Chico,
You've given dispensation for strong, frank criticism before with the proviso that the conversation start with the statement, "Chico, I disagree."
Chico, I disagree.
The statement is muddled. The odds of someone getting hit by lightning are dependent on lots of factors the most important of which is the size of the population in areas where lightning strikes are probable. The odds of a statistician (or anyone else for that matter) randomly choosing an individual who will be struck by lightning are high. The odds of the particular individual (who it later turns out was struck by lightning) getting struck are exactly 100%. Ditto for the lottery.
We can go deeper into this, but it's a highly technical, dissertation-level area where "philosophy of science" and math theory meet. In turn, that's a consequence of statistics being the most completely mathematical of all sciences.
Over certain courses, a humble Jeep will thrash the World Land Speed holder -- which also wouldn't do well in F1. Similarly, the "strongest man" in terms of performing which feat of strength?
And with the knife, again it depends on what you mean -- both in terms of the particular characteristics you've selected (which can be quite ambiguous and circumstance dependent), and whether that or any particular set of characteristics can exclusively define "the best" kitchen knife.
In my opinion the whole question is highly dependent on what the knife will be used for and who will be using it. Because a gyuto/chef's is meant to be such an all-rounder any given knife -- no matter how well it performs some tasks -- will be bettered by other knives for other tasks. Any given blade, no matter the alloy and no matter how well smithed, will be bettered in some significant paramters by a great many others. Indeed, some very important blade qualites are mutually inimical (if not mutually exclusive).
"A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh ... " And a guess is just a guess.
Geeze, that's pretty conclusory considering you've offerred no evidence to support it. Furthermore, costly cosmetics aside, typically the most expensive AND highly prized knives are almost all honyaki, which are all (by definition) "single steel," and not laminate. It bears mentioning that most of the highly patterened forge welded jigane are made by other manufacturers and sold, by the inch, to knife smiths for subsequent forge welding to their chosen hagane. To my mind it says something that nearly all of "the best" patterned jigane are available to anyone with a checkbook. I.e., when there's competition "the best" has a tendency to get spread out fairly democratically.
Returning to laminates vs "single steel," at the upper levels I have no dog in the fight, no preference towards honyaki and no animus towards any of the various forms of Japanese laminate construction.
At some point we're going to need to go into some depth to figure out which sorts of lamination you're referring to when you talk about "Japanese laminates." When it comes to most culinary knives, the better honyaki knives are significantly better than the best hon-kasumi knives, and absolutely trash the best warikomis. One exception to the rule is the type of lamination called kitaeji in Japanese which is the Japanese version of "true damascus.
I suppose you could assert superiority for ni-mai/hon-kasumi construction in that it allows the maker to use otherwise very expensive and failure prone hagane, and also that ni-mai knives are tougher and more abuse resistant than honyakis. That is, everything else being equal, which it never is.
"Tough" and "strong" aren't ideas. They're steel, alloy, and/or blade qualities. The terms have specific meanings. Toughness refers to a material's ability to resist tearing, breaking, cracking, chipping, abrading, etc. In a negative way it can be said that a tough steel bends before it breaks. Strengh refers to a material's ability to resist deformation such as bending, rolling, and waving. In a negative way, it can be said that a strong knife breaks before it bends.
Usually, very strong steels are not very tough and vice versa. However, over the past decade (or so), several steels exhibiting a high proportion and good balance of both properties have been introduced and used for culinary knives.
When discussing knives technically, it's probably a good idea to keep "tough" and "strong" out of the same sentence unless you're using them for their technical meanings.
Very tough knives can take extremely sharp edges. The Aritsugu "A" series which uses "gokinko" steel is an excellent example. Also, although it doesn't score a particularly high Rockwell "C" number, around 60HrC, it takes forever to profile and sharpen -- much longer than knives with blades which score significantly higher. On the other hand, the "A" knives exhibit extreme strength.
In addition to contradicting much of what Chico said, this also goes to show that hardness, at least as expressed by Rockwell C testing (surface hardness), neither shows the entire story, nor as much as most prospective buyers think it does. It's a mistake to think a higher Rockwell number always represents a better blade.
We can dream.
Not all laminates are hagane/jigane. The exception is kitaeji, referred to already.
You probably should go ahead and type a short treatise if for no other reasons than to make your reasoning clear to others and to yourself. Writing has a wonderful of organizing and clarifying one's thinking, at least for me.
By "differential hardening" of "singular steel" knives you're presumably referring to mizu-honyaki. By "300 layers in a perfect strata" you may or may not be referring to kitaeji rather than kasumi, hon-kasumi, or san-mai. It would be nice to know for certain. That said, you'd at least get quite an argument from most high-end Japanese kitchen knife smiths as to whether there's anything better than a well done mizu-honyaki.
Swords, sword making and sword construction is a different, if related, subject. I suggest leaving "samurai swords" out of the discussion or else (you) writing the specific nexus.
Several knives can be sharpened to the same (and higher) sharpness than a KD by a competent sharpener using appropriate tools. Hattori-san would be among the first to tell you that the KD's jigane performs very little service in terms of performance. Almost all of the action is at the KD's Cowry hagane. By way of analogy, the Hattori FH, a VG-10 single steel, takes just as good if not a better edge than it's less expensive, "laminate" brother, the Hattori HD.
In terms of edge taking alone, most aficianados Japanese manufactured knives and the alloys used to make them, would give pride of place to a carbon over any stainless alloy such as the KD's Cowry-X; particularly to one of Hitachi's three shirogamis -- probably S1. In my experience, a G3 Ikkanshi Tadatsuna gets every bit as sharp, if not sharper, than an Hattori KD. Even I (pretty good, but not the world's best sharpener by any means) can get (even) my old Sabs (pretty good, but not the world's best edge takers) to fall through tomatoes with no more polish than a surgical black Arkansas. What I can't get them to do (as opposed to either a white steel, or G3 "Inox") IKT is fall though by mistake.
Furthermore, as good as the Hattori KD is, it is very chip-prone. This brings us back to the awful truth that there are always trade-offs, and those make determining "best" impossible. It depens on which qualities take priority under a given set of circumstances.
Moreover, and also completely subjective, I think the KD is gaudy beyond ugly; not to mention obscenely overpriced considering its competition. Cosemtics aside, and even at the ridiculous price level, it's nowhere near my top choice.
Of course you're not only entitled to your opinion, consider it well respected.
BDL
