Hamo bone-cutting knife
Fish Butchering
Specialized
A hamokiri (鱧切り) is the knife for hamo, the daggertooth pike conger, a summer fish prized in Kyoto and across the Kansai. It is also called a honekiri, a bone-cutting knife. The blade is long, tall and heavy, single-bevel, with a straight spine, a long straight edge and a nearly square front. Typical lengths run from 270mm to 330mm.
Hamo is full of fine bones that cannot be pulled out. After filleting, the cook cuts through flesh and bone about a millimetre apart, stopping at the skin, so the bones end up small enough to eat. The length and weight of the blade do most of the work, cut after cut. Compared with a deba, it does not chop through big bones; it is a precise, repetitive cutter for this one fish.
