One of the oldest knife designs of the Japanese kitchen. The nakiri’s flat, rectangular blade, lacking a point, was designed specifically for clean push-cuts on vegetables. Every inch of its edge touches the board at once. Nothing is left connected at the far end, nothing accordions, and the cook doesn't have to correct for a curved belly. Set up a stack of chard or a half-dozen leeks and the work just goes faster and cleaner.

The tall, straight blade also serves as its own bench scraper — turn it on its side and move a board's worth of diced vegetables into the pot in one pass. What it is not built for is protein or bone. There is no point for detail work and no curve for rocking, and the thin hard edge that makes it so good on vegetables will chip on a chicken joint. Keep it away from anything with a skeleton.

A note on the steel. The Yasugi works produced several grades of high-carbon tool steel that, to the eye, couldn’t be told apart. So the mill marked each one with a different color paper. The smiths who bought the steel adopted the shorthand, naming it after its wrapper rather than its formula. Blue paper gave us aogami-kō: blue paper steel in Japanese.

Blue Paper Steel No. 2 is one of the most widely trusted carbon steels in Japan, and the reason is balance. Aogami holds its edge longer than white steel while remaining far easier to sharpen than powdered stainless steel. At the hardness our forge runs it at, the edge can be taken thinner than a Western blade would tolerate, and that’s what's meant when they say a Japanese knife cuts differently.