Watanabe Sushi Knives

I recently ordered a couple of knives from Shin Watanabe. He makes hand-made cooking knives in Japan. When I receive them, I'll post a mini-review. From what I have been able to gather, he makes high quality stuff at very reasonable prices considering they are hand-made. He also has different price/quality ranges from basic to professional.

There's not a bunch of information on them, but I have yet to find someone unhappy with his products. If anyone has any experience with them, please feel free to post it in this thread.

What a treat. They were beautiful - not like traditional western knives. They were artfully crafted - yet they were obviously hand made. Quite possibly the sharpest knives I have ever seen - including Wustof, Henkles and maybe even sharper than Global if that's possible.

The balance on each knife is also different from that of western knives which tend to balance more evenly in the hand. The handles are made of wood (magnolia I believe and burnt chestnut on the smallest one), so knives are more front-heavy which will take some time to get used to. I was also surprised by the small knotch in the Shashimi knife between the handle and the blade - it almost looked like the handle wasn't long enough to cover the full tang. I was assured that this was normal ...... and "low and behold" it was. I saw several different pictures on the Watanabe Blade website and others like Japanese-knife.com that show the same thing.

Holding them kind of gave me the feeling like I was holding the decendant of a sword or something. Very cool.

I have read an article about about the top 10 bushcraft knives. These knives are very much sharp and long-lasting. If you want to read the article, go to
http://bestproducts-4u.com/best-bushcraft-knives/