by David Ballantine (adapted from The Wooden Post, vol 16, June 2020)
When Douglas Brooks comes to the West Coast to teach a class in Japanese boat building, as he says he would like to, I will be the first one to sign up. Pedagogy and boat building are both acquired skills, and Douglas is more than adept at both. In a recent Kezuroukai-USA online event, Japanese Boat Building, Tools and Techniques, Douglas demonstrated the art of Japanese boat building with such acumen and generosity of spirit that it was not a stretch to discern that he has taught, in addition to constructing boats of all sizes and shapes, for quite some time.
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.
Douglas held the online class from the shop at his home, where he is often engaged in building custom boats for individuals when he is not running workshops across the country or teaching at Middlebury College near his home in Vermont. As we checked in, he was milling about the shop, putting two large planks on low supports and arranging several long 2x2s on either side of the planks. As would be expected in any sort of Japanese joinery, new boats are never caulked. What is surprising, however, is that the bottom (made by the two thick plank boards) are only butt jointed and nailed. The first third or so of the presentation had Douglas demonstrating the ingenuity of saw-fitting between the planks. They had been gently wedged together with the 2x2s running at an angle from the low-hanging beams to the top of the planks. Much like a plane takes down the high points on a board surface, this sawing between the plank edges takes down the edge high points that keep the planks apart, in essence planing both edges simultaneously until there are no gaps.
One of four Edo-era replica sailing ships built over a twenty-year period by one man. His last ship was launched in 2006. His crew of fifteen men built a 100-foot, 100-ton vessel in eleven months. Average age of the shipwrights in 2006 was 69.
The planks are thick in part because there is no internal framing, as with Western style boat building. They are edge-nailed with large fastenings that are hand-made of flat steel stock. A beveled mortise is chiseled out to guide the slightly bent nail into the opposing plank. The nailhead is then driven deep into the mortise, past the surface of the boat bottom. A wood tenon is wedged into the angled mortise to seal the nail from moisture. The thickness of planks makes bending the boats’ sides challenging as well, which is why Japanese wooden boat builders generally build a boat from one tree. The planks for the sides of the boat mirror their position from the center of the tree when it is milled. The idea is that if you are bending the sides of your boat, it makes sense to have the opposing sides be comprised of very similar tensions.
As is to be expected, there is much more to it than that. While sharing a few of the finer details with us, Douglas used his fluency in the Japanese language to approximate meanings of words that often don’t have direct translations. The level of information given in the class is difficult to describe. Douglas’ expertise comes from a lifetime of boat building craft, of which Japanese wooden boats are only a part. One gets the impression that if you took the class a second time, you would undoubtedly glean substantially more from this man, who has become a priceless fount of disappearing knowledge.
Douglas actually started his career in boatbuilding in 1980 as a college student in the Williams Mystic Maritime Studies program at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. There he was able to work under the tutelage of renowned boat builder/writer, Willits Ansel. It might be safe to say that the relationship was auspicious. Much like Willits Ansel before him, Douglas has pursued his life-broadening boat building experiences to the point that the most logical thing to do is to teach and write about them. His most recent work, Japanese Wooden Boat Building, gives the reader insight into the intimate relationships he has formed in Japan. You can find him, and purchase his book, via his website: DouglasBrooksBoatBuilding.com