The Festival

The Festival

I am working this summer building a 20-foot workboat as part of the Setouchi Festivale, an international art event centered on five islands near the city of Takamatsu, Japan.  My project takes place in the Takamatsu Port, where craftspersons are working at a variety of traditional arts.  There is a huge contingent of Bengali craftspeople, from metal workers to potters to boatbuilders.  

You can learn more about the Festivale here, and I will be keeping a special blog on my project, which is in English and Japanese.  I suspect this blog will have more text and information than that one:

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

Our project blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

A good friend of mine wrote a nice article about the art and the islands.

James Jack article:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2013/03/28/arts/unearthing-the-seto-inland-seas-social-landscapes/#.UahXEmQayc0

Japan: Preparing Lumber

My friend Koji Matano, founder of the Wooden Boat Center in Takashima, Japan, oversaw the felling and sawing of three cedar trees and one hinoki.  This is more than enough material for our boat, but we needed to sort the material and stack it for drying.

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

Our project blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

Koji had painted the endgrain with glue and roughly stacked it all before my arrival.  Japanese boatbuilders normally insist on one year of air drying of their timber.  We are pressed for time, and hope that by placing the stacks well off the ground on concrete blocks, plus the breezy location on the shore of Lake Biwa, that we will have dry enough material come July.  

Japanese boatbuilders use flitch-sawn material; that is, the log is sliced straight through.  Normally the keel timber is a thick plank taken from the center, and each pair of planks (garboard and sheer) are taken symmetrically from the log either side of the center.  Therefore I had to hunt through the pile, finding appropriate planks for each part, then finding their match for the opposite plank.  I labeled the the names of the parts on the stickers we nailed across the endgrain.

We worked sometimes during snow flurries.  Lake Biwa is Japan's largest lake, located right in the center of the country, 50 minutes by train from Kyoto.

Back in Japan, briefly.

I am back in Japan, doing some preparation work for a project I have here next summer.  I was accepted into the 2013 Setouchi Festivale, an art and craft exhibition taking place in the Seto Inland Sea region.  I will be building a traditional Japanese boat as a public demonstration in Takamatsu City.

The Festival has an excellent website and we have started a blog specifically for this project.  I will continue to post here as well as at our project blog.

Setouchi International Art Festival:

http://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/

our blog:

http://woodenboat.jp/setouchi/

I came over to measure a boat at the Seto Inland Sea Museum as well as to select the lumber I will use for the project.  My partner in this is Mr. Koji Matano, a former glass artist and now a builder of Western-style boats.  He is also the founder of the Wooden Boat Center in Takashima.  Mr. Takumi Suzuki, a canoe guide and builder of wood-canvas canoes, will be assisting me as my apprentice.

The Museum is Japan's oldest boat collection, and what we chose was a type called a tenmasen, or small cargo boat.  The museum has drawings and this detailed model of the type.  They also have a mockup of a full-size boat displayed in a boatshop setting, which we measured.  Later I will develop the lines full size (lofting), which is actually not a traditional Japanese method.

Some of the collection in the museum's main hall.  

On our way to Takamatsu we visited with the last boatbuilder of the region.  Tsuda san is a fourth generation boatbuilder I first met in 2003.  He had a remarkable career building all types of boats.  We had a nice visit and he eagerly showed us photographs of his boats, and gave us advice.

Our lumber, which was taken from two cedar trees in Tokushima Prefecture.  These planks are 23-feet long and some are nearly three feet wide at the butt.  We sorted and stacked the material for drying and I chose which planks will be used for particular parts of the boat.

A view of the Inland Sea.

Lofting Workshop

For a week in early January I taught a lofting workshop at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, a nine-month apprentice program in Pemaquid, Maine (http://www.carpentersboatshop.org/).  Eleven apprentices lofted a series of small boats over the course of the week, and also built half models.

We loft on paper, using a temporary table.  I find this much more convenient as I can store lofted boats by just rolling up the drawings, and working at table height is much more comfortable than on one's hands and knees.

We began by lofting a very simple flat-bottomed skiff, actually a boat that I had previously built with students in the Boat Shop’s summer class program.  The skiff gave students an introduction to the principles of laying out the lines of a boat full-size, along with a sense of how the three views lofted (profile, plan, and sections) work together to provide information on construction details such as mould shapes, bevels and the stem rabbet.

From the first boat we moved on to a round-bottomed boat, which featured waterlines, buttock lines and diagonals.  There, apprentices had to not only loft and fair the lines, but makes sure the lines in the three views reconciled with each other.  

By Wednesday midday it seemed like a good time for a break, so we turned to the shop and students cut lifts and glued up blanks for half models.  The models ranged from a Thai river boat (lines found on the internet) to the famous Herreshoff 12-1/2 sloop.

We finished the week lofting several more boats, hopefully two models that the Boat Shop may be building later this year.  It was great to see the apprentices really understand the process, one that I feel is essential to anyone wanting to learn traditional boatbuilding.  The ability to loft a boat opens many more resources for boatbuilders, and allows the builder to work out construction issues and pattern out many elements of a boat before building.  For more about lofting, visit this page at my website:  http://www.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/lines.html

Boats and Barrels - Japanese Coopering

2020 Note: This cooper is now retired but has been assisting younger coopers and clients make barrels. He is probably the person most knowledgable with the craft nation-wide, having done exhaustive study of the craft. A film was being produced about him which you can learn more about here: http://disappearingvillagefilm.com/tlc-home

See my other blog posts on coopering:
http://blog.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/2019/12/two-kyoto-bucket-makers.html
http://blog.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/2017/01/from-boats-to-barrels.html
http://blog.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/2017/07/the-bucket-maker.html
http://blog.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/2014/05/the-bucket-maker.html

In 1996, after studying with the last builder of the strangely wonderful taraibune or tub boats of Sado Island, I published my first book on that initial research.  Entitled The Tub Boats of Sado Island; A Japanese Craftsman's Methods, I often thought how it could have been entitled The Accidental Cooper.  As the name implies, tub boats are basically barrels, and building them encompasses all the techniques of traditional Japanese coopering.

http://www.douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com/taraibune.html

Luckily I would go on to study with other boatbuilders, building "normal" boats, but I did remain interested in coopering.  There are far fewer coopers left in Japan than even boatbuilders, and this past September I paid my second visit to what is now the last shop still building wooden sake barrels.  Located outside of Osaka in the city of Saki, I had visited once before.  The owner is an enthusiastic historian of barrel-making.

I've been wanting to find a magazine that would accept an article about this man and his craft, so on my most recent visit I spent several hours interviewing him.  If I ever do publish anything I will be sure to blog out it here.....


Three of the workers were putting new braided bamboo hoops on a typical sake barrel.  These are eight feet tall.  The barrels themselves last up to fifty years, but the hoops need replacing every five to ten years.

The man on the left is 86 years old and has been with the company since he was 16.

 Classic patterns used by barrel makers (and tub boat builders).  If you hold the notch of the pattern against the staves, it gives you the curvature of the outside of the stave and the proper bevel for the edge.  The outer edge of the pattern is cut to the curvature of the inner face of the stave.

 Braided bamboo hoops.  This is the most difficult part of barrel making.  The material has to be properly chosen, harvested, split, shaped then braided into hoops.  They have to be sized exactly to fit the barrel.  All this is described in my book, by the way.

I thought this was a nice portrait of the owner of the firm.

The heart side of the wood faces the liquid.  In the case of tub boats the heart side faces out.  Same rule; the liquid is just on the outside of the container.

One of the workmen braiding a hoop.  He starts with four strips of bamboo about 50-feet long.

The firm's owner has been saving old barrel parts.  These are sections of the bottoms of barrels, with writing on their edges.  He's found all kinds of information recorded on plank edges, including date and location of construction, price, owner and even wages.

Japan: September, 2012

I was invited to Japan this September to speak on rural cultural preservation at a conference in Kameoka, a small city outside of Kyoto.  My hosts were the Hozugawa Kudari (Hozu River Tour Boats) and Kyoto Gakuen University.

My first day in Kameoka I attended an all-day workshop on the Hozu River.  The boatmen of the tour boat company have formed a volunteer group to revive the craft of ikada, or log rafts.  These were built to transport logs down the white water Hozu River and deliver materials to Kyoto.

Photo courtesy Ikada Preservation Group

The group managed to find two men who had first-person knowledge of how these rafts were made and, more importantly, had the skills to navigate rafts downriver.  The ikada group spent the morning making three log rafts and teaching students and other visitors.

The afternoon was spent running a short stretch of river with children on board.  The group has run the full length of the river, and the video footage of their efforts is stunning.

UPCOMING LECTURES

I have several speaking engagements coming up.  I will be talking about my work in Japan at the Norwich Public Library in Norwich, Vermont on March 22nd; the South Hero, Vermont public Library April 18th; and then speaking at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine May 10th.  I've also been invited to speak at the University of Vermont to the Japanese Department (open to the public) sometime later in the semester.  I will keep this blog posted, or contact me via my website.

Organizations in Vermont, such as libraries and schools, can apply to the Vermont Humanities Council Speakers Bureau Series to have me come and lecture.  The VHC will fund an honorarium.

Thanks,

Douglas