The Last Boatbuilder (We’re fundraising! )
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The Last Boatbuilder is Chikara Motomura’s latest feature-length documentary project. The idea came to Chikara when he read about an American boatbuilder, Douglas Brooks in Wooden Boat Magazine. Douglas has dedicated his life to preserving the disappearing tradition of Japanese wooden boat building. The film will capture Douglas apprenticing with one of the last boatbuilders in Japan.
For centuries, traditional wooden boats throughout Japan have played an important role both commercially and culturally. And now, as the demand for these boats has 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 1990s, he has traveled all across Japan, meeting numerous boatbuilders, and apprenticing 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 goal is to learn, document, and share the knowledge for the future generations.
Background:
In 2025 Mr. Hirofumi Tenkyou, a boatbuilder in Japan asked Douglas Brooks to document his design and techniques as he built an ukaibune, or cormorant fishing boat, in Miyoshi, Hiroshima. Fishing with cormorants in Miyoshi has a 450 year history, and for more than one hundred years its has been done seasonally for tourists. Brooks has spent the last thirty years apprenticing with boatbuilders in Japan to document their work. The project with Tenkyou san was his tenth. Brooks is the sole apprentice for seven of his teachers. This last generation of boatbuilders, who had come of age in the wake of the Second World War, were elderly and most never had apprentices. Boatbuilding, like most Japanese crafts, had traditionally been renewed by the ancient relationship of master and apprentice. Little or no information was ever recorded. Tenkyou san uses no drawings, instead he works from memory, aided by a few patterns. This is common among Japanese boatbuilders, but it points to the crucial need to record these techniques before they are lost.
The Project To Date:
In February, 2026, boatbuilder and researcher Douglas Brooks and documentary filmmaker Chikara Motomura traveled to Miyoshi, Hiroshima, Japan. Over the course of several weeks they built a thirty-foot cormorant fishing boat together. They were helped at times by several Japanese carpenters. Brooks recorded all of the dimensions Tenkyou san used in laying down the lines of the boat, as well as his specialized techniques, including some Brooks had never seen before in his research. He also took hundreds of photographs, and measured two historic boats: one a traditional cargo carrying vessel and the other a small fishing boat. Motomura filmed the entire process and the launching ceremony, including video interviews, for his documentary. Please enjoy the video highlights he has created for this site.
What’s Next:
Brooks will begin working on detailed drawings of the boat as well as a book manuscript, slated for publication by Floating World Editions. Motomura will shoot additional footage in Japan and the US and edit a documentary film. We hope to raise additional funds so Brooks’ manuscript can be translated into Japanese and his book published in both English and Japanese, and Motomura can finish editing the film. We will continue to seek grant funding in the US and Japan, and we welcome additional donations.