“Shun” (shoon) is a concept at the very heart of Japanese cuisine. In Japanese, shun is the word used to describe local, seasonal food when it is at the peak of its flavor and freshness—at the peak of its perfection.

Shun Cutlery is known for its exquisite beauty and ultra-premium performance. Yet as beautiful as Shun is on the outside, and as beautiful as it performs in your kitchen, its true beauty may be in what you don’t see.

Shun is dedicated to maintaining this ancient tradition by continuing to handcraft each knife in our Seki City facilities. Each piece of this fine kitchen cutlery takes at least 100 individual steps to complete. While we maintain these ancient traditions of handcrafted quality, we also take advantage of thoroughly modern, premium materials and state-of-the-art technology to provide that traditional quality to millions of professional chefs and avid home cooks throughout the world.

Heat treatment—an invisible, yet vital, process. This exacting process is fundamentally important to ensuring that your Shun provides lasting value. In heat treatment, the metal is heated and cooled to change its microstructure, bringing out its very best properties. With precise heat treatment, blade steel becomes finer-grained, making it stronger and harder so blades can be thinner, sharper, and give you a longer-lasting edge. Shun’s experts are, quite simply, masters of the heat treatment process.

Shun is the exact moment when a fruit has reached its ideal ripeness when a vegetable is at its very best, or when meat is at its most flavorful. Home cooks and professional chefs alike celebrate shun in their kitchens, eagerly awaiting each season’s bounty and serving every ingredient at its proper time.

Shun Cutlery proudly takes its name from this Japanese culinary tradition of eating the freshest food at the perfect moment. We took this name to honor this seasonal, mindful way of eating and as a mark of our dedication to making kitchen cutlery that is always at the peak of its perfection, too.