This wild YouTube scientist makes knives out of random stuff

Do you know how knives are made? Do you know how a knife is made? milk?

Unless you’ve seen this video – or any other video on the YouTube channel Extremely Japanese –you do not know. The channel focuses on the art of knife-making, but most of the videos detail the creators’ successful attempts to make actual working knives out of materials like UV resin, tofu, bismuth, and milk.

The craftsmanship itself is fascinating and impressive, but it’s the mysterious knifemaker that makes the film so interesting to watch. The creator himself—who only pours water from a cow-shaped vase and frequently engages in lengthy experimental side quests that have nothing to do with the knives crafted in the film—has never revealed his name online. But their expertise in materials science is obvious, and the breadth and specificity of the equipment they use makes you wonder why this person owns so much specialized lab equipment.

It’s all conspiracy and there are no answers, but that’s not the point. Sometime around 2018, on the floor of the house my roommates and I shared at the time (because we didn’t have enough couches for all of us at once), I saw for the first time what we affectionately called the “milk knife” ” something. We’re tired of watching Vine compilations over and over again. In some twist of fate (no, this is not an exaggeration), someone put this video on and we ended up watching it three times together before moving out. It has become a weird YouTube video that I play late at night. To accommodate the attention spans of 2024, I usually speed up kiwami japan videos to 1.5x since they can be quite long. This channel hasn’t released any new knives in the past few years, but there are plenty of them in the backlog that you can use.