Professional grade shiro suita with loads of red renge.
 
This is a super fine and fast cutting finishing stone that will handle a host of tool steels. I test my stone with straight razors, knives and hand made bi-metal kanna blades. When honing a vintage 1950s-60s Japanese Kikuhide straight razor this stone easily and quickly removed the  Rockwell 60 steel creating a barber smooth shave. When honinng a classic 1890s Wade & Butcher razor the steel was removed even quicker, leaving a  HHT (hanging hair test) keen edge in the HHT (hanging hair test) range of 4. A good shave by most standards. This is a versitle stone that will sharpen and polish especially  many steel including boutique crucible, high carbon, wrought and tempered iron.
 
The sides and ends of this stone display a saw pattern that represents the use of the same 2-man (chip) handsaws used for the previous 7 centuries on up into about 1910-1920 . After this all stones were cut, sized and trimed with power driven circular table saws. 
 
Light, colorful with renge suita stones tend to be softer than dark monocromatic stone. This is true and I rate this stone as a Mohs 3.
 
The size of this stone allows it to fall into the size grade of 25, an archanic grading scale base on how many pieces of roughly trimed stone, of that grade, can an average stone-porter manage to carry for the sometimes up, and the down routs of the Kyoto mountain diggins to the workshops below in the valley.