As Aftermath’s resident hardware freak, my goal is to tell you about tools that I have bought and thoroughly enjoy. Sometimes, this process requires weeks of in depth testing and modification. Other times, it’s a pretty simple suggestion. Today is the latter: I love my NT Cutter cutting tool. It costs just over six dollars, is incredibly versatile, and I use it basically every single day. You should get one.
Of all the chain stores in Japan, the one I miss the most outside of combinis like Family Mart and Lawson is the DIY chain Hands, formerly known as Tokyu Hands. For Americans, imagine if Michaels, The Container Store and the now defunct Bed Bath and Beyond fused and was seven stories tall. Imagine a building full of all the tiny, beautiful tools needed to make hyper detailed Gunpla and model trains, do woodworking, and cook. The one in Shibuya has a map that looks like it came out of Metroid. I daydream about it sometimes.
I did not buy my NT Cutter at Hands, but going there does impress upon you how alienating and boring the experience of going into a category killer craft or hardware store can be in America. It also shows you, in case you could not guess, that Japan takes its knives and craft tools very seriously. This extends beyond kitchen knives to small pocket knives like kiridashi and razor blades. Japan takes this stuff so seriously that every time I look for a new tool I often add “Japanese” to the end the way people affix “reddit” to searches.
This is how I came across the much beloved NT Cutter and Olfa brands, the latter of which actually invented the iconic snap-off razor blade. Both OLFA and NT Cutter’s entry level items are quite cheap online, at around six dollars as of this writing. Both brands offer knives in a variety of colors and shapes. They both feature a notch at the end for snapping off the blade when it gets dull and a clip for fitting into a pocket. OLFA is well loved and you can’t go wrong either way, but I find the NT Cutter PRO AD-2P to be quite handsome with its distinctive red dot. I use mine every single day of my life and just ordered more because I lost mine somewhere; backups are so cheap that it’s basically a rounding error for me.
This does not take anything away from American utility knives. X-ACTO makes a bunch of great tools, and I hear good things about Lenox. And for precision work like model crafting, I know a bunch of people who don’t even mess around with utility knives and go straight for medical scalpels. But for a tiny everyday cutting, the knife I go back to the most is my NT Cutter. I love that little guy so much.
