Nisaku Japanese Stainless Steel Knife, 7.5" Blade

. Hori is a Japanese onomatopoeic word for the sound of a digging object, and its duplication hori hori symbolizes repetition of the action. I bought this hori knife to have a second one at hand for an upcoming family project at home. My old knife has lasted in good condition over years of outdoor use, and I was swayed by the manufacturer's claim that this one "is forged by master blade craftsmen with the highest grade Japanese stainless steel for durability". I should have checked such a PR hype before my purchase, since it is absolutely false. 1. Source. This is the model Yamagatana (i.e., 'mountain machete/hatchet' in Japanese) hori-hori knife No. 800 manufactured by Tomita Cutlery Co. Ltd., owner of the trademark Nisaku (i.e., 'made in Japan'), sold here as the NJP800 knife. Though it was being sold by Amazon Services Inc. when I bought it in the last week of March, it is currently sold by Propeller Brands LLC, a subsidiary company of Snow Joe LLC, which is the exclusive US distributor of Nisaku brand products. 2. Dimensions. At the time of this writing, the dimensions given in the Product Information section and in the title of the webpage, which disagree with each other, are weirdly inexact: the total length is 13"; the concave blade is 1.7" wide and 7.5" long (with a 6.8"-long dual sharp edge, bevelled and serrated); and the handle is 5.5" long with an ergonomic shape. It weighs 10.9 oz, and the knife alone 7.7 oz. The NJP800 has a non-offset blade, and a mid-tang of quite less than full width (that is, the steel shaft inside the handle only extends about midway the length of the handle, and it is narrower than the width of the blade). The former provides less leverage when digging or weeding than an offset blade, and the latter limits how much pressure can be put on the plastic handle for leverage, most particularly since the non-tang half of the handle is taken by an elongated hole for which no justification or need is given. The arrangement makes it likely that the handle will break, or at least deform, if too strong a pressure were applied to the non-tang half. 3. Handedness. The NJP800 is secured in the sheath by a snap on loop, and a round bump on one side of the handle's guard, which fits a hole in one side of the sheath (figure A, green arrow on upper right panel). If the knife is inserted with the bump facing the other side of the sheath, the blade cannot be fully inserted without deforming the sheath. Given the bump-in-hole arrangement, this is a right-hand knife for the serrated edge as well as a left-hand one for the bevelled edge. 4. Materials. No information is given on the steel used, except for calling it "Tomita steel" (which could not be more redundant and disingenuous, since Tomita Cutlery is the manufacturer). At the time of this writing, the dot-com 'nisakujapan' website (in English) says the NJP800 is made of "DSR-1K6 (HRC58)" steel. This is absolutely false. The website confuses the NJP800 with theNJP801, which is the hori knife made from DSR-1K6, the 440C Daido Special Steel infused with vanadium that reaches an HRC58 (Rockwell) hardness upon quenching. The dot-co.jp 'nisaku' website (in Japanese) says that the NJP800 is made of 420J2 steel. This is a low-carbon content steel of the 420 series with a hardness of HRC52 or less; thus, it has high corrosion resistance, but lower damage resistance and poor edge retention. The 420J2 steel is more suitable for a diving knife than a soil-digging tool, and most certainly it is _not_ "the highest grade Japanese stainless steel for durability". Meh. In addition to a belt-carrying black elastomer sheath, the blade comes inside an additional clear plastic sheath attached to the blade by a piece of low-quality sticking tape (blue frame in figure A, lower right panel), which leaves a difficult to remove sticky residue on the metal. This sheath is useful to protect the side edges of the elastomer sheath from being cut when removing or inserting the blade. It is worth emphasizing that it is a *very sharp* long knife that cannot only accidentally cut you easily, but also with a fixed 7.5" length blade it is likely forbidden to be carried concealed in a number of jurisdictions. 5. Blade-smithing quality. The left panel of figure B shows the knife positioned so that its mirror finish reflects light from a window on the edge of the concave side of the blade. The two green arrows delimit the position of a dark material in the steel. The upper inset of the panel is a magnification of the material, which could not be removed by rubbing with a cloth wet in water or alcohol, which has a distribution tightly parallel to the edge, indicating that it was created during the shaping of the blade. Unlike the serrated edge, the bevelled edge was not smooth to the touch but had considerable burring, which caught strands from the cleaning cloth (see the lower inset of the left panel of figure B). Further, as enclosed by the green frame in the right panel of this same figure, the convex side of the knife had a blade-long line of many short scratches roughly paralleling the bevelled edge. I returned this knife for an exchange with another, and found similar defects at about the same and other parts of the blade. These finishing imperfections and defects do not detract from the applicability of the knife for weeding or digging, but they are appallingly below the traditional standard of Japanese artisan blade-smiths. The product I received seems like a mass-produced item from another country of SE Asia. --