Great information :-)

I left off the final part of the story. After sharpening the knife, instead of throwing into a bag, he put it into a box and then gift-wrapped it so beautifully, that I hated to tear it open when we got it home.

Yup - I know the feeling of too many knives. After retiring the European ones, we've taken quit a few trips to Japan and brough back an eclectic group of Japanese knives. That said, I'd say 90%+ of my knifing (with the exception of slicing bread and slicing roasts) is done with a Global (brand name) nakiri. Not my favorite handle, but it balances well, is kept razor-sharp and is essentially a long chef's knife missing the pointy end. It slices and chops vegies, meat, fish, whatever. It's steel is not only hard enough to hold an edge, but tough enough to do the breaking-down of small birds. When I need a paring knife, I use a sub-$5 ceramic one. If I have to whack something bigger, I have a Chinese cleaver (souvenir of an early 1970's trip to Hong Kong). Before I got hooked on the nakiri, I ended up primarily using gyutos and ended up with a number of them (some, just because they were interesting to look at). While I have a couple of yanagibas and a deba, I only use them occasionally (out of guilt, I guess).

While my first knife came from a shop in Kyoto, and while some of my knives were picked up in department stores (including some Global ones bought in Sydney Australia at about half-price due to currency exchange niceties) it can be real fun to buy them in Tokyo, on Kappabashi-dori (or just Kappabashi, "Kitchen Town"), a street between Asakusa and Ueno packed with shops for restaurant supplies, high-quality knives, beautiful ceramics, and quirky plastic food samples (the type that mimic real food that are found in the windows of nearly every restaurant in Japan.

Knives have "personalities" the same as pots/pans do. All of my Japanese knives (except for the handful of Globals picked up in Sydney) were picked up first deciding what style I wanted and then looking for the best value in the quality class I was looking in - so none of them are of the same manufacturers. Similarly, while some of our pots are of common manufacturers, they were all picked up individually based on their material properties as cooking vessels rather than who the manufacturer was. Interestingly, on occasion, I have taken advantage of "lifetime" warranties on cookware. Meyer (Analon and Circulon) as well as Le Creuset have both been extremely accommodating, but interestingly I had a bit of a challenge with All Clad.

Jeff