In February I will be going back to Japan for my tenth apprenticeship with a boatbuilder, continuing work I started in 1996. I will be building a cormorant fishing boat with the last builder of the Miyoshi region of Hiroshima Prefecture. I will have a documentary filmmaker with me and the goals of this project are to produce a book and film. My focus will be documenting the design secrets and techniques of building this boat. Read More …
Douglas has, since 1996, apprenticed under no fewer than nine Japanese master boat builders. While all the individual masters exhibited many similarities of craft, all of their particular boat types are significantly different in design and construction, as dictated by their particular uses in rivers, lakes, or oceans. What is most sobering is that, according to Douglas, all of these masters are well into their seventies and eighties without reliable apprentices to carry on their crafts, which have been centuries in the making. Read More …
Our July workshop was a great success. Led by Toby Hargreaves and Mia Norton, we had a full crew of 10 enthusiastic students. The team jumped right in and cut out a 20 foot by 15 foot frame with all hand tools including scribed log joinery, wedged through tenons, and 28 rafter scarf joints. Read More …
Mine has turned into a very unusual apprenticeship. When I returned in Spring of 2016, I thought I would be here for two years. My second year in, I realized I must stay on at least another three years to feel satisfied. It takes at least five years to gain solid competency around producing the right brown coat under any circumstances; that is, the layer before the thin finish, which must be applied as perfectly as the finish will be. And so, I found myself a visa – a three-year PhD program at Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT). Three days a week I train, three days a week I am at school. Read More …
by David Ballantine (adapted from The Wooden Post, vol 14, December 2019). Future of Mentoring: Read More …
Friday morning at 08:00…a small group of people meeting in a parking lot…who’d have guessed that we could possibly travel 150 miles in a loop around the entire San Francisco Bay in one short day…we all introduced ourselves, and I let them know the itinerary and what to expect. The day ended up being a revelation on the perseverance and persistence of early Japanese craftsmen. Read More …
The flurry of movement and the excitement of the competition usually hides something quite different which has been evolving over time and is far from center stage. Many of those who participated in the 2019 El Cerrito event probably saw the wide plane blade sitting on Sayuri’s sales table all day Saturday. What they didn’t know was that the buzz around that blade was centered on one man who had made the long journey to California to demonstrate his blacksmithing skills along with two other smiths. His journey actually started in his garage several years earlier when he decided to fool around with knives and Damascus steel. Read More …
Exploring the resilience of traditional Japanese structures. The question of what techniques were employed early-on to allow the evolution and systematic improvements to the joinery which eventually would resist jolts and winds, for tens of centuries. Read More …
Two travelers coming from Japan to share with us their experiences working on traditional buildings with traditional tools and materials. But that is not all they are involved with. There is a growing movement in Japan to push for recognition of the traditional building arts as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (of Humanity). That effort is outlined in the following interview conducted by Yann Giguère. Read More …
When the nation of Japan viewed the devastation and clean-up efforts after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, many people came to recognize the necessity to reduce non-recyclable content in construction. Nearly 100% of new construction materials could NOT be recycled. Whereas the traditional buildings, with tatami, wood and tile, could be quickly cleaned-up without environmental costs, the plastic and chemical remains of the modern construction needed to be carefully filtered and sequestered to protect the environment from becoming polluted with complex chemical residues which mix together producing unknown future effects. The cost of the clean-up after disasters like Earthquakes has become part of the conversation in Japan centering around how to bring about healthy sustainable environments. Read More …
