Sushi / sashimi knives

All of the following are generally cooked items:

• Shrimp, ebi, available raw in sashimi, but almost always lightly poached. The poaching brings out sweet and subtle flavors otherwise masked by a metallic tang. It also prevents the highly perishable shrimp from losing texture to spoilage.

• Octopus, tako, available raw in sashimi when sliced very thinly, but otherwise poached lightly. The poaching reduces toughness and brings out additional flavors in an otherwise bland meat.

• Eel, unagi, as you noted, is ALWAYS grilled, and steamed. This is necessary to achieve the truly transcendent flavor and texture of unagi. In fact, the cooking of eel is such a challenge that it is generally a whole separate chef profession in Japan. Most eel comes from one of the professionals, because sushi cooks know they will never be able to match the quality themselves. Improperly cooked eel becomes tough and has unpleasant flavors. Raw, the blood of eels is even toxic!

• Sweet egg omelet, tamago, is by definition cooked. This is not to say that raw egg doesn't have a place in Japanese food though; tamago kake gohan is a dish of raw egg on rice, with soy sauce.

• Cockle is lightly poached

• Crab, kani is always cooked because... well eating raw crab meat is just vile.

For further reading, I highly suggest the online sushi encyclopedia.

Food Safety:

Sushi is only prepared from the very freshest and highest quality seafood, and sushi chefs are trained to identify parasites and signs of spoilage. In addition, some areas (including the EU) require sushi to be frozen for 24 hours to kill parasites.

If that wasn't enough to help settle your stomach, the pickled ginger and wasabi served along with sushi are more than garnish or simple condiments! Both ginger and wasabi have potent and documented anti-microbial and anti-parasite properties. Ginger is also well-known for combatting nausea. Source: the CRC Handbook of Medicinal Spices, page 310 for wasabi and 316 for ginger. (links are to Google Books copy).

Okay, I'm going to partially answer the initial question / title, as the pairing really isn't what knife for what food, but what knife for what type of cutting. And I say partially answer, as there are a lot of types of knives ... I'm only going to list the more common knives, as the japanese have a whole lot of specialty knives.

This is only the tip of the iceburg. I'm making this answer community wiki, if people want to add knives, or details of anything I listed. (although, if you want to organize it by use (eg, chopping/slicing/paring/etc, it might be better to move that to a separate answer, or this is going to get way too long)

• Chef's knife -- has a large-ish blade (generally 8" or longer, ~2" high near the bolster), with a convex curve that's more dramatic near the tip. Its characteristic use is to keep the tip on the cutting board, and rock the handle down (preferably using the weight of the blade) to slice through things.

• Paring knife -- a smaller knife (~3-4" long), used for paring. (cutting in the hand; peeling, stuff that doesn't require a cutting board). The blade may be concave (bird's beak), straight (sheep's foot) or convex (spear point).

• Slicer -- a long (~10" or longer), straight, thin knife, used for slicing large items (eg, meats)

• Bread knife -- a long (~8"+) serrated knife, used for slicing bread.

• Boning / Fillet knife -- a thin, flexible blade, used for cutting between joints and stripping meat from carcasses.

• Meat cleaver -- a thick, wide (often 4"+ tall) knife, used for hacking through bones or frozen items.

• Vegetable cleaver / Chinese cleaver : a sharp, thin, smaller cleaver, used for delicate work that should never be used for cutting through bones.

• Santoku -- cleaver-like in a design, but has a slight convex blade and closer in scale to a small chef's knife (5 to 7" long, about 1.5" tall). Good for general use.

• Utility knife / tomato knife -- mid-sized (~5-6" long), serated knife. Good for when you need a small serated knife, such as um ... tomatoes. And works pretty well for cutting medium firm cheeses.

• Cheese knives -- um ... see this answer on cheese cutting

• Steak knives -- mid-sized knives to be used at the dinner table, that are either very, very sharp, or serated.

• Table / dinner knife -- the basic sort of knife as part of a table setting

• Butter knife -- a short, dull knife, possibly offset, used for spreading butter or things of a similar consistency.

And not knives, but related:

• Kitchen shears -- look like your general run-of-the-mill scissors, although the good ones come apart so they can be cleaned easily.

• Poultry shears -- heavier duty, often spring loaded ... look more like pruning sheers (that you'd just for trimming down a rose bush). They have a notch in one of the blades near the pivot point so that you can cut through a bone without it slipping. Ideal for cutting the backbone out of a chicken.

• Bench knife / scraper -- a wide, dull piece of metal with a handle along one edge. It's used for dividing dough, scraping down your work surface (bench), but can also be used to scoop up stuff to transfer to another location (eg, dump in a pot)

• Pizza cutter -- a circular blade attached to some sort of a handle (which might be more like a shroud). Can be used for lots more than just pizza, though. Great for cutting thin, but large objects. (eg, cutting breadsticks, trimming filo, puff pastry or other rolled out dough, etc.)

• Vegetable peeler -- a handle with a swiveling sort of blade on it, but where the cutting edge is along a slit in the middle. You have standard peelers, and 'Y' peelers. Normally smooth blades, but may be serrated. Good for peeling the skin off items, cutting vegetables into ribbons, or shaving chocolate.

• Mandoline -- a blade fixed on a planar surface. Used to make thin slices of a consistent thickness by moving the food against the blade.