nipponcurated 
A left-handed single bevel knife is not a mirror image, it is a different blade. Today the left-handed version costs 88 dollars more on the same shelf.
A Sakai wholesaler will put your brand on knives for a minimum of five. Here is what you can actually verify about a shop before you hand over money.
English guides tell you to build a patina. Japanese knife houses tell you to wash the blade immediately after acidic food. Both are right, narrowly.
A Sakai wholesaler published the test in English back in 2017: if the edge pattern is very straight, the blade came from rolled stock, not a hammer.
The same Sakai gyuto is sold eight times with eight handles and a 159 dollar spread. The price list Sakai publishes shows what that upgrade really buys.
No Japanese maker calls those layers Damascus. The steel maker calls it suminagashi, and the layers stop before the edge that does the cutting.
Gyuto, santoku and bunka mean something much narrower in Japan than in English, and the same maker says different things in its two languages.
Japan keeps an official national list of forging regions. It has seven names on it, not the three that English knife guides repeat to each other.
Blue and white steel are named after the paper the mill wraps them in. The number after the name is carbon content, and that is most of the story.
Japan teaches two complete grammars of its own language, and they disagree about what the units even are. Which one is your app teaching you?