Tarai-bune: Sado's Tub-boat

In 2002, The Nippon Foundation sponsored a survey of Japan’s traditional boat builders, and found only 119 private builders around the country who could still work. While such surveys necessarily miss a few people here and there, such numbers were grim for the future of this traditional craft. Even worse was the average age: 65.

Tenmasen

The worst problem brought about by the aging of these men is that for hundreds of years the most crucial aspects of their trade were kept secret. Builders would take on disciples, who would perform menial tasks, but competition was so fierce that even these followers were not entrusted with the key nuggets of knowledge required to build boats. The situation was so extreme that without the accepted practice of nusumi geiko, or stolen learning, the younger generation would never have learned their trade.

Today, however, this tradition of secrecy has lead to a situation in which, as boat builders pass away, their knowledge vanishes permanently.

It would be untrue to say that Japanese people are apathetic about this; most aren't even aware of it. Those few academics and researchers who do care about preserving the history of Japan’s boats seem to be primarily interested in collecting data or at the most making lines drawings of old boats. Nothing is being done to collect the skills and preserve them.

Chokki Bune

In the survey mentioned above, one particularly interesting point was the result of the Tokyo survey. Of the 3 boat builders left in Tokyo, only one responded that he could still work. That one was American Douglas Brooks, who was at the time building a river boat there.

Brooks’ methods are work-intensive, as he is goes one-on-one with the old builders in their boat shops, helping them build what for many will be their last boat, and gleaning those valuable nuggets of information. He comments that, surprisingly, they have been only too glad to teach him their old secrets, painfully aware that they are the last of a centuries-old line.

Beka Bune

In the past, Douglas Brooks has travelled to such locations as Sado Island in the Japan Sea, becoming Japan’s last builder of tub-boats, to Northern Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, where he learned to build a hand-carved shimaihagi, and Tokyo, where in a temporary boat shed on the concrete in front of the Koto Ward Office, he recorded the construction methods used in putting together one of the chokki-bune that used to choke the waters of the Sumida River.

To date, he has built five boats with completely different construction methods:

Shimaihagi

This year, Brooks is back again, this time in the southern island of Okinawa, where he is learning to build a traditional sabani from one of the the last three men alive who can build using traditional materials. The craft will be an 8-meter vessel—one of the longer sabani, and will probably be the final sabani of its size that the builder will ever build. Though it is an inland craft and must therefore deal with the rigors of the sea, it is being built using, not nails, but wooden butterfly joints.

But all of the truly fascinating details of the construction of this ancient boat are best left to the words of the builder; readers are encouraged to visit Brooks’ blog of the build, accessible at the link below.

The Nippon Foundation is glad to support such an interesting project—one that not only aims to preserve a quickly vanishing tradition, but that is being conducted from the uniquely open and unbiased viewpoint that can only be brought by a foreigner with a deep love of boats.