Affiliate Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a commission. You pay exactly the same price either way, and no company can pay us to be recommended.

How this site makes money

Wabi Sabi Made is free to read. When we link to a place you can buy a knife, that link is sometimes an affiliate link — meaning the retailer pays us a small share of the sale if you buy. The price you pay does not change, and nothing is added to your total. We may also earn from advertising or other arrangements; wherever we do, it is disclosed.

We currently participate in the following affiliate programs:

• Hocho Knife Affiliate Program — a member as of August 2026

What money cannot buy

The entire premise of this site is that a maker's claims get checked against the Japanese sources before we repeat them. Selling that premise for commission would leave us with nothing worth reading. So:

• Payment never buys a verdict. No commercial arrangement — affiliate, advertising, or otherwise — changes our assessment of a product.
• Commission never sets the order. When we compare products, a higher commission rate does not move anything up the page.
• Anything sponsored is labelled. If a piece is ever paid for or produced in partnership with a company, it will say so plainly, at the top, before you read it. We will not run paid material dressed as independent writing.
• No recommending what we have not checked. Claims about steel, origin, forging method, and manufacturer are verified against Japanese-language primary sources before they appear — including when the claim is flattering to a product we could earn from. See how we work.
• We say when we do not know. If a maker's claim cannot be confirmed, the article says so rather than smoothing it over.

Where you will see this

Affiliate links are disclosed on the page where they appear, near the links themselves — not only here. If an article contains affiliate links, it says so before you reach them.

Images and AI

Explanatory illustrations on this site may be generated with AI, and are labelled Illustration where they appear. We do not use AI-generated images to depict a real product, a real workshop, or a real person as though it were a photograph of that thing. Every claim is checked against primary sources before it is published.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have failed to live up to it, write to hello@wabisabimade.com. Corrections are welcome.