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The Specialist

By June Thomas
Posted Friday, Jan. 30, 2009, at 7:05 AM ET

Master brush-maker Yoshio Tanabe spent the first 10 minutes of our acquaintance explaining why the appointment was futile: His knowledge of brushes, calligraphy, and the properties and characteristics of animal hair was vast, and my capacity for understanding was small. It was hard to argue—what could I possibly comprehend of his craft when I can't write a single Japanese character?—but he relented when I brought out a dog-eared photocopy of the chapter in Edo Craftsmen that profiled the family business and featured many shots of his photogenic father, Matsuzo. I was a fan! Besides, he'd just finished up a batch of brushes, so he had some time on his hands, and Tanabe Bunkaido, his little shop in the Nezu district of Tokyo, was empty. So, why not?

Later, I realized that reluctance was a family tradition. The only touch of color on the calligraphy-filled shop walls came from a vomit of primary colors in a small painting by Joan Miró. Apparently, the Catalan artist once came to the store while Yoshio's father was still alive, asking for brushes. Matsuzo initially refused the sale. His brushes were intended for calligraphy, not painting; what's more, he had intended to pass them on to Yoshio rather than sell them. But like his son the hesitant interview subject, he eventually relented, and Miró left the store with a parcel under his arm. (Yoshio speaks unsentimentally about his father, but he keeps a whole cabinet full of his dad's brushes in the store. At this point, they're probably too old to sell, but from the way he caressed them as he demonstrated their qualities, they're clearly among his most prized possessions.)

Yoshio Tanabe is such an imposing man—broad-shouldered and strong—that it's hard to imagine him spending half a century selecting, separating, and combing animal hairs, but that has been his life. He's a talkative, gregarious guy—after his initial show of playing hard to get, he spent two and a half hours answering questions and demonstrating his skills—and yet since his father died 20 years ago, he has worked alone in a small workshop behind the display cases, getting to his feet only for lunch or the bathroom. "When I was younger, I wondered why I had to do this," he admitted, indicating the cramped quarters.

To my Western way of thinking, "guilt" is the explanation. Matsuzo Tanabe, whose only schooling after the age of 7 had been his brush-making apprenticeship, pushed his son into the family business. Yoshio's rebellion was to insist that he be allowed to graduate from college before he moved into the workshop, but once installed, he never left. Nothing has changed in his five decades of brush-making. Is he bored, I asked. "Yes," he answered flatly, though he didn't seem to consider that such a terrible fate.

So, what is the reward? The accumulation of knowledge and the satisfaction of creation: "Making a brush is like calligraphy itself. When you really look at it, you can see the skill and all the work that's gone into it." And, of course, praise from the cognoscenti. "When a calligrapher says to me, 'Good brush!' I am satisfied."

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1138353315?bclid=1149097313&bctid=8870921001

Tanabe's wares are expensive. The cheapest thing he makes himself is a beginner's calligraphy brush of horse and sheep hair that retails for $60. (He also sells brushes made by former students of his father's.) The softer and rarer the hair, the more expensive the brush—and the greater the skill needed to wield it. One of the priciest pieces in the store is a $22,000 brush made by Matsuzo Tanabe from black Japanese horsehair; it took years just to collect the long, soft hairs it required. It seems churlish to wonder if art supplies are worth thousands of dollars; it's like asking if anyone needs a Patek Philippe when a Timex tells the time just as well. Nevertheless, a $1,000 brush wouldn't improve my kanji, and there can't be many calligraphers whose skills could cause a significant reduction in Tanabe Bunkaido's inventory.

Among the thousands of brushes displayed in the store are a few with ivory handles. Tanabe is slightly embarrassed by them—they're old, he stresses, not for sale—but where better for an endangered material than an endangered store? There's no doubting Tanabe's skill as a brush-maker, but it's hardly a growth industry. During our long visit, no one so much as looked in the store window, much less came inside. Computers and competition are killing calligraphy—these days, people print out labels rather than address New Year's cards by hand, and the private calligraphy schools that once taught Japanese youngsters the arcane arts of lettering have been replaced by cram schools where kids study for Japan's university entrance exams. Calligraphy schools have gone the way of abacus schools; they're no longer needed.

Perhaps that's why Tanabe seems sincerely unsentimental about the fate of the family business. Although it's hard to believe, he's 71. He has no children, and he never took on an apprentice. When he can no longer work, it will all come to an end. We guests—including interpreter Michiyo—exclaim how sad this is. Tanabe-san simply smiles. It's just how it is.

In the end, I'm not sure how much I learned about work from my visits with these men. I already knew how lucky I was. For all the talk of Japanese respect for tradition, the proud craftsmen seemed all but abandoned. But there was something positive about their isolation: the silence. My vacation was blissfully peaceful. I didn't watch any television while I was in Japan; since I couldn't understand the words, the noise felt offensive and clamorous. One Sunday afternoon, I even found myself kneeling in a teahouse, pondering a scroll. My host explained that the calligraphy described the sound of the wind moving through trees. Outside, it was quiet enough to hear the breeze.

The final entry in the series is a visit with master brush-maker Yoshio Tanabe: http://www.slate.com/id/2209693/entry/2209879/

Not a Costume

By June Thomas Posted Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009, at 10:54 AM ET

When I was a child, the entire family would gather at my grandmother's house for two annual occasions: Boxing Day dinner and the Miss World pageant. For the latter, we'd all study the form conveniently provided by that morning's paper, then gather around the television to cheer our favorites and wager on the winner. My strategy was simple: I always favored Miss USA. One year, though, the organizers insisted that all the contestants get into the spirit of the "national costume" segment of the show. You see, while Miss India sported a sari and Miss Japan shuffled onstage in a kimono, the Brits and the Americans usually wore some variation on business casual involving miniskirts and go-go boots. That year, their outfit had to reflect national tradition. I've managed to block whatever culturally inappropriate outfit the American wardrobe department came up with, but Miss United Kingdom's rendition of a beefeater is forever seared into my cerebral cortex.

I tell you all this to explain why the Japanese attitude toward the kimono unsettles me so. All the years of that questionable family ritual make it difficult for me to think of it as anything other than a costume. Yes, generations of Japanese—men and women—woke up and put on a kimono every day of their lives. But even though Frenchwomen used to dress like the cast of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and America's Founding Fathers wouldn't leave the house without a powdered wig, the only time you'll see those clothes in Paris or Philadelphia today is during a movie shoot.

Kimonos aren't exactly common in modern Japan, but every day I was there I saw at least 15 kimono-clad figures, almost all women. It wasn't the raw numbers that surprised me; it was how normal it seemed. Women in kimonos eat breakfast in coffee shops, they strap-hang on crowded trains, and they poke about in 100-yen stores. Other Japanese people don't pay the slightest bit of attention—it's as if they haven't noticed that the person next to them happens to be swathed in several thousand dollars' worth of beautifully tailored silk. As a gaijin—a foreigner—I attracted more attention than these women, and I can guarantee that I was far less interesting to look at.

In Spain, when a woman dresses up for a bullfight or the neighborhood fiestas, everyone compliments her appearance. True, anyone who doesn't offer a piropo will get an earful, but you don't sing praises out of politeness—you do it because she looks great. In England, mockery is the most likely response to a spiffy outfit, but at least it's a reaction. The Japanese nonchalance contravenes the laws of nature: When a bird primps its plumage and does a little dance, attention must be paid.

The Japanese seem to love uniforms—parking-lot attendants are kitted out like generals, guys who pick up trash wear full-dress blues—so perhaps kimonos are just another kind of uniform, a way of establishing that the wearer belongs here, that she hasn't lost her connection to her nation's history. Making a fuss would question that connection, rendering it invalid.

I thought about all this when we went to see Takaki Nagashima in Kyoto. I'd first caught sight of him at a seminar in New York, where he was teaching U.S.-based Japanese women about obis—the ornate sashes used to tie kimonos. On that sweltering day in August, Nagashima sat at the end of a long table unfurling bolt after bolt of astonishingly luxurious fabric, the very picture of opulence.

Although Nagashima is not an unknown craftsman—he's a salesman, not a shokunin, and his family's obis proudly bear the company shoushi, an identifying seal—his line of work is just as steeped in tradition and just as endangered. His family's obi-making business, Nagashimasei Orimono, is based in the Nishijin—a textile center for more than 1,000 years—and I asked him to give my girlfriend and me that classic travel experience: the factory tour.

Nagashima showed up at our hotel decked out in a gorgeous steel-blue kimono, and everywhere he went, the man turned heads. He is a one-man kimono-and-obi-promotion campaign—young, attractive, and used to being stared at. Our first stop was the company besso, a special house where executives take guests to discuss business or negotiate deals away from the office. It was spectacular—even though we were in a dull, residential neighborhood, as soon as we passed through the gate, the modern world fell away—but it was also somehow emblematic. Every room seemed to include a feature, such as a weaving technique or a type of wood from a tree that could no longer be harvested, that was threatened or already extinct. Even the garden was endangered: These days, few gardeners know how to handle the maintenance of such a jewel.

At company headquarters—and later in the jam-packed, slightly anarchic factory—the impression was again of opulence: 300,000 colors of silk, stitches too tiny to be seen with the naked eye, and endless luxury. The Nagashimasei Orimono specialty is weaving with metallic threads that produce a shimmering fabric that moves like liquid gold or silver. The designs are intricate and complex—some are taken from traditional paintings—and the traditional Nishijin weaving process produces an almost three-dimensional effect. The workers—there are 40 in all—tend to be middle-aged; Takaki, at 35 the youngest person around and clearly accustomed to being treated like the prince of the family business, complained that these days young people aren't interested in learning these nontransferable skills, preferring office life and business suits.

Although there has been a bit of a kimono boom in recent years, thanks to a resurgence of interest in tea ceremony, overall the prospects aren't good. Kimonos and obis are expensive—an outfit can cost as much as a car—and they're delicate. Kimonos must be washed at least every 10 years, and all the stitches are removed for laundering, which means they must be reconstructed by a kimono tailor each time, a three-day job. Putting on a kimono and tying the obi is a complicated business, and women who don't wear them very often can forget the technique. Outside of weddings, funerals, and formal events, there just aren't many opportunities to don traditional dress—which might explain all the kimono-clad ladies enjoying the No. 2 breakfast at Beck's Coffee Shop.

Nevertheless, Nagashima is sure that kimonos and obis will survive because of the Japanese reverence for tradition. And, while there's a thin line between holding on to tradition and turning your back on the world, the Japanese women who walk around town in beautiful kimonos don't seem like Civil War re-enactors playing at history or buggy-riding Amish rejecting the internal combustion engine. They put on their kimonos and get on the bullet train as if it's the most modern thing in the world.

The fourth part of the series, about kimono and Nagashma Orimono: http://www.slate.com/id/2209693/entry/2209724/

Doing Things the Difficult Way

By June ThomasPosted Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2009, at 11:17 AM ET

There are two ways to transform bland white cotton into the rich, deep blue that you see everywhere in Japan: with chemicals or through the occult art of aizome, natural indigo dyeing. According to Hiroshi Murata, president of Kosoen dye works, once chemical dyeing was invented 100 years ago, U.S. producers abandoned the Polygonum tinctorium plant. Americans are practical people, and chemical dyeing made sense: Naturally dyed indigo fabric is more expensive and much more trouble to produce. Still, Japanese people were attached to the superior quality of aizome, so a few manufacturers persevered. A determination to do things the difficult way seems to be what drives Hiroshi and his younger brother Noriyuki. "Normal people would give up," he told me. "But we continue."

It was late on a Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the Kosoen workshop in Ome, a green-hilled city about 80 minutes and 20 years from downtown Tokyo. Noriyuki was bounding around the workshop mixing up a giant vat of dye. Wearing Wellington boots as he sloshed overflowing buckets of water to rinse the floor, Noriyuki, who is 48, looked like a joyful toddler playing in the rain.

Many steps are taken on the journey from flower to fabric, and the good folks at Kosoen took pains to explain them all on the company Web site. Like a great chef, a superior dyer must understand the science he sets in motion when he combines alkaline and acidic ingredients, and he must be sensitive enough to know when to stop stirring the pot. Similarly, just as proximity to heat and blade takes its toll on a cook's fingers, Noriyuki's blue hands are testimony to his vocation. The navy tint extends to his wrists, as if he's wearing gloves; his long fingernails shine a rich indigo more intense than any polish could produce. As the man at the helm of the color wheel, he literally has a finger in every pot.

There was something very familiar about the Kosoen demonstration. I'd seen another, almost-identical presentation about indigo dyeing when I visited the Kano Dye Pits in Nigeria. In West Africa, where the electricity supply is unreliable and capital is unavailable, going organic seemed practical, but why—apart from bloody-mindedness—would citizens of the most technologically advanced nation on earth choose a method fraught with so many difficulties?

Let's review the challenges. The raw materials are scarce—only a handful of Japanese farmers still grow the Polygonum tinctorium plant, each year producing just 1,000 bags of sukumo, the fermented dried leaves that are to indigo dyeing what grapes are to winemaking. Only well water can be used in the natural dyeing process—the chlorine in town water would kill the delicate bacteria—and to keep the bacteria happy, dyers must eschew air conditioning in summer and heating in winter. And for all that discomfort, the financial risks are high: The raw materials Noriyuki tosses into the vat for each batch of dye—sukumo, sake, wheat bran, ash, and lime—cost at least $3,000, but if the chemistry doesn't take, and the microorganisms don't thrive, the whole thing is a write-off.

Why take the risk? Hiroshi's answer is that this work is okufukai—it presents a profound, almost existential challenge. A third Murata brother operates a chemical dyeing shop, but Hiroshi and Noriyuki prefer to maintain the connection with old Japan, to struggle stubbornly to bring beauty from bacteria. And, of course, they are proud of the quality of color that only natural indigo dyeing can produce. Amy Katoh says that Kosoen "produces a youthful blue that whistles with fresh air and sunshine." My azure palette isn't refined enough to offer a review, but I'll always remember Noriyuki-san's grin as he dipped his big blue hands into the dye vat to test the mixture. "You have to taste it to see when it's right," he laughed, sticking a finger in his mouth.

In Kyoto, Kenichi Utsuki, the owner and artist in residence at Aizen Kobo, is more of a proselytizer than a businessman. Utsuki subjects anyone who wanders into his workshop and store in the Nishijin District to a lecture on the natural indigo-dyeing process (complete with laminated handouts), a sit-down show-and-tell of his collection of indigo fabrics from around the world, and a tour of his operation. I would have found it obnoxious if he weren't such a true believer. He evangelizes for natural indigo, touting its ability to repel mosquitoes and snakes, its resistance to fading, and its durability. In a way, though, that durability is a liability: The costly ingredients and the painstaking dyeing process, with its repeated cycles of soaking and air-drying, make the products relatively pricey (around $70 for a scarf; $35 for a napkin-sized piece of blue cotton). Still, as at Kosoen, the subtle variations of shade made everything seem desirable—I wanted to take things home just so I could point to them and say, "See, that's blue."

Kenichi's wife, Hisako, designs tasteful garments for the family business, but they weren't my kind of thing. I was tempted by the samu-e suits, loose-fitting garments favored by farm workers and craftspeople, but they failed the Q-train test: Whenever I'm tempted by a "foreign" garment, I try to imagine myself wearing it on the New York subway. No way. Eventually, though, I did purchase my own bit of indigo. Days later, when we made our pilgrimage to the Blue & White store in Tokyo, I couldn't resist buying a bag made from fabric dyed in Hiroshima. It smells a little gamey (no wonder mosquitoes give natural indigo a wide berth), and it lacks the zips and security features that life in an American city seems to demand, but I was sold when the sweet shop assistant told me I looked "suteki"—stylin'—when I slung it over my shoulder.

Part 3 of the series, about the Murata brothers of Kosoen dye works: http://www.slate.com/id/2209693/entry/2209723/

The Unknown Craftsman

By June Thomas Posted Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009, at 10:05 AM ET

My first contact with traditional Japanese crafts left me cold. The 55^th Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition, housed under fluorescent lights on the seventh floor of the massive Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo, was antiseptic and unengaging: The exhibits—fine pottery, intricate wooden boxes, elaborate kimonos—were exquisitely made, but they were a little too perfect for my taste. I had more fun wandering around the sprawling food hall in the store's basement. A visit to the Japan Traditional Crafts Center in the Ikebukuro neighborhood was another ice bath. All very pretty and informative—accessible, too, with display information provided in English—but far too museumlike.

The JTCC has worthy ideals. Founded in 1979 by the ministry of economy, trade, and industry, the exhibition is intended to promote traditional crafts, commonly known as mingei. The Mingeikan—a Tokyo folk-art museum founded by philosopher Soetsu Yanagi—defines mingei objects as "the work of anonymous craftsmen, produced by hand in quantities, inexpensive, to be used by the masses, functional in daily life, and representative of the region in which it was produced." Perhaps it's inevitable that when government agencies—or private enterprises, for that matter—try to champion humble crafts, they suck the life out of them. One of the most dispiriting outings of the entire trip was a trek to the Kyoto Handicraft Center, whose brochures were on display in every outpost where a foreign visitor might venture. It's the kind of depressing place that makes you wonder if the guidebook writers had been bought off: The otherwise excellent Lonely Planet Kyoto City Guide called it "the best one-stop emporium in the whole of Kyoto," but the place filled me with sadness. Commercially, it was a smart enterprise—lots of vendors housed under one roof, English-speaking staff, credit cards accepted (an astonishingly rare practice in Japan, other than at the big department stores), shuttles to and from the downtown hotels. The booths were stuffed with goods, but everything felt like it had come off a conveyor belt. Still, even in the midst of all the schlock, the spirit of the shokunin endured: While package-holiday tourists pounced on cheap yukata and ugly T-shirts, a pair of woodblock printers quietly carved and inked, unmolested by the horrors surrounding them.

Back in the capital, Masaharu Moriya of Moriya Bamboo exemplified Yanagi's ideal of the unknown craftsman. He was a man of few words. My minutelong questions, followed by two minutes of the interpreter's rendering, would inevitably be answered: "Yes," "No," or "A little, perhaps." Still, I never had the feeling that he was evading my queries. He was shy and apparently unused to gaijin schlepping out to his studio, located an hour from the city center. He provided the facts of his life—he was inspired by his father, who worked with bamboo, though not professionally; he has been in business for 30 years, 15 at the current location; he tried other lines of work, but this was "the most suitable"—but when it came to philosophy, vocation, the soul-harmonizing joy of shaping bamboo, he had nothing to say.

Feeling bad that I was keeping Moriya from his work, I asked him to show me what he does. He virtually skipped to the workshop. Within seconds, he had whipped off his sock so that he could grasp one half of the springy bamboo with his right foot. In less than two minutes of splitting and stripping, he turned three lengths of bamboo into 12 strips, and 30 seconds later, he had woven six of the strips into the base of a basket. Even as he worked swiftly with a tool that must've been sharp enough to take off a toe, he kept an eye on the cars zooming down the highway outside his studio.

My visit to Moriya Bamboo came about halfway through a three-week trip, and by that point I had clear expectations about what I'd find in the store attached to a craftsman's workshop: a few exquisite but expensive objects—the cost easily justified by the time devoted to producing them, the materials used, and the rare opportunity to buy a beautiful object direct from the hands of its creator. Moriya's store was completely different. Visitors could step up to a shoes-off fancy furniture section or find a few delicate items intended for use in Japanese tea ceremony, but the bulk of the haphazardly displayed stock was practical, rustic gear—baskets, brooms, and housewares; traditional winter boots—priced for country folk rather than visiting urbanites. There was even a selection of cheap souvenirs and wooden toys that a child could blow his pocket money on.

These days, according to Moriya, people aren't using traditional bamboo products for their intended purpose, and with Japanese agriculture in decline, a lot of the things he makes end up in galleries and museums as exemplars of traditional products. What looked like a grass-skirt ensemble turned out to be a traditional bamboo raincoat, but it won't be used to keep farmers dry as they toil in the fields—it was made to decorate the walls of a restaurant that is trying to establish a traditional vibe.

Despite the effects of urbanization, the bamboo business seems sound. When 67-year-old Masaharu retires, his son Koichi will take over, and, judging from the quantity of raw materials stacked out back, the order book is healthy. Of course, it's hard work. It was Sports Day, a national holiday, when we took our jaunt out to the workshop in Aobadai. The trains out of Tokyo were packed with liberated office workers heading to the country for a day of hiking, but the Moriyas were at their posts, splitting, shaving, and shaping bamboo.

The second part of the series, about bamboo craftsman Masaharu Moriya: http://www.slate.com/id/2209693/entry/2209722/

Am I Too Frivolous for Japan?

By June Thomas
Posted Monday, Jan. 26, 2009, at 10:51 AM ET

Every language attracts a special kind of student. Spanish speakers are lazy and charming. Those who have mastered French are sometimes chic and always sybaritic. Hebrew attracts the committed; Turkish, the committed and complicated. Adventurers are drawn to Arabic, and Mandarin is for brainiacs who love a challenge—so much so that they often abandon the language altogether once they've got it down. And Japanese? Japanese speakers are serious, serious people. Of course, all languages demand tedious, diligent study, but there's something about Japanese that calls out to those who are quiet, kind, and, often, spiritual. People who would rather kneel on a tatami mat contemplating a calligraphy scroll than, say, slump on a sofa watching Gossip Girl.

I always fancied myself too frivolous for Japan. Going there would be like visiting a library—a quiet, orderly place where nothing much happens. A world unto itself with lovely things to look at but nothing much to do. I love libraries; I just didn't want to spend my vacation in one. All that politeness stressed me out. There seemed to be a million rules—take your shoes off here, wear these slippers in the bathroom and nowhere else—and I didn't understand any of them.

I started to rethink this position when I realized that my recent holiday destinations—wonderful, envy-inducing places all—had started to blur together. In my recollection, dinner in Dublin was just like lunch in Moscow, albeit with 50 percent less gristle. That great bookstore in Madrid really wasn't all that different from the Barnes & Noble a few blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. As I surveyed the living room—I happened to be perched in front of the TV set at the time of this epiphany—my vacation souvenirs stared back at me reproachfully. The memento I'd purchased in an Amsterdam museum shop was a close cousin of the keepsake I'd bought at a Barcelona gallery. Sure, each knickknack featured some iconic image of the city or country it was supposed to represent, but all those tasteful trinkets could have rolled off the same assembly line in Kansas or Kenilworth.

Just then, I noticed a pile of books that my girlfriend had left on the kitchen table. (Did I mention that I've lived with one of those kind, serious students of Japanese for nearly a dozen years?) One book was a series of profiles of "Edo craftsmen," elderly Japanese men (and a few women) who had turned their backs on the modern age—and apparently the law of supply and demand—to devote themselves to pursuits such as kabuki calligraphy, kimono tailoring, and the construction of household shrines.

They were a gutsy bunch of bad-asses, these shokunin. In Japan, a land of conformity, it takes determination to renounce the necktie and business suit of the salaryman in favor of coarse cloth work clothes. Some shokunin appeared to have given up human company altogether: The photos showed old men working alone; occasionally two balding heads shared a tiny room. The stories about them fit the Japanese stereotype of respecting one's elders—most of the gray-haired masters had taken up tools decades earlier at their father's request—but there was also a dose of obstinacy in their choice of career. You think kimono-crest printing went out with the dodo? I'm (barely) living proof that you're wrong.

The second volume, Blue and White Japan, design guru Amy Katoh's mash note to the nation's signature color scheme, is one of those seductive design books that have you ready to trade in your set of Crate & Barrel dishes for a collection of chipped, unmatched china after just one flip-through. You'll also want to discard your store-bought tablecloth in favor of an improvised covering pieced together from farm rags. Apparently, I had two options for acquiring these must-have objects: a lifetime of flea-market browsing or a visit to Katoh's store in Tokyo.

I needed a pack of tissues to get through Old Kyoto, the final book in the stack. Focusing on "family establishments that have been in business for at least a hundred years, and in some cases for over ten generations," it's a collection of obituaries-in-waiting disguised as a guidebook. Pretty much all the shopkeepers Diane Durston profiles would qualify for Medicare, and one entry about a charming cask and bucket maker concluded with a heartbreaking postscript: "Tomii-san, unfortunately, had no son and no apprentice to carry on his honorable trade. He passed away in 1998, leaving a hole in the heart of the Nishijin district where the bright red buckets out front (his only 'sign board') were once a famous landmark." I used to think that the best guidebooks made you want to race to a destination before it's "spoiled"; this one left me desperate to get to Kyoto before anyone else died.

It's not as if I really needed any casks or buckets, but like a lot of people whose work life is hyperactive, I freak out when faced with the unstructured days of vacation. Perhaps heading to Japan with a purpose—tracking down some of these men who make things with their hands, often with the same tools their great-grandfathers used, and figuring out what drives them to live the lonely life of a traditional craftsman—would help me understand more about my own attitudes toward work and vocation.

I had also heard a lot of good things about Japanese television.

This is the first part of a five-part travel series I wrote for Slate in January 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/2209693/entry/2209694/