Jun 22, 2026

I did not grow up in a kitchen. I did not inherit a chef's apron or a family recipe. The path that eventually brought me to Sakai's knife-making world passed first through something more humble: a sushi school in Tokyo, and a graduation test that I was not at all sure I would pass.

The test was this: take a daikon radish. Using a usuba — the thin, single-bevel Japanese vegetable knife — peel it in one continuous, unbroken sheet. The sheet had to be at least 40 centimeters long, peeled from a section of daikon no less than 10 centimeters tall, and the finished sheet had to weigh at least 40 grams. It had to be uniform in thickness. And it could not break. All of this within a fixed time limit.

This technique is called katsuramuki. And I had never done it before.

When I realized what was coming, I did the only thing I could think of: I bought daikon. A lot of it. I went to the market and filled bags with radishes and brought them home and began practicing every day, alone, in my own kitchen, making mistake after mistake.

The early attempts were not attempts at all, really. They were collisions — between the knife and the radish, between my intention and what actually happened. The blade caught. The sheet tore. The thickness was uneven in ways I couldn't predict or control. I tried to go faster and it got worse. I tried to go slower and it still got worse.

What I was discovering, without having the words for it yet, was that katsuramuki is not a trick. It is not a technique you can learn by memorizing a sequence of steps. It is a conversation between the knife, the vegetable, and the hand holding them — and you cannot participate in that conversation until you have spent enough time in it to understand its rhythm.

The daikon pile got smaller. I bought more. I practiced more.

Somewhere in those weeks of daily practice, something shifted.

It is difficult to describe precisely. The blade did not change. The radish did not change. But my relationship to both of them did. I began to feel — not just know intellectually, but actually feel in my hands — what the knife required. The angle. The pressure. The way the blade needed to travel in a continuous arc rather than a push-and-correct sequence of micro-adjustments.

The usuba is a knife designed for exactly this kind of work. Its single bevel, its thin spine, the geometry that allows it to enter a vegetable and move through it with a precision that a thicker blade cannot achieve — all of this exists to make katsuramuki possible. But the knife cannot do the work alone. It can only do what it was made to do when the person holding it has learned, through repetition, to work with it rather than against it.

This is what I had been learning, without realizing it. Not just how to peel a radish. How to hold a conversation with a blade.

When the day of the examination came, I was ready in a way that is different from confident. Confident suggests certainty. What I had was something quieter — a familiarity with the process, an acceptance of what the work required, a body that had done this enough times that it remembered what to do even when my mind was still catching up.

The daikon. The knife. The motion.

I passed.

The sheet came off in one piece, long enough, heavy enough, unbroken. Not perfect — I could see the places where the thickness varied, the moments where the rhythm had faltered and recovered — but complete. The test had been passed.

I stood there for a moment holding something I had made with my own hands and a blade, and felt something that I have carried ever since: the particular satisfaction of a skill that has entered the body, that cannot be undone, that will be there the next time you need it.

My instructor once said something I have never forgotten. A skill like katsuramuki, once truly learned, is like riding a bicycle. You do not forget it. It becomes part of how you move through the world.

He was right. But what he didn't say — what I only understood later — is that the skill and the knife are inseparable. You do not learn katsuramuki in the abstract. You learn it with a usuba, with a thin single-bevel blade whose entire design is organized around the possibility of this precise, continuous movement through a vegetable. The knife is not the tool you use to practice the technique. The knife is the reason the technique exists.

This is the thing about Japanese knife culture that I want overseas readers to understand — the thing that gets lost when people talk about sharpness or steel grades or edge retention statistics.

Japanese knives are not optimized in the abstract. They are optimized for specific relationships between a blade and a food and a technique and a person. The usuba is thin because katsuramuki requires thinness. The single bevel exists because a double bevel creates different forces in the cut that would make this particular motion impossible at the required precision. The lightness of the blade allows the continuous arc without fatigue. Every design choice is the residue of a question asked and answered over generations: what does this specific work actually need?

When you understand this, the knife stops being a product. It becomes an argument — a position on what good cutting is, and how to achieve it.