Which detail best shapes the central idea that the Japanese art of boat building is taught using unconventional learning methods? School of Hard Knots
by Alex Hanson
The typical apprenticeship with a Japanese traditional boatbuilder lasts six years, during which an apprentice can expect to spend a lot of
time sweeping the shop floor and sharpening tools while watching the master ply his trade. Work is conducted in silence, questions are
answered elliptically, if at all, and, by the end, the master will have withheld key pleces of knowledge that the apprentice is expected to acquire
through guile or outright theft.
Even in Japan, where traditional crafts are revered, this system is too grueling, too much at odds with modern life, to survive. It is no
wonder, then, that as a generation of Japanese boatwrights has retired, their knowledge has retired with them. Vermont boatbuilder
Douglas Brooks is trying to ensure that the centuries-old designs for fishing boats and water taxis don't follow these craftsmen to the grave.
For more than two decades, Brooks has researched traditional boatmaking in Japan, and has done short, nontraditional apprenticeships to
record boat designs. Ordinarily, no Westerner would have a hope of learning in a few weeks what usually takes years of patient observation to
acquire
"They're willing to teach me because they realize what's about to be lost," Brooks says.
The challenge of preserving this art is largely pedagogical, and that's the subject of "Ways of Learning." a slide talk Brooks gives through the
Vermont Humanities Council's speakers bureau. Through his talk, Brooks has stimulated a debate about how traditional crafts are handed down.
His American audiences expect collegiality and dialogue between student and teacher and are often shocked to hear about the Japanese
method
"Japanese craftspeople do not teach in a way that's familiar to us as Westerners," Brooks says. In part, that's because the apprentice is meant
to develop a set of values as well as a set of skills. They must learn how to observe, and they must learn patience and cunning.
of the five masters Brooks has learned from, only two had drawings of their boat designs, and even those were incomplete. Unless an
apprentice was the master's son, he could expect to have to steal essential pieces of knowledge from the master, either by sneaking into the
shop to take measurements or by some other subterfuge. One master told Brooks of how he had plied his own master with sake to unlock his
secrets
When Brooks learned to braid the hoops that hold together a taraibune, the traditional tub boat still used for gathering shellfish and seaweed
off Japan's Sado Island, his teacher, then the last man still making the boats, gave him the long bamboo strands and walked away.
"I remember the hairs going up on the back of my neck when my teacher dropped those strips in my lap and said 'braid." Brooks savs. It was