Seki Virtual Cutlery Festival 2020: Industry Adapts to Remote Events

Seki City’s annual Cutlery Festival (関の刃物まつり / Seki no Hamono Matsuri), one of the most important events in the Japanese cutlery calendar, has adapted with virtual elements for 2020. The festival, which normally draws tens of thousands of visitors to the city’s main streets and factory showrooms, introduced live-streamed demonstrations and online ordering to maintain its role as a showcase for Seki’s cutlery heritage.

What Changed

The Gifu Prefectural Seki Cutlery Industry Association (岐阜県関刃物産業連合会) coordinated the transition to a partially remote format. Key adaptations included live-streamed forging and grinding demonstrations from individual workshops, online ordering from the Seki Cutlery Hall inventory, and pre-recorded factory tour videos replacing the popular in-person walkthrough events.

The live streams proved particularly effective. Watching a craftsman hand-forge a blade in real time — the glow of heated steel, the ring of hammer on anvil — translates surprisingly well to video. Several streams attracted viewers from outside Japan, reaching an international audience that the physical festival rarely served.

Online Ordering From Seki Cutlery Hall

Seki Cutlery Hall (関鍛冶伝承館), the city’s permanent exhibition and retail space, made portions of its inventory available for online purchase during the festival period. This included professional hairdressing scissors from local manufacturers at festival pricing — typically 10-20% below standard retail.

For international buyers, this was notable. Festival pricing on Seki-made scissors has traditionally been a local-only benefit, accessible only to those who travelled to the city in person.

Factory Tours Go Digital

Several manufacturers produced video walkthroughs of their facilities, covering the full production process from raw steel to finished scissors. These videos, while not matching the immersive experience of standing in a workshop and feeling the heat from a forge, provided a level of production transparency that static website photos never achieved.

Over 100 Manufacturers Represented

Despite the challenges, the festival maintained representation from Seki’s 100-plus cutlery manufacturers. Not every company participated in every digital element, but the collective effort demonstrated the industry’s commitment to the event and its willingness to experiment with new formats.

Whether the virtual elements continue alongside the physical festival in future years remains an open question. The international reach they enabled is a compelling argument for keeping them.