Do you know how knives are made? Do you know how knives are made? milk?
Unless you’ve seen this video – or other videos on YouTube channel Kiwami Japan – you don’t. The channel is dedicated to the art of knifemaking, but most of the videos are step-by-step details of the maker’s successful attempts to create real, usable knives from materials like UV resin, tofu, bismuth, and yes, milk.
The craftsmanship itself is fascinating and impressive, but it’s the enigmatic knifemaker that makes the videos so fun to watch. The creator himself – who only pours water from a vase in the shape of a cow and who often undertakes lengthy, experimental side quests that have little to do with the knife being made in the video – has never revealed his name online. But their expertise in materials science is evident, and the breadth and specificity of the equipment they use makes you wonder why this person owns so much professional lab equipment.
It’s all intrigue and no answers, but that’s not the point. It was sometime around 2018, on the floor of my then-group home with my roommates (because we didn’t have enough couch to fit all of us in at once), that I first saw what we affectionately call “milking knife.” We got bored of watching Vine compilations over and over again. In a twist of fate (no, that’s not an exaggeration), someone put this video on, and we ended up watching it together three more times before we left. It has become my favorite YouTube video to put on at the proverbial end of the evening. To accommodate 2024’s attention span, I usually set Kiwami Japan’s videos to 1.5x speed, as they can be quite long. The channel hasn’t posted any new knives in recent years, but there are enough to get through in the backlog.