Yes! Another way to look at it:
Katsuramuki is the exact opposite of Western cutting.
Instead of multiple slices coming off to the right, we have a single slice coming off to the left.
Instead of cutting against the board, there is no board; we cut in hand.
Instead of holding the food in place and pushing vertically with the knife, we hold the knife in place and push horizontally with the food.
Backwards, speaks Yoda.
By definition, produce separates behind the edge of the knife. At one extreme, if the degree of separation is zero, the potato is sliced but the slices adhere. If the separation is over-eager, we call it “wedging”. If the separation is desirable, we call it “food release” lol.
With katsuramuki, the food release takes the form of a tangent separating off a circle. The tip of the bevel touches the top of the daikon. The separated sheet rides along the ura. The tangent angle is exactly the bevel angle of your single-bevel knife.
When planing a ham, the same notion holds, except we conceive of the flat top of the ham as the arc of a radish of infinite radius; but we yaw the piece in the same way. The knife rides the ham at the same bevel angle as a whetstone.
In the Western paradigm, an usuba “naturally” rotates “into” the food. Given rectilinear product, the resulting curve is undesirable: “steering”. Western cooking, and Western psychology, is full of rectilinearity: past is left, future is right, up is good, down is bad, and the cuts are all about brunoise, dice, cube.
In the Daikon paradigm, there is no spoon, I mean, there is no steering! Given round product, a knife counterrotating against the curve produces a rectilinear plane “out of” the food. Perhaps the closest analog is the chiffonade, but with daikon, the roll is already latent in the vegetable, an invisible Archimedean spiral waiting to be revealed.
The kiritsuke doing katsuramuki is thus dual in every way to the chef’s knife chopping.
Here I started holding the knife at too low an angle, and pushing too hard down into the meat. Later, a higher angle kept the slices from breaking.
Oh, and be sure to inform yourself on single bevel sharpening before you do it. It's quite simple but fixing mistakes can be a huge pain. Enjoy the knife!
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