About Blade & Bevel

Why this site exists

Buying a Japanese knife is unusually hard for a $150 purchase. The vocabulary is foreign, the sizes are in millimetres, half the shapes are specialists you do not need, and most of what is written about them is either marketing copy or forum folklore. People end up buying an eight-piece block set they will regret, or a beautiful single-bevel knife they cannot sharpen.

The aim here is narrower than “knife content”. It is to get you to one good knife you will still be using in ten years, and to be honest about which knives you should not buy — including ones we would eventually like to sell you. Several guides on this site end with a section explaining who should not buy the thing being described. That is deliberate.

How the guides are written

Every guide follows the same rules:

• The answer goes first. If the honest answer is “no, buy the other one”, that is the first paragraph, not the conclusion.
• Trade-offs are stated, not hidden. Harder steel is sharper and chips more easily. Carbon steel takes a better edge and rusts in the sink. Both halves get said.
• Numbers where numbers exist. Blade lengths in millimetres, hardness in HRC, typical ranges rather than adjectives.
• Industry claims are labelled as claims. Where a figure comes from a trade association rather than an independent measurement — for example the share of professional chefs said to use Sakai blades — we say so instead of presenting it as fact.
• No affiliate links. There are currently no affiliate or referral links anywhere on this site, and no paid placements. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page it appears.

What we have not done

This section matters more than the previous one, because it is the part most sites leave out.

• We have not visited every workshop we write about. The regional guides describe documented history, designated techniques and the characteristics those regions are known for. They are not travel reportage, and we do not present them as such.
• We have not tested every knife type in a professional kitchen. Where a guide describes how a knife behaves, it reflects the consensus of how that shape is used, not a controlled test we ran.
• We do not yet sell anything. There is no stock, no cart and no checkout. Anything you read here about our future range is an intention, not a product.
• We have not settled how duties will be handled. US import duty on kitchen knives is substantial and the rules have moved repeatedly. We would rather say “undecided” than promise duty-paid delivery we cannot yet guarantee.

If you find a claim on this site that you think we cannot support, tell us. We would rather remove a good sentence than keep a wrong one.

How we plan to make money

By selling knives, eventually — a small curated range rather than a broad catalogue, because we do not think anyone needs another site listing four hundred blades. Later, possibly services such as engraving and sharpening.

Not by affiliate commission, not by sponsored reviews, and not by selling your email address. The privacy policy sets out exactly what we store and what we do with it, which at present is very little.

We are telling you this because a guide site that plans to sell you the thing it is reviewing has an obvious conflict of interest. The only useful response is to name it, and then to keep writing the parts that are bad for sales — the “you do not need this” sections, the “a cheaper one is fine” paragraphs, the honest note that a set is a worse buy.

Where we ship, and where we do not

When the shop opens it will ship from Japan to the United States and the EU.

The United Kingdom is out of scope, and not by preference. UK rules on importing bladed articles make direct-to-consumer shipping from overseas impractical for a small operation. We would rather not take your order than take it and have it stopped at the border.

Corrections and updates

Each guide carries a published date, and the structured data on every page records when it was last substantively updated. We only move that date when the content actually changes — not when we adjust a heading or fix a typo — because a site that claims to have updated everything last week is telling you nothing.

Spotted an error? Send us a message — there is a form on the contact page, and it reaches the person who wrote the guide. Corrections are made in place, and material ones are noted on the page.