Heirloom Cutlery?

I just rediscovered the drawer full of sharp things. The good ones are knives that she brought back from my grandparents place. The couple junk ones you can barely see are the ones she got here that don’t get used anymore. But those Japanese knives look pretty nice, and I don’t even think they’re the real good ones. One of them I spotted a price tag of +5,000 yen, around $50 so not your dollar/yen shop variety, but the super good ones run into multiple hundreds. There was a couple of the veggie cutting blades, sorta cleaver shaped, broad squarish and pretty thin.  Decided to bring one of them out and use it yesterday. It’s a three layer blade, apparently fairly common for the consumer grade Japanese kitchen knives. Side plates are a softer more ductile steel, in this case stainless, and the center the harder grade edge steel. I thought this one might also be stainless, but apprently hagane as labeled on packaging is normal carbon steel. The knife is nice. Cuts amazing! Made some paper thin cucmber slices. But I made a booboo with these knives of not immediately washing and drying. I left it for later and you can see the edge immediately has started to oxidize. Yikes! That’ll learn me. Now I’m going to have to seek out a stone and hone that out. Angle on these Japanese knives are different from what you sharpen Western knives to, 15 degrees here. This one is double sided though, many Japanese knives are single sided. And did you check out the spine on that deba nestled in the newspapers on the right? That thing is at least 1/4 inch thick! Anyway, I’ll start with the veggie one for now. Mom didn’t use these, but I figure I’ll do my part to perpetuate some culture in some way here. Oh yeah, I’ll need to figure out some kind of storage solution for these.