Tristan Aoki keeps a Silky Gomboy 240 in a leather scabbard hanging from a hook above the back door of his Kyoto garden shed. The saw was bought in March 2021 from a tool shop in Sanjō, in a small back street where the shop's proprietor, a woman named Hayashi-san in her seventies, sold him the saw, a small file for resharpening, and a tin of camellia oil, in that order, after a quarter of an hour of conversation about what he intended to use it for.
The Silky Gomboy is a folding pruning saw with a 240-millimetre blade and a polypropylene handle wrapped in a rubberised grip. The blade is high-carbon SK-4 steel, impulse-hardened to about 65 HRC at the teeth and left softer in the spine for shock absorption. The teeth are cross-cut, with four teeth per centimetre, ground to a chisel point.
It cuts on the pull stroke. This is the central fact about a Japanese saw and the source of almost every other property of the tool. A saw that cuts on the pull stroke pulls the blade straight as it cuts, rather than buckling it as a Western push-stroke saw does. This permits the blade to be much thinner. A thinner blade removes less material per cut, which is to say it asks less work of the user.
Aoki has carried the Gomboy through five full pruning seasons in his small Kyoto plot, which contains four fruit trees — a Fuji apple, a Kosui pear, a Bing cherry, and a kaki persimmon — as well as a mixed hedge of camellia, holly, and laurel. He has also used it, on a single Saturday afternoon in 2023, to cut six lengths of cedar for a new cold frame.
His notes on the saw, kept in a small Maruman sketchbook on a shelf in the shed, are surprisingly thin for five seasons of use. The saw, he has come to think, is the kind of tool that does not generate observations because it generates results.
The pruning of fruit trees in a small Japanese garden is more like joinery than like landscape work. The cuts are precise. The angle of the cut matters. The position of the cut relative to the bud below matters. The cleanness of the cut, which determines whether the wound will heal without disease, matters enormously.
Aoki has used Western pruning saws — a Bahco Laplander, an Opinel folding saw, a Felco F600 — and respects them all. None of them produces the cut a Silky produces. The cut from a Silky on a fresh fruit-tree branch is glassy, as if it had been sliced rather than sawn. The pith of the branch is undamaged. The bark at the edge of the cut is not crushed.
This matters in fruit-tree care because the tree's ability to wall off the wound, and to grow callus tissue across the cut face, depends on the condition of the wood at the cut edge. A clean cut from a Silky heals in one season. A ragged cut from a duller Western saw can take two, and is more likely to develop into a site of cytospora canker or another wound-entry disease.
The saw is not free of compromises. The folding mechanism, which is convenient for carrying in a scabbard, introduces a small amount of play at the joint that becomes more pronounced after about three seasons of heavy use. Aoki's Gomboy has perhaps a millimetre of lateral play now, which is not enough to affect the cut but which he can feel in his hand.
The impulse-hardened teeth cannot be resharpened in the conventional sense. The hardness that gives them their long life also makes them too hard to file. Aoki has been told that the saw can be re-toothed by a specialist saw service in Osaka, at a cost that is not greatly less than a new saw. He has not yet had to test the claim. The teeth on his Gomboy, after five seasons, are still cutting well.
The handle has shown its age more than the blade. The rubberised grip has begun to crack in two places where the saw has hung in the scabbard during summer humidity and winter dryness. Aoki has wrapped the cracks with a layer of jute twine, which is the traditional Japanese repair for a worn saw handle, and the wrap has held for two seasons now.
The maintenance of the blade is the simplest part of the saw's care. After each use, Aoki wipes the blade with a small cotton rag that he keeps in the scabbard. Once a fortnight, more or less, he opens the saw on the bench, rubs the blade with a pad soaked in camellia oil, and folds it back into the scabbard. The camellia oil, called tsubaki abura in Japan, is the traditional rust-preventive for carbon-steel blades.
He buys his camellia oil from the same shop in Sanjō where he bought the saw. A 100-millilitre bottle costs about ¥800 and lasts him about a year. He has tried Western alternatives — mineral oil, gun oil, three-in-one — and none of them produces the same dry, slightly fragrant film on the blade that camellia oil does.
The pull-stroke takes time to learn for a gardener trained on Western saws. The instinct, when meeting wood resistance, is to push. The Silky asks the user to pull. The first few cuts with a new Silky are typically marked by a slight tendency to push at the end of the stroke, which the saw rewards by jamming in the kerf.
After perhaps fifty cuts the body learns. The pull becomes natural. The free wrist on the return stroke becomes natural. The whole motion settles into a rhythm that is, oddly, slower in the user's perception than a Western saw and yet produces a faster cut.
Aoki has timed himself, on two occasions, against a Bahco Laplander. The Silky cuts a 40-millimetre apple branch in 12 to 14 seconds. The Laplander, in the same hand, takes 24 to 28 seconds. The difference is not subtle.
The case for a Japanese saw in a Western garden is not, however, only about speed. It is about the relationship between the gardener and the cut. A pull-stroke saw, used well, makes the gardener pay attention. The angle of the wrist, the line of the cut, the position of the support hand, all become things to be considered rather than overpowered.
Aoki has come to believe that the saw has changed the way he prunes. He prunes more slowly now. He looks longer at each branch before he cuts. He makes fewer cuts in a session and more cuts that are right the first time.
He recognises that this could be the result of getting older rather than the result of using a different saw. He is forty-seven. He has been pruning fruit trees for thirty years. He is willing to attribute some of the change to age and to experience, while still believing that the tool plays its part.
On the last Saturday of February 2026 Aoki took the Gomboy down from its hook, oiled it, and put it back in its scabbard for the start of the pruning season. The saw, by his count, had made roughly nine thousand cuts since it came out of the shop in Sanjō in March 2021. It is still, by any sensible measure, in working order.
He expects to carry it for another five seasons at least. If it lasts ten, which the manufacturer claims as a working life under home-garden use, he will have paid roughly four yen per cut for the privilege of owning it. He thinks this is a defensible price.