That's a beautiful combination of materials, Ben: subtle, culturally relevant, and aesthetically appealing. I love the ray-skin, but Warthog leather is a nice change. The animal itself is era & area appropriate, with a mythical association in the various Buddhist Taoist, and Shinto philosophies; the leather looks great, and the menuki emphasizes the formula for blending ancient and modern that Tendick knives do perfectly and tastefully.
Ironically, there's a good reason for the increased supply and lower prices in Warthog leather, and it's crazy-ish:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/11/thousands-of-radioactive-boars-are-overrunning-farmland-in-fukushima/?utm_term=.ccd5df640f33
In the radioactive wasteland that has followed the 2011 Fukushima earth-quake<tsunami<
nuclear meltdown. Various species of wildlife have moved in to the once beautiful, now irradiated sections of Fukujima... even without the city-sized concrete mausoleum that buried the highest concentrations of radioactive materials in Chernobyl. Tens of thousands of Warthogs have taken over the deserted towns and farms, because they're RADIATION PROOF.
Incredibly, they appear to be unharmed by levels of radiation that would turn humans into a bloody slush, as gamma rays punch holes in the GCAT bonds of our DNA, and rewrite our genetic recipe.
Like the Wolves of Chernobyl, now Japan has the Wart-Hogs of Fukushima. In just 7 years, they have over-run Fukushima as real-life Kaiju Alpha-Beasts. The 18 000 people who died in the tragedy is terrible, and so is the large chunk of permanently unlivable coastline in a beautiful-but-overpopulated nation. But it's a cool story; it WILL be the basis for a bad horror movie within a year.
A cull was added to the 180-billion dollar clean-up. Even hunting the accessible periphery, hunters in HAZMAT found and killed 14 000 of these Boars, and that's just a fraction of the population that has exploded in just 6 short years.
The meat is wasted, obviously. But after running a Geiger-counter over it, the leather makes for great material, salvaging something positive from an ugly situation. Your leather might not come from Fukushima, but the huge influx of Boar-leather on the market no doubt lowered prices across the board. If that Warthog leather came from one of the Radioactive Warthogs of Fukushima, I'd advertise the fact. If you're lucky enough to get a slightly irradiated batch, the sheaths might glow in the dark.
:thumbup:
[video=youtube;qo3GgQzlrQQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo3GgQzlrQQ[/video]
