That doesn’t really make sense. Stainless steel is by definition any steel alloy that contains 10.5% or above chromium. Are you implying that stainless steel can be made without iron? Because that wouldn’t be steel at all and wouldn’t be likely to have any of the properties your looking for. Or that it can be made from iron without the addition of carbon, which again violates the definition of steel, and would likely give you something that behaves more like cast or wrought iron rather than steel.
Also in terms of blade hardness Japanese kitchen knives at above 60 Rockwell aren’t exactly uncommon, they’re brittle sure but they’re all over the place. Shun, one of the biggest brands of Japanese cutlery in the west hardens its blades to between 60 and 62.
But otherwise yeah. These don’t look particularly well made. And the shapes look down right awful for use as kitchen knives. There looks to be some color variance along the handles that looks like color change from heat treating. But its just as likely to be work hardening. Marketing them as pencil sharpeners makes sense. They look to be made in the same way as a lot of the bargain basement traditional Japanese construction and wood working knives I see in tool catalogs all the time. That sort of thing is not really intended to be a precision tool or particularly well made, they’re cheap traditional tools for hard use in limited circumstance. These are just cutesy display items (most likely).
