Ajikataya

Mutsumi Hinoura has been training and working in Sanjo with his father, master smith Tsukasa Hinoura, since 2001. His knives are similar, with good distal tapers and wide kiriba style bevels, and really wonderful heat treatments. They both have a lot of experience with hunting and outdoor knives, and their kitchen knives seem to carry some of the same qualities of toughness.

Mutsumi’s shirogami incorporates a very good edge life along with a good toughness for it’s hardness, it is crisp and a bit hard feeling on stones but still yielding and easy to polish. It can work well at a very wide variety of finishes especially which if you are getting into sharpening more can reveal a lot about the personality of different stones. We use a Mutsumi shirogami 2 as part of our stone testing knives.