The Last Boatbuilder (in production)
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For centuries, traditional wooden boats throughout Japan played an important role both commercially and culturally. And now, as the demand for these boats significantly declined, there is almost no active boatbuilder left. With that, the art of Japanese traditional wooden boatbuilding is also disappearing. An American boatbuilder, Douglas Brooks has become a vanguard of this tradition. Since 1990’s, he has traveled all across Japan, met numerous boatbuilders, and apprenticed with 9 master builders. Now he is the last boatbuilder of 7 different types of regional wooden boats.
For this project, Douglas is apprenticing with the last boatbuilder of a cormorant fishing boat in Miyoshi, Hiroshima. His goat is to learn, document, and share the knowledge for the future generations.
From Douglas Brooks
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why:
I have been invited by a Japanese boatbuilder, Mr. Tenkyou Hirofumi, the last builder of cormorant fishing boats in the Miyoshi, Hiroshima region, to apprentice with him in February. He is building his final boat and, familiar with my work documenting traditional Japanese boatbuilding, he has asked me to work alongside him and document the process before he retires. This is literally the last chance to record a craft, the techniques and dimensions of which reside only in one man's memory. I am being joined by a documentary filmmaker who wants to make a film about the project. We plan on producing drawings, a manuscript and video documentation of how these boats are built to ensure the survival of this craft tradition.
The Context:
In 1996 when I served my first apprenticeship with a Japanese boatbuilder, working alongside him in order to document his design secrets and techniques, the craft of boatbuilding was already in crisis. The last generation of boatbuilders, who had come of age in the wake of the Second World War, were elderly and most did not have apprentices. The craft, like most Japanese crafts, had traditionally been renewed by the ancient relationship of master and apprentice. In the early 2000s the Nippon Foundation conducted a nationwide survey of craftspeople capable of building wasen (traditional Japanese boats) and found 660 craftspeople. At the time of the survey, however, the average age of those listed was over seventy. My ongoing research has spanned the period since then, and I have seen first-hand the steady erosion of the craft.
The Background:
I have since 1996 apprenticed with a total of nine craftspeople from throughout Japan. My teachers were in their seventies and eighties when I worked with them. Even more significant: I am the sole apprentice for seven of my nine teachers. I have shared my research via articles, book chapters, books, and workshops. My work grows directly from my own background building traditional wooden boats for museums, municipalities and private individuals in the west. We speak of a wooden boat revival in Europe and North America, but this was fueled by a very different tradition of craft learning and curation. The apprentice system largely disappeared in the west, replaced in many places by boatbuilding schools and vocational programs. At the same time there has long been a rich tradition of documentation of western boats via drawings, books, and film. In Japan none of this existed. Where boatbuilders did create drawings, they were left intentionally incomplete to protect the craftsperson’s secrets. A significant number of boatbuilders worked, like Mr. Hirofumi, entirely from memory. The result is without a generation of apprentices all this knowledge will be lost. “In the nick of time” is an apt description of this research; I will be Mr. Hirofumi’s first apprentice, ironically, as he builds his final boat.
In-kind support is being provided by the City of Miyoshi Tourism Authority, which is purchasing the materials and paying Mr. Hirofumi a stipend for building the boat and teaching me.
Thank you for your support,
Douglas Brooks