Yanagiba • 300 mm • stainless Swedish Steel • Japanese octave handle of ebony with stainless fillers and white corian • for right-handed use

Features of the Ginryu Swedish steel series

Ginryu (silver dragon) is a premium sashimi knife, made from the Uddeholm Swedish steel from the Sandvik steel factory, also called honyaki Swedish steel. This series is made for the professional chefs and is the highest quality of Japanese traditional sashimi knives from Takayuki.

On request, this model is also available for left-handers.

Swedish steel

For a long time, Swedish steel has a high reputation for quality and purity. Contemporary Swedish steel, or European steel, adheres to this high standard and is also available in a stainless version. The use of this type of steel is popular with Japanese knife smiths, due to their predictable behavior during forging and the fine structure of the steel after the hardening process. Thanks to this structure, the steel excels in extreme sharpness and sharpness retention. MISONO uses this steel in their Carbon series, where it is called European steel, this is rusting steel. Takayuki uses the Swedish Uddeholm steel, but then the stainless variant. Again, both steel variants excel in their purity and structure and can be sharpened very sharply.

Elwin de Veld about the knives of Sakai Takayuki

We usually start our trips to Japan in Osaka, from where we take a Shinkansen ( a bullet train) to Seki, in Gifu prefecture. We start in Sakai, in south of Osaka, where we always recieve a warm friendly welcome from Aoki san and Ogawa san from Sakai Takayuki. In recent years the customers in our shop have been asking for special Japanese traditionally forged knives: Yanagiba, Sakimura, Kengata: all the names of models which are used in Japanese kitchens for preparing various sorts of fish. Sakai Takayuki is my key which opens the door to the world of traditional Japanese knives and to top it all, their product range is targeted for the western market. For making of the traditional Japanese knives Sakai Takayuki employs the best of the best: Itsuo Doi and Kenji Togashi, among others. The blacksmith Yamatsuke san, with his stable hand on the Kaiten Toshi (Japanese water stone), is a guarantor of an exceptionally sharp finish. Sakai Takayuki buys lots of their steel from the Aichi steel (their headquarters are situated close to Nagoya) and works among other with carbon steel shirogami white and aogami blue. A nice detail: the colours in the names of the steel have nothing to do with the colour of the steel itself- it's just the colour of the packing in which the raw steel is being stored in the factory. The western models are manually finished at the company's quarters in Osaka (sharpening), but largely manufactured in Seki, in Gifu prefecture. The finish and the quality is sublime- just what we can expect from Takayuki.