New old stock knives;
2 Japanese kotozawa and 20 years of Bernal Cutlery, by Josh Donald
This March of 2025, Bernal Cutlery turned 20 years old, and, of course, that allows for a lot of introspection. Not just starting March first; it’s been happening for at least a year running up to the actual anniversary. I have gotten all maudlin looking at old photos of Kelly and I working the counter at 331 Cortland fifteen years ago, or older ones of me sharpening at home before we had an actual shop with young children on my back (hi, Henry), so I could meet a deadline. Seeing photos of my face before I could see hints of either of my grandfather’s as it does now (I inherited a love of hornrim glasses and sideburns from both of them, apparently). Looking at the knives on the wall behind our crew at Guerrero Street is always a good one too, remember when we had to talk people into buying __ fill in the blank, any knife we cannot keep in stock now.
Recently I got a text from an old customer who had a box of knives he had purchased from Bernal starting around 2013 that he was looking to sell. Matt would sometimes help me finish raising rent for the month when he would periodically buy a big batch of knives which he would re-handle and sell himself. He would make new handles for Japanese and Western-handled knives and would sell them through us and a few other shops. He liked 270mm gyutos and I would keep him in mind when adding a few of these behemoths to my orders. Not many other people used a 270mm (11”) gyuto at work, but they were his jam. Matt had drifted away from doing the re-handling and was thinning down his knife collection and so he brought up some knives from LA that had been sitting in his collection. Konosuke Sakai (from Bernal and a few other vendors) and Yoshikane from Bernal. It's honestly really wild looking at these old knives, some with labels from our old shops, old handwriting from myself and our crew.
On my last visit to Japan in the summer of 2023 I learned why people told me not to go in late summer, the intense unrelenting humidity and heat was no joke. I thought heat stroke was for stubborn octogenarians who insisted on golfing midday in the Arizona summer but learned that you can also get it in August in Japan by just huffing and puffing 6 blocks from train station to hotel with bags and backpacks. Among many other memorable heat stroke near misses from that trip was a visit to Kazuomi Yamamoto at Yoshikane Hamono to catch up. It had been four years since I had seen him, and a lot had happened in that time. At the beginning of our conversation (translated, as my Japanese is useless), I tried to ask in a casual and offhand manner if he would consider making the western-handled knives again (last ones we got were in 2017 or so. A lot of people really loved them and had been asking if he would ever make them again. Without any translation, he smiled, got a sly look in his eye like he caught me and shook his head saying “I think I know what you are saying, and those are bad words”. I laughed and told him I thought he would say something like that.
The first knives I imported directly from Japan in 2011 were Ashi and Yoshikane. I didn’t have a big budget and agonized over what to order. Every time I thought I put together a good order, I went over budget. It was hard to whittle them down and to know what quantity to order of different knife sizes. Finally, I got the orders in and then waited for them. These still were made to order but in 2010/2011, there were far fewer shops outside of Japan selling them, and the recession had softened demand. Maybe I waited three or four months. It seemed like an eternity every time I checked my email for updates, I wish I could only wait that long now. I think Ashi was the first to show up, and the bandaid-colored ‘gum tape’ sealing the box was super exciting to cut open. I had sharpened a few Ashi and Yoshikane before in my then five or six-year-old sharpening service and was amazed at how easy they were to sharpen compared to the more standard-fare Japanese knives that tended to come my way.
It took a while for people to take to the Ashi and Yoshikane knives. Just a little too expensive for most home cooks and they did not have the brand recognition of other Japanese brands for most professionals. Finally, some cooks took my word for it and started using them here in San Francisco and before too long their co-workers showed up to get one too. Now we cannot stay stocked, and backorders stretch out over the years. They also seem ridiculously underpriced at what they used to sell for, even when adjusted for inflation and all.
A year or so after first bringing in Ashi and Yoshikane I was able to start ordering knives from Konosuke in Sakai. I was able to put together an order with the help of a new employee, helping me with sharpening, Tagg, who collected a group of his sushi chef friends. Tagg had a background in sushi and is still working behind the sushi bar here in S.F. at Chisai on Mission St in Bernal. We got together enough knives for the minimum order, and I added some for the shop. But first, I had to agonize over what exactly to order and how to keep my budget in check. Again, somehow I made it and put our order in and waited a little while for the knives to get finished and arrive.
Konosuke was a great introduction to really fine Sakai hand forged, hand ground knife making. Konosuke is loved for both the consistently excellent quality of the forging they have done for them in Sakai and also for the finesse of the grinding and sharpening work on their knives. Kosuke Kawamura started Konosuke as an extension of his father’s cutlery business Kawamura Hamono (there are a few Kawamure Hamono’s in Sakai by the way) and working with Morihiro Hamono for grinding and sharpening, was instrumental in bringing old-style Sakai single bevel grinding techniques to double bevel knives. What looks like centuries-old traditional knifemaking in Konosuke’s early Fujiyama wide double-bevel knives is a fairly modern innovation with a lot of creativity behind it. Clean, beautiful work, and honestly, everything about their packaging and presentation was great. My hands felt dirty immediately after opening a box from Konosuke.
I could keep going on about each new revelation with the next set of vendors I started working with at this phase of Bernal Cutlery; Sakai Kikumori and K Sabatier being a few others that next exposed me to new stuff, and broadened our horizons but I want to get back to Yoshikane. Somehow being reunited with a few of those old stock Western handled Yoshikane that have long been out of production got me thinking about old conversations I had had with Kazuomi Yamamoto that had I had had a chance to understand and re-understand as my experience of running a business and developing a craft with other people grew.
When I was researching writing Sharp back in 2016 and was interviewing Yamamoto-san at Yoshikane Hamono, I asked something to the effect of what is the most important thing you have learned as a knife-maker, essentially what was the family’s secret sauce that he could distill for me. I was expecting something about forging temperature and duration, heat treatment combinations, or a golden ratio for grinding geometry. Instead, he gave me the two following Japanese kotozawa; shorthand proverbs: “Sessa takuma” and “Shoshin wasuru bekarazu”. When I researched them and understood their meaning, they made sense. The selection of these kotozawa pointed to an attitude of how to approach learning and growing within a craft rather than acquiring specific knowledge. Shoshin wasuru bekarazu is about remembering the beginner's mind frame or remembering one’s original intent. Sessa takuma is made up of four characters that translate directly to “cut, shine, rock, grind” and is sometimes interpreted as rocks polishing each other in a river.
Shortly after the time I spoke with Yamamoto-san I learned Sessa takuma (after gathering a few interpretations) can be seen as personal refinement working collaboratively or in competition with others. I had read about it at work in Buddhist monasteries in the personal development resulting from the way monks would irritate each other. As rocks tumble in a stream their rough edges are worn down by each other. Having a growing crew over the years has brought us into contact with this phenomenon for sure. Not that we all irritate each other constantly, but anyone who works a busy service industry job knows how personality traits in oneself and co-workers can be either assets or liabilities. Sometimes both depending on the situation. I have learned a good deal about myself in working with others; when to let go of things that I feel possessive of and hand them over, when to hand something to someone who is more skilled than me and how to be clear and not afraid to ask for what I want. Most targets at the shop are moving targets often changing with time, so not getting ossified in a set attitude is important. At the same time other things we bump into often don’t seem to change and going with what we have learned makes for not re-inventing the wheel constantly. Some knives wax and wane in popularity and how people integrate them into their work or home cooking is temporary (looking at you single bevel kiritsuke circa 2012-15) and others are immovable and don’t seem to change; 8” chef and 210mm gyuto. Some attitudes people come into the shop with are not going to be changed, and sometimes we learn from them; for example, the choice of knives for breaking fish or approaches to in-hand paring knives.
Shoshin wasuru bekarazu is about remembering the beginner's mind frame or remembering one’s original intent. I have mostly internalized this in keeping at hand what my process of learning looked like. When I was a kid trying to sharpen my pocket knives in the 1970s in my room in Echo Park, Los Angeles. I had a few pocket knives I would use to carve wood, make spears for hunting lemons out of a semi-neglected tree in my overgrown backyard, doing little carving things, and a million other things you do with a pocket knife when you’re 7 or 8 years old. I had three favorites, a Buck 112 lockback, an Imperial brand Barlow jack knife, and a carbon steel Opinel #8. The Buck knife had a little Arkansas stone that came with it or was bought separately but I remember the little plastic box it came in with a gold Buck logo and a stinky little bottle of oil. My knives were abused and very dull, I tried to use that little 1x3” stone to sharpen them with the sharp smelling oil and not really getting anywhere with the bruised and rounded edge on the Buck knife, sometimes cutting my fingers. When I did get enough of an edge to do so, I had better luck on the Opinel, its thin carbon steel blade was a lot more obliging to the sharpening stone and would quickly get sharp again. Magic.
Shoshin wasuru bekarazu also brings me to my early 20s a little bit after I moved to San Francisco in the early 90s getting my first Japanese whetstone and going after the knives I shared with 5 other roommates in my apartment on 18th and Guerrero. I bought a stone and inexpensive rustic style forged Japanese knife at Soko Hardware in Japantown. I had no idea what I was doing but some knives did seem to get sharper, others were impervious to my efforts but I did get a fleeting taste of competency. Maybe not enough to keep at it diligently and develop my skills for several years as I apparently found other distractions.
The wish to be able to have advised my younger self gives me the enjoyment I find in teaching people now how to get started sharpening, its a long road and I only really only point their feet in the right direction and maybe teach them how to tie their shoes for the journey but I do remember how I really wanted to get those stones to make music with my knives and instead got some a few skronky honks and beeps.
For the last several years I have been teaching myself how to use a large Japanese grinding wheel; a kaiten mizu toishi. It has been a direct engagement in Shoshin wasuru bekarazu as I am relatively new to using it compared with the rest of the sharpening work I do. Not saying I am really good at everything whetstone, I don’t particularly like to work many, many hours on one knife making a ‘flawless’ finish, but I’m not bad at keeping an even angle and have good experience picking appropriate finishes, knives I sharpen perform well I think. Theres certainly still trial and error working out different finishes on knives I regularly use and knives I am in the process of testing out; our own BC prototypes and also knives that we source for the shop.
While I got to first watch and then later to actually use the kaiten mizu toishi grinder myself with Ashi-san in Sakai on numerous visits sharpening both Ashi hamaguri and single bevel grinds I was not good when I first took up the wheel. Lumpy surfaces, and irregular thinness along the edge, I was a little afraid of it pulling the knife out of my hands and throwing it across the room. It was actually easier than I thought, it skated over the surface with a little tug letting me know it was removing steel, a spray of water with sparks in it trailing behind away from me. After having one myself to use years later I’m still not perfect, but I can now let my hands do the thinking while I’m working for good periods of time before having to check in with the work and look for flaws. I can feel the thickness and shape of the blade between my hands or the grinding board and the stone wheel most of the time. Restoring old Western knives over the foundational geometry laid down many many decades ago also has given me insight into the older approaches of hand grinders. By giving myself permission to be bad at something again I got a chance to grow as a sharpener.
In an even larger sense, this 20-year mark finds us in the middle of a significant (for us) expansion, following the trajectory and momentum gathered on projects started years ago; wholesale distribution and manufacturing, more opportunities to again experience being in the green fruit stage of Shoshin wasuru bekarazu. Having 20 years of experience in a craft and a business, and again returning to that green learning phase is a different experience, and I’m finding a new benefit of Shoshin wasuru bekarazu; being able to temper both fear and overconfidence, which is always welcome. I find the benefits not from getting it perfect but from getting on with it no matter what.
Beautiful read! Thank you!
Wonderful reading.