Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Building a traditional Japanese boat

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Eighteen students in bright blue happi coats gather around a 21-foot traditional Japanese riverboat sitting on the bank of the pond at Japan House at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The narrow, light-colored boat is a simple structure made of thick pine planks. Used primarily for fishing, its low sides curve gracefully toward the ends, which are squared off and slope toward the boat’s bottom.

Photo of Douglas Brooks holding up a piece of wood and a T-square.

Douglas Brooks apprenticed with nine Japanese master boatbuilders to learn their traditional techniques, and he is preserving the craft and the traditional teaching methods. He said most of the craftsmen he worked with had not had other apprentices, leaving no one to pass on their traditions.

The students built this boat over the course of a week, guided by Douglas Brooks, a Vermont-based boatbuilder who specializes in traditional Japanese boats. Now they are ready to launch it. But first, Brooks leads them in a Shinto launching ceremony.

He waves streamers of cut paper over the students and the boat, representing purification. Each student takes a turn throwing a pinch of salt into the boat, striking sparks from a flint and sprinkling sake over an end of the boat. Then each places a sprig of leaves on a small altar, bows and claps their hands twice.

As the students perform the ceremony, Brooks places items in a small cavity chiseled into the boat’s center beam. With the addition of the objects, the cavity becomes a permanent Shinto shrine.

Photo of hand saws and other tools.

The students used Japanese boatbuilding tools for their work. The traditional tools include hand saws designed for use while standing over the wood for efficiently creating watertight, fitted seams. Sharpening the tools on water stones is itself an art form demanding precision and technique.

At last, it’s time for the boat to be launched. The students lift it and place it in the water, and several step into the boat in stocking feet. They push off from the shore to the applause of spectators. As they float onto the pond, one student says the boat might be leaking, before another reassures everyone that the liquid in the boat is just the sake.

Brooks built replicas of historic Western boats before becoming intrigued by Japanese boatbuilding. He apprenticed with nine boatbuilders in Japan to learn the traditional techniques for building more than a dozen types of Japanese boats. He teaches those techniques now and has written several books, including the first comprehensive survey of the craft written in any language.

Japan House education associate Diana Liao learned about Brooks and saw a boat he built for the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford. She applied for a grant to bring Brooks to Japan House for a weeklong artist residency, and she worked with him to develop the boatbuilding apprenticeship class.

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Before they began working on the boat, the students spent seven weeks reading about Japanese boatbuilding and the apprenticeship system, and writing reflections.

Photo of students working along a plank of wood with hammers and chisels.

Working as a team, students construct the thick structural planks that will form the boat. Unlike Western boat construction, where a thin frame is fastened to a robust framework to provide structural strength, a traditional Japanese boat gains its strength from the thick planks of wood that are bonded together to form one solid structure.

Contrary to Western boatbuilding tradition, most Japanese builders don’t record drawings or otherwise document their processes, which are individual to each boatbuilder and committed to memory. The craft is transmitted through an apprenticeship system that is deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Brooks was the only apprentice for most of his elderly teachers, and he has preserved their craft only by learning it through apprenticeships.

The students worked with traditional Japanese boatbuilding hand tools, including chisels and saws, and one of the first things they learned was how to keep the tools sharp – an important responsibility of apprentices in Japan. Brooks showed them how to slide their chisels along a flat, reddish Japanese water stone and where to apply the pressure to avoid rounding off the edges.

In Japan, the craftsmen don’t teach by telling their students what to do. The students observe in silence for weeks or months as they sweep floors and sharpen tools, before being asked to do a boatbuilding task. They are responsible for their own learning through observation, and when they finally are told to pick up a tool to work with, they are expected to perform the task perfectly, Brooks said.

Photo with a pile of wood shavings in the foreground and a student using a hand plane on a piece of wood.

Wood shavings pile up as students shape and smooth a single heavy oar with a hand plane.

“It is not an efficient way to teach, but the apprenticeship is a values-based approach to education that believes the student must first hone their powers of observation, along with obedience and humility, before any practical training can occur,” he said.

When he teaches over a longer term, Brooks incorporates this traditional style of learning, enforcing a completely silent workshop. But with only a week to build the Japan House boat, he offered more verbal instruction.

Matt Bridges, a graduate student in education and an amateur carpenter, enrolled in the class because he was interested in the teaching process.

“He has some really interesting ideas about how to go about teaching this to someone who doesn’t know anything. And I spend so much time in the library, it’s nice to work with my hands,” Bridges said. “It’s not a mastery (of skills) but we got a whiff of building something that is interesting, beautiful and practical.”

The students built the boat at the Siebel Center for Design. They assembled the bottom and sides of the boat by placing two thick pine planks together and using a saw-fitting technique to ensure a watertight fit. Brooks demonstrated how to use a hand saw to cut along the seam between the boards. The alternating teeth on the saw make a parallel cut so the boards fit together perfectly.

Photo of a student lying in a wooden boat and signing the underside of a beam.

Before launching, each of the boat builders signs the underside of the boat’s center beam. During the ceremony, symbolic objects are sealed inside the beam to create a permanent Shinto shrine within the boat. The objects included a lock of hair, handmade dice, a paper crane and two paper dolls emblazoned with an Illini “I.”

Two-by-twos braced between the planks and an overhead frame held the planks in place. Two students worked from the center to the ends of the seam, and when they finished a cut, another student tapped the boards together with a hammer. Then the sawing resumed.

Photo of Jennifer Gunji-Ballsrud and Douglas Brooks laughing near a pond.

Japan House director Jennifer Gunji-Ballsrud introduces Douglas Brooks at the boat launch, before the Shinto ceremony begins.

When the saw fitting was finished and the planks were edge-nailed together, the sides were lifted up and clamped in place. The boat nails were copies of those used in Japan, made by a Vermont blacksmith. The students then began the saw fitting where the sides and the boat’s bottom met.

While some of the students worked on saw fitting, others used a hand plane to shape the boat’s oar.

Kyoko Sawada, a master’s student in East Asian languages and cultures and a teaching assistant for Japanese language classes, took the class to learn about this part of Japanese culture. Sawada was excited to get a traditional, hands-on experience, they said.

Photo of students climbing into a wooden boat as it is set to launch.

With some unsteady sea legs, the boatbuilders climb into their creation for the first time on the water. Eventually, up to seven people take their seat before launch.

Arielle Pfeil, a senior in mechanical engineering, has done some woodworking in engineering classes, but the boatbuilding techniques had more of an artistic aspect and Brooks showed the class the fine techniques for finishing touches, she said. 

Photo of students in bright blue happi coats cheering on the shore of a pond.

As some of the students embark on the maiden voyage, the rest of the boatbuilders cheer on their classmates. Japan House education associate Diana Liao made the bright blue happi coats, which are traditionally worn for festivals, for the class to wear at the launching ceremony.

The final step was adding a few beams to the inside of the boat.

“Western boats are typically constructed of a relatively thin layer of planking fastened to a fairly robust framework. In Japan, there’s little to no framing inside the boat. The boats are composed of very thick planking compared with Western boats of the same length. Their strength is in the outer shell of the structure,” Brooks said.

At the Japan House pond, the students take turns in the boat as Brooks rows. Spectators applaud each time a new group pushes off from shore, and the students wave as they glide across the water.

Editor’s notes: The boat that the students built will be for sale and the proceeds will support Japan House programming. Anyone interested in the boat can contact Japan House at japanhouse@illinois.edu. More information about Douglas Brooks is available online.

The Japan House boatbuilding class was supported by the Arts Midwest Grow, Invest, Gather Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional contributions from Japan House.

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