I have acquired some vocabulary in lurking around too many japanese knife shops, and am sharing some it here:
Brands:
正本総本店 - Masamoto Souhonten (Kyoto store)
築地正本 - Tsukiji Masamoto (Tokyo)
堺孝行 - Sakai Takayuki
忠房 - Tadafusa
酔心 - Suisin
重房 - Shigefusa
ミソノ - Misono
有次 - Aritsugu
築地有次 - Tsukiji Aritsugu (Tokyo)
Type of knife:
洋出刃 - western deba
牛刀 - gyuto
筋引 - sujihiki
ぺティー petty
柳刃 - yanagiba
薄刃 - usuba
鎌型薄刃 - kamagata usuba
出刃 - deba
切付 - kiritsuke
白 - white
青 - blue
包丁 - kitchen knife
刃物 - knife warez
Also there are of course varying levels of quality from each brand.
From Sakai Takayuki I've seen:
霞 Kasumitogi
本霞 Hongasumi
Tsukiji Aritsugu:
別打 Betsuuchi? Betsuda?
特製 Tokusei
Hopefully I've helped someone look around Rakuten or google for various doses of knife porn & there isn't already a list of these words... If the list generates interest I will add more but with this you can browse quite a few knives, eg.
copy pasting 堺孝行 柳刃 白 should bring up yanagiba from Sakai Takayuki with some kind of white steel (a "二" or "2" in the description will probably mean white#2)
If you're in english and you want to decrypt some of the description, click on the top right corner (i'm talking about Rakuten btw) and select 日本語 as the language
Ryan
Thanks for the translations, it helps alot on rakutenI just made my first order there, so im a bit nervous right now ^^ I hope tenso is good lol.
I found a shop called subaru that had lots of Masamotos, and i think it may be the only shop that has the SW-series in stock.
http://item.rakuten.co.jp/subaru/c/0000001167/
http://search.rakuten.co.jp/search/m...search&x=-1274
I just found out that it was 2 months waiting time for Masamoto Sw. It felt too good to be true that they had them in stock...
Thanks Ryan for sharing your work, greatly appreciated.
This week ordered a couple of unbranded 180mm white steel usuba from Houcho and will post pictures when they arrive. Any preferences for here or "show us your latest knife" thread?
Reviving this thread because I found a new Rakuten shop:
http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/matsuohamono/
It seems to be a maker selling directly; the brand is Matsuo. They have some nice looking stuff.
Thank you , your information is very helpful