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Chances are good that you’ve sharpened a knife recently, and chances are equally good that you do not remember it, because sharpening a knife is rather banal.

But this is not an average knife-sharpening event. The crowd spills out of the knife shop and onto Bank Street, with people filming through windows and peering over shoulders to get a glimpse of something that, to the everyday person, looks fairly unremarkable. Shibata-san picks up a block soaking in water, then another one, compares them, and places one down on a workbench. He rhythmically and almost robotically rubs the blade across the wet stone, flipping it and turning it. It is hypnotic.

Someone asks him how he knows what angle to hold the blade at. He pauses for a beat, and in broken English, replies, “Feeling … practice.” And then he goes right back to rubbing the blade against the stone. At one point he stops and offers to cut someone’s hair. They decline; he gestures vaguely toward his own hair — a cross-lingual look, it’s OK! Still no takers.

Shibata-san is a rock star because of the simple fact that his knives are very, very good, which is to say they are very, very sharp. Kent tells me that Shibata-san might be the best knife sharpener in the entire world. “I’m a really good knife sharpener,” he says, but “he’s Wayne Gretzky.”

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

Rock stars, wherever they go, attract parties. More than 200 people had RSVP’ed to the two-hour sharpening demonstration, and many more appeared to drop by to check out the action. It is, for lack of a better term, a knife party. Music plays in the background, as people push past each other to get their hands on some of the knives on display. Out back, someone is grilling up hot dogs. Chris Lord, manager of the store, hands out cans of beer from a large plastic bin filled with ice behind the counter. I wonder to myself whether that’s a very wise combination; it bears repeating, again, that these are some of the sharpest knives in the known universe.