A friends father was in Japan recently and I asked him to bring back some good Japanese knives with I then in turn gifted to my wife for her birthday last weekend. He picked the knives up from his favourite knife store, only thing is all the documentation, including the branding on the blades, is in Japanese (duh!!!). I was hoping to find out more about the knives and/or brand and was wondering if anyone could read and translate for me? Thanks!

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One of the ideograms appears to be a standing man, so maybe it's Japanese for "Old Timer". :-)
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It says "made in china" :-) j/k
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crap... one of the guys who worked for me read Japanese. He just moved. I'll send this link to him and ask him to decipher it once he get's settled in.
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:-) That was funny! :-)
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Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto?:-):-)
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I think the top part says, "Hattori Hanso" :-)
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I don't know Japanese, but I would like to see pictures of the whole knife though. Please.
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Waaa.....Sugoi!
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:-):-)
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Speaking Japanese wouldn't help you for this situation!!!
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What was it Maxwell Smart said... Missed it by that much?

I;ve got a college friend that has been teaching in Japan for the last 10 years that probably could help. However..... she and her husband just packed up to move back to US (Florida), and posted on facebook last week that they will be hard to contact for at least a month. If you don't have any answers in 30 days or so, maybe she will be back available, and I can contact her. Hopefully, you will have it figured out before then!!
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It's hard to say, my Japanese is very rusty, and Japanese characters often
have several pronunciations depending on the context. I did find several of
those characters in my kanji dictionary, but I couldn't make any sense of
them the way they're put together. In regard to the second picture, The first
four characters that appear in a square shaped formation are a mystery to
me. I'm pretty sure that the 2 large ones in the middle are the name of the
brand of knives, the region they're made or the smith himself, and the name
is probably pronounced Miyafumi, although the reading of the characters could
be something different like Kyubun or Kyumon. I'm pretty sure the last two
characters mean swordsmith or cutlery or something like that. So basically the
message on the knife is just "Miyafumi Knives," a simple brand marker.
That "Miyafumi" combination also appears in the first picture so they are
either made in the same region, or by the same company/person. I don't
think there's any kind of deep message on the blades, but if you're interested
in a more accurate reading of the brand name and a clarification of the
antecedent characters, you'll probably have to enlist the help of a literate
Japanese person:-)
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I think that it may say Ginsu Knife.:-)
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