Why is he doing this?

One evening, my boyfriend and I were perusing the YouTube Recommended section when we came across a channel called “kiwami japan,” and down we fell into the rabbit hole. Here is a creator who epitomizes the true spirit of YouTube, a place to post about whatever niche interest you want. I’ve since categorized this man as the greatest example of divergent thinking I can imagine.

After Guilford’s American Psychological Association address, the study of creativity shifted to a psychometric approach examining everyday people through easy-to-deliver tasks. One popular divergent thinking task, the Unusual Uses Test, asks participants to list all the uses for a particular object in a set amount of time. Researchers can then rate the participant’s creative ability based on the number of answers provided and the novelty of those answers (Sternberg et. al).

Now, imagine this Unusual Uses Test but in reverse. For example, how many objects can be used for the sole purpose of crafting a kitchen knife? Kiwami japan has taken it upon himself to answer this question to the best of his ability. He has devoted most of his YouTube channel to documenting his quest to turn almost everything under the sun into a chef’s knife. Wood? Plastic? Pasta? Jello? Rice? Cardboard? Chicken bone? Tofu? Potatoes? Yes. Kitchen knife. To the person sitting next to me on the train who may have glanced at my screen as I write, if you are reading this, I promise you I’m not a knife-obsessed weirdo for scrolling through the—she switched seats.

Because there is little to no known information about this man anywhere on the internet, we can only speculate about his creative process through interpreting his upload history. His YouTube career began with simple, albeit sort of creepy, videos about making cursed chocolate, latte art, and various tools. His first upload featuring the iconic thumbnail of him holding onto a knife is a relatively normal video about repairing and sharpening an old knife. This is where he really gets into his niche interest making and sharpening knives, and except for a few random videos about making other objects, he appears to be completely devoted to this craft. He seems to be entirely self-motivated in this pursuit. But why?

For the same reason that people like me watch these videos, I’m assuming—because why not. At the very least, self-motivation may have been a primary factor in his YouTube infancy. His most popular video now has 31 million views, with every other knife video consistently earning at least 3 million views. One viewer, Tori Holbrook, commented on his most recent video making a tofu knife, saying “this dude is a chemist, a chef, an engineer, a woodworker, a knifemaker, a video editor and a comedian. Genuinely how does one man do all this.” Comments like this, support from his growing 2.61M and counting subscriber-base, and the booming success of his videos has probably encouraged him to continue pushing the boundaries of what can possibly be made out of random objects. Kiwami japan has found a specialized niche to which he fully devotes himself, taking the Unusual Uses Test to the extreme. Instead of just thinking of possible knives, he finds ways to actually create them and then shares his findings with the internet. Is this talent useful? Maybe in the zombie apocalypse, but only time will tell. I would still classify him as a little-c creative individual for thinking up crazy products and interweaving multiple disciplines to bring his vision to life. If YouTube is his career, then he would be categorized as pro-c, but there is no information about him to verify this.

His videos have other weird quirks which I cannot even come close to understanding, so I will not attempt to explain his humor here. However, I would recommend watching at least one video to see what a late-night YouTube rabbit hole can lead to. Perhaps, if nothing else, it will inspire you to find your own unique passion and see it through to the bitter end.