Last Call: Savor The Japanese Art Of Sharpening Knives

I've never paid much consideration to sharpening my knives. Once a year I'll take them to a kitchen supply shop to get them sharpened—I know I should be going more often. At home I use a $15 sharpening steel, but really, it doesn't do much actual sharpening. If you look really closely at a blade, you'll see the edges are bent in one direction or another with repeated use. What a sharpening steel does is nudge the finely bent edges back towards center. But again, it doesn't accomplish much in actual sharpening.

In recent weeks I've been thinking about investing in a whetstone. The Japanese have used this method to sharpen knives for centuries, and frankly, it just looks cool as hell. There's also a certain gracefulness in watching the Japanese sharpen knives; it's like dancing the bolero with your santoku. So let's watch a few sexy knife-sharpening videos, shall we?

From our friends at Munchies comes this video from knife sharpener Vincent Kazuhito Lau. I believe, by law, every knife sharpening video must end with a piece of paper being sliced. This video doesn't disappoint.

This video, inexplicably, has nearly 25 million views. It's about how a $1 knife purchased at Daiso (the Japanese equivalent of the Dollar Store) can be transformed into a deadly weapon using a whetstone. Watching that tomato at the end get thinly sliced is very satisfying.

Finally, I geek out watching videos of rusty things that get restored. This particular clip features an especially apt title: Spark Joy Sharpening. It really does.