Is a Japanese kitchen knife really as good as one often hears? If this question is about a real Japanese cooking knife from a Japanese forge, then you have to answer this question with yes. However, if it is only about Japanese styled knives, then you should be more careful in answering and pay attention to the details. A high-quality Japanese knife must meet certain criteria, otherwise you can save your money and buy a supposedly high-quality product from a neighboring country. Our offered Japanese knives come directly from Japan and from traditional specialized enterprises with a long history, sometimes over several centuries. Not without reason, these companies have survived to this day and rightly maintain the image of the sharpest Japanese chef's knives.

Japanese knives are increasingly hard to come by due to their reputation for being the best knives in the world. This is mainly because a Japanese knifemaker cannot make as many knives as he wants. For the most part, an authentic Japanese knife is subject to a largely manual forging process that cannot be sped up at will. Therefore, the lead times for Japanese chef's knives are now up to 3 years.

Our Japanese knives come from blacksmiths who sell most of their knives locally in Japan. Therefore, only a small part of the production of these Japanese knives makes it to the European market.

A Japanese kitchen knife finds convinced users among professional and amateur chefs alike, which is due to the excellent properties of these knives. Japanese knives are usually three-layered and allow you to cut fish, meat, vegetables and fruit with great precision. With their extremely sharp blades, our hand-forged Japanese kitchen knives are perfectly suited for gentle processing of delicate foods.

The basis for this exceptional sharpness and edge retention of the Japanese knives are the material and the special manufacturing processes of the Japanese forges. Depending on the steel, properties such as high toughness, enormous degrees of hardness (up to 68 HRC) and uniform crystalline structures are optimally combined, which in combination with the special manufacturing processes, in part purely by hand, gives rise to these exceptional, high-quality kitchen knives.

These attributes allow for outstanding sharpness of the Japanese knives, whose cutting edges are resistant and retain their sharpness for a long time, even with extensive use. In our portfolio you can find Japanese chef's knives for every kitchen purpose. A rough classification into all-purpose knives (Gyuto, Bunka knives, Santoku knives), vegetable knives (Nakiri, Bunka, Gyuto, Santoku), fish knives (Gyuto, Bunka, Funayuki, Deba, Yanagiba, Kiritsuke) and petty (small cuttings like fruits and vegetables) gives a first overview. Historical uses such as cutting and filleting fish have influenced the blade shape of the Funayuki, as has the requirement for fine chopping of vegetables in the Nakiri knife with a single-edged blade. Over time, some special Japanese knife shapes have thus evolved into general-purpose knives as well, growing the popularity of Japanese chef's knives.