July 12, 2023 5 min read
Takayuki Shibata is visiting Knifewear in August of 2023 and will come visiting our Vancouver and Calgary store. Sign up to our mailing list below to stay up to date about this event, or any future events we'll be having.
This is an excerpt from the The Knifenerd Guide to Japanese Knives by Kevin Kent released in 2018.
“By starting the Masakage brand and selling more handmade knives, I want to create the job for young blacksmiths. Ultimately it will lead to preserving the traditional craftsmanship in Japan. That is how I find meaning in this job,” says Shibata-san
Takayuki Shibata-san is the Wayne Gretzky of knife sharpening. Seriously.
I’m a great knife sharpener. I bet I’ve sharpened more than 10,000 knives. When I started Knifewear, I would sharpen up to 200 knives a day by hand. I’m quite good, but I’m no Wayne Gretzky.
Every time I sharpen knives with Shibata-san, I see something new and I am still surprised. Many people may not notice a difference between his results and mine, but to me, it’s glaring. I’m lucky to know him.
What sets Shibata-san out as one of the best knife sharpeners in Japan is that he has developed an original sharpening method that works great on vegetables and raw fish. His method encourages incredible edge retention and it makes stainless steel cut as nicely as carbon steel. He knows that if you sharpen a knife to 800 grit, it will stay sharp a long time, but it will not cut smoothly. In other words, it will make quick work of an onion and it can blast through a tomato skin, but it will tear the flesh of a fish if you try to slice sashimi. If you sharpen both sides to 8,000 or 10,000 grit, you will have an amazing sushi slicer, but your knife will lose that insane edge very quickly.
Knifewear owner and president Kevin Kent’s fascination with handcrafted Japanese knives began while he was working as sous-chef for the legendary chef Fergus Henderson at St. John restaurant in London, England. Back in Canada in 2007 he began selling them out of a backpack from the back of his bicycle, while working as a chef in Calgary. He considers his chef years as the best education for being an entrepreneur. Being a chef takes long hours, involves hard work, both mentally and physically, and chefs must be able to put out fires, both literal and figurative, with extreme competence. Today, Kent is still just as obsessed with Japanese knives as the day he first held one. A couple times a year, he travels to Japan to meet with his blacksmith friends and drinks far too much sake. Each visit he learns more about the ancient art of knife-making. Through this obsession Knifewear has expanded to include five Knifewear stores in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Edmonton. Plans are also underway to open a store in Kyoto, Japan. He refuses to confess how many Japanese knives he owns … but he admits the number is rather high. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @knifenerd and find out more about the stores at knifewear.com, and if you meet him in person, ask him to tell you his Lou Reed story.
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