Web Video / Kiwami Japan

This kitchen knife is made from rawhide and smoke.

圧倒的不審者の極み!^note Attōteki fushin-sha no kiwami, lit. "Extremely overwhelmingly-suspicious person", known as Kiwami Japan to its English-speaking fans, is a Japanese YouTube channel about knives. It is best known for its "Sharpest ____ kitchen knife in the world" videos, which consist of the owner, Kiwami Kouba, making professional-grade kitchen knives out of increasingly bizarre materials.

Due to its unusual, often humorous content, intricate chemistry involved in making the knives, and a lack of spoken dialogue, Kiwami Japan has garnered a following from all over the world. Its videos are all watchable independently of one another, but will often have shout-outs to previous uploads and continuity updates for those who have been watching in chronological order.

You can watch it on Youtube here.

This YouTube channel provides examples of:

• Awesome, but Impractical: While every knife made thus far certainly qualifies, special mention goes to the knives he made out of ice and smoke, respectively.
  • The Bismuth knife, elaborated in "Shaggy Dog" Story, also counts.
• Blade Enthusiast: His main content consists of making knives out of increasingly improbable materials, and he usually ends his videos with clips of him getting rid of the forged knife through creative means, sometimes seeping into what a Serial Killer would do.
• Character Tics: His hands are usually shown trembling on screen whenever he's agitated, such as when a step in the knife-making process goes wrong.
• Chekhov's Gun: The plate used at the end of the pasta knife video is itself turned into a knife two videos later.
• Companion Cube: The cow pitchers. Other small plush toys are also treated this way in some videos.
• Complexity Addiction: Kiwami is prone to devising overly complicated solutions to obstacles he encounters during the knife-making process, such as making a vacuum-sealer from scratch - twice, because the first one didn't hold - or making a knife all over again if it isn't as effective as he'd hoped. The videos will also often expand on a certain part of the process in more detail, showing the chemistry involved before applying it to the production of the knife.
  • His milk knife; the construction of the knife itself, having the dissolved remains of the mixture of milk, acetic acid, and ethanol be cooked down to a solid form seems simple enough, but the construction of the pommel, on the other hand, involved no less than three uses of a vacuum chamber to create a pommel mold after making separate molds out of the head of Kiwami's signature cow pitcher, then one from an actual knife's pommel to attach the cow head, and then finally the rubber pommel out of the previous two molds.
  • There's also the fact that he tends to create his knife ingredients from scratch instead of using store-bought ones. The candy for his candy knife is made from sugar cane, and for the water and oil knife, he extracts the oil from flaxseeds using a tiny container that produces about 5 drops of oil per batch.
  • His second (or third, if you count the guillotine) chocolate knife has a chocolate bar pattern. To get this shape, he 3D prints three chocolate bar-shaped slabs and coat them in UV resin to get a glossy finish. Then, he puts it on clay and constructs a Lego wall to make a silicone mould out of it, which he then uses to mould the chocolate.
• Continuity Nod: The videos often have B-plots involving little toys or his iconic cow-shaped kitchen utensils.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Kiwami hasn't always specialized in his popular "sharpest _____ kitchen knives" videos; his early content covers other equally bizarre experiments, with the comments section usually full of newer subscribers joking that they expected more knives.
  • In an early 2018 video, he outright does a Q&A with his face visible (albeit partially covered by a surgical mask), in contrast with his later content where he never speaks and appears briefly if at all.
• Eat the Evidence:
  • The video on the knife made out of pasta quite literally ends on this trope: he cooks the knife and eats it.
  • The Fake Egg knife video mentions at several points that you can eat the ingredients (a gel made from sodium alginate, beta carotene and food colouring, amongst others) at any point during the process, even once the knife is finished!
  • The gelatin knife video ends with him melting down the knife and returning the gelatin to its single-serving pouches.
• The Faceless: It's rare for more than his hands to ever be on screen, much less his head.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Not only does the potato knife video have music playing for the majority of it, but the video's subplot concerns the tiny bear statue being possessed by a demon, forcing Kiwami to keep trying out ways of placating it so he can continue the video, ultimately resulting in him trapping the bear in a box, sealing the box in a tube of several tape rolls, and putting the tube on a perpetual rolling device he had fashioned, complete with brushes to rub against it.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Kiwami's handiwork in knife-crafting is nothing short of awe-inspiring. His carbon fiber, paper and rice-derived cellulose fibre and bismuth knives are of special mention.
• Improbable Weapon User: On the other end of the coin, it is bizarre to see everyday, mundane objects be turned into knives through crafty means. Would you ever find any long-lasting use in a knife made from pasta?
• Loophole Abuse: His video on using a $1 kitchen knife to cut the hardest food in the world sees him accomplish this task... by more or less turning the knife into a saw.
• MacGyvering: Despite having a wide variety of fancy tools in his house, Kiwami frequently builds his own machinery from unconventional things.
  • In the Sharpest egg kitchen knife in the world video, he uses a hand massager, a balloon, and sandpaper to make an electric grindstone for the blade.
  • In the Sharpest rice kitchen knife in the world video, he builds a small mill out of a glass jar, some aluminium oxide balls, an electric drill, a tray, metal brackets and rolling pins to finely grind rice into rice flour.
  • He's also used a cow pitcher, candles and straws to create a distillation apparatus to extract limonene from oranges, and he has a centrifuge made of wood, string and a cup.
• Noodle Implements: In several videos, a hand massager (commonly mistaken for a vibrator by commenters) is used during the construction process; in the Paper Knife video, it's used to shake out cellulose fibres from a mix of rice and paper (until Kiwami decides this is too slow, and uses a waterfall and aluminium oxide balls to grind the mixture for over a week), while in the Milk Knife video it's used to remove air bubbles from the resin mixture being used to make the knife's handle.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Sure, it probably is the sharpest rice/smoke/gelatin/chicken bone kitchen knife in the world, if only because it's the only one of its kind at the time of it being made. Of all the "sharpest ______ kitchen knives" he's made, only the carbon fiber knife is likely to have any meaningful competition.
• Renaissance Man: His unique content requires a broad range of skills, including cooking, science, engineering and smithing to even accomplish, but his videos often segue to clips of him doing unrelated things such as doing one-handed push-ups and latte art, which he also performs very well.
• Running Gag: Cucumbers. Several knife-making video ends with him cutting one, and each time it's acquired in a more bizarre fashion, from finding one hanging on his window blinds, to grabbing one out of a lamp fixture, to finding one balancing perfectly on his under-sink shutoff valve, to grabbing one hidden in a roll of toilet paper, to walking through a forested path to have one airdropped to him, squeezing one out of a tube made of fake egg, to receiving one from Death, to finding one inside of both an orange and a bread roll. And, of course, he eventually makes a knife out of the cucumber itself.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The bismuth knife. After a painstaking amount of time creating it, the jagged and uncomfortable surface of the handle causes Kiwami to only use it for less than 30 seconds, only measly chopping the cucumber in half, before giving up and smelting it down into a multi-coloured metal block again.
  • The primitive stone knife is whittled using nothing more than other rocks over a period of days... and then buried out in the wilderness for safekeeping. And then he later accidentally smashes and breaks it while testing out a newly-sharpened axe head.
• Shout-Out: At the end of his Sharpest egg kitchen knife in the world video Kiwami does a thumb up gesture, much like another silent YouTuber who's known for his obsession with eggs and a habit of ending his videos with a thumb up.
• Yandere: Kiwami is sometimes presented as one, crafting the knives to get back at someone who snubbed him.
  • In the "sharpest candy knife" video, Kiwami gives some handmade candy to a girl, who throws them away. Enraged, he turns the candy into a knife and the video ends with him sneaking up on the girl to pull out a cucumber from the back of her head for a cutting demo.
  • In the "sharpest tofu knife" video, Kiwami makes dinner for someone (tofu and sushi, as per their request), but they never show up. So he makes a tofu knife and goes to their apartment intending to stab that person.