It started with a knife Kamila couldn't find.

It was late 2015. Our co-founder Kamila was looking for a Japanese kitchen knife to give to her partner for Christmas. Something proper. Something he’d keep.

She went to every premium kitchen shop in London. None of the knives were quite right. They were either mass-produced versions of Japanese designs, or genuinely Japanese knives sold without any context, on websites written half in kanji and half in marketing copy.

She wanted to know the maker. She wanted to know where it had been forged. She wanted to give her partner something with a story attached, not a brand name. None of the shops could tell her any of that.

So she did the obvious thing nobody else seemed to be doing. She found a Japanese bladesmith online, wrote to him directly, and asked if he’d make her one.

He did. Hand-forged. Custom engraved. Wrapped in cloth and posted from a town in Japan she had never been to.

The Christmas the knife arrived, her partner unwrapped it carefully and looked at it for a long time before he said anything. He set it on the counter. Like an object that mattered.

Then he started using it. And then he started showing it to people. At every dinner party that followed, he’d bring out the knife, talk about where it came from, hand it to a friend to feel the weight. The knife had become a small piece of family lore.

What Kamila didn’t expect was how much she’d start reaching for it herself. Cooking had always been the part of the day she rushed through. The thing between work and dinner. With this knife in her hand, the chopping became its own small pleasure. The prep slowed down. She found herself in the kitchen an hour before a meal that didn’t need an hour, just because she wanted to be.

That was the surprise that became the brand. Cooking didn’t have to be a chore. With the right tool in your hand, the rhythm of a kitchen changes.

Ten years on, plenty of customers buy a knife “for their partner.” A few months later they’re back asking about a second one. We have a quiet theory about who’s actually doing the cooking. We keep it to ourselves and ship the second knife.

Kamila watched all of this and thought a quiet thought. If one well-made knife from a workshop in Japan could change the way two people felt about cooking, there were probably others who wanted the same thing she’d wanted and couldn’t find it.

The thought sat there for about six months.

In early 2016 Kamila called her high school friend Anna, who was looking for a business of her own to start. The pitch was simple. Bring knives like the one she’d had made directly to people. Cut out the importers and resellers. Build real relationships with the bladesmiths in Japan and pay them what their work was worth. Anna said yes, and they co-founded Oishya the same year, with no investors and no marketing budget.

The conversations with Japan happened entirely over email, through translators and the patient back-and-forth of people separated by language and 9,000 kilometres. Two young women with no track record, writing to fourth-generation craftsmen, asking to be taken seriously. On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. The fact that it did is the part of the story Kamila and Anna still don’t fully understand.

The first hundred knives sold one at a time. By 2018 they had visited their first workshop in Japan in person. By 2020 they were working with bladesmiths across several Japanese regions, plus a handle workshop in Europe. By 2022 the company had outgrown its original name, Japana Home, and became Oishya.

Today Oishya ships to twenty-eight countries. We work with bladesmiths in Sakai, Seki, and other regions of Japan, with handle craftsmen, board makers, and the European workshops that finish what arrives from Asia. The blades are forged in a quiet partnership between hand and machine. The steps that ought to be identical are, and the rest stays in human hands. Every knife that leaves our warehouse has been touched by between three and five people whose names we know, carries a 5 yen coin and a hand-carved hanko stamp, and is covered for life.

The price we charge is what the knife costs to make properly. We work at the pace the blacksmith works, which sometimes means placing orders two years in advance, because some blades simply take that long. The kind of brand we’re building is the kind a Patek watch is. A Patek doesn’t say you own one. It says you’re looking after it for the next generation. We’d like to be the knife version of that. The one a daughter inherits. The one a chef keeps on a magnetic strip and reaches for first. Same workshops. Same craftsmen. Same standards. More countries, more years, more meals.

If you are here, you are part of that. Whether you’ve owned an Oishya for nine years or only just discovered us tonight. Thanks for reading. Thanks for caring about the small things in your kitchen. We’ll see you on the other side of a meal.