Santoku vs Bunka

A bunka is a santoku with a point. If you want the shorter, flatter Japanese general-purpose knife and you also want to do detail work with the tip, buy a bunka. If you want the same knife without hunting for stock, buy a santoku — and in a home kitchen that is the right answer most of the time.

These two shapes are closer than any other pair on this site. Both sit at 165 to 180 mm. Both are double bevel, which means both sharpen like a Western knife. Both have a tall heel and an edge that is flat for most of its length, so both want a push cut rather than a rock. Makers often build them on the same blank, with the same steel and the same heat treatment, and only grind the last 30 mm differently.

We hold no bunka in the registry, and we are not going to invent one to fill the slot. The three picks above are the santoku side of the argument plus the closest widely stocked knives to a bunka in size and grind. If you want an actual bunka, buy it from a specialist and expect a smaller warranty network.

A reverse tanto is a straight angled grind down from the spine to meet the edge, producing a point that sits high rather than at the midline. Practically that gives you three things a sheepsfoot cannot: you can score skin without cutting through it, you can push the point into something dense — a pepper, a winter squash — and lever a window open, and you can trim silverskin or fat with the first 20 mm of edge.

It costs you two things. The point is fine enough to snap if you twist it, and it is the part of the knife most likely to catch your other hand when you are learning. A santoku's blunt nose is genuinely safer for a cook still building a claw grip.

• First Japanese knife. Santoku, or better still a 210 mm gyuto. See what to buy as a first Japanese knife.
• You already own a gyuto and want a shorter second blade. A bunka is the more interesting choice, because the gyuto already covers the rocking and the length, and the bunka adds a different kind of point.
• You want one knife and a small board. Santoku. Shun Classic 7 inch if you want the nicer object, Tojiro DP F-503 at 170 mm if you want the same steel class for much less.
• You do a lot of fine knife work — garnish, fish, detail. Bunka, or a kiritsuke, which is the long version of the same angled-tip idea.

Buy a santoku unless you specifically want the point, in which case buy a bunka from a retailer who will stand behind it. The two knives are the same tool with different last inches, and no one has ever regretted a santoku on the grounds that it was too blunt at the end. If you have not settled on length yet, gyuto versus santoku is the more consequential comparison, and gyuto versus bunka puts the angled tip against a full-size chef's knife.