Who We Are

Douglas Brooks is a boatbuilder, writer, and researcher specializing in the construction of traditional wooden boats for museums and private clients. Since 1990, he has been researching traditional Japanese boatbuilding, documenting the techniques and design secrets of the craft. He has built boats with seven elderly boatbuilders from throughout Japan; he is the sole apprentice for six of his teachers. Brooks has published four books and numerous articles on Japanese boatbuilding. He is also the only non-Japanese listed in a 2003 Nippon Foundation survey of craftsmen capable of building traditional Japanese boats. 

Nina Noah is a former apprentice graduate of the Apprenticeshop, America’s oldest boatbuilding school, and is currently its Director of Student Affairs and Outreach. Founded in 1972, The Apprenticeshop has a long history of researching, documenting, and teaching boatbuilding traditions from other countries, in addition to building traditional boats from North America. Past projects have included Norwegian prams, Azorean whaleboats and currently an Irish racing sloop. 

Project Goals

Besides being beautiful in form, wooden boats have served as a vital means of transportation and commerce throughout the world for most of human history. You can go to almost any place and find the remnants of a once-thriving boatbuilding industry. The boats produced tell a rich story of the specific place and culture they were designed and built in; they capture the hand and eye of the builders who made them; their ribs and planks hold a record of the ways in which they were used; and often, they document the process by which people learned and grew into more capable, confident, patient, and thoughtful people. While in some places the knowledge of how to build and operate these craft has been revived, in others, it is starting to die out.  

Boatbuilding in Japan is currently in crisis. Japan’s rapid growth in the post-War years disrupted the system of apprenticeship that sustained and nurtured it. Without a new generation of apprentices, craftspeople have been unable to pass on their knowledge. It is critical now to document the work of Japan’s last generation of boatbuilders to preserve this knowledge before it vanishes. To accomplish this, we will work alongside Mr. Hideto Bansho, the last known boatbuilder of the Echigo region on the Sea of Japan, to build a small fishing boat called a tenmasen. 

One of the foremost goals of this project is to disseminate our research and engage a wider audience with traditional craft.  With the assistance of multimedia specialist Benjamin Meader, we plan to document both the process and the specific techniques used through a variety of forms, including written and oral narrative, digital map, photograph, and video, so that we can share the knowledge and experience with as many people as possible, including those outside of the field.

The other major goal of this project is to develop a boatbuilding exchange program with the Apprenticeshop. The exchange program will bring students to Japan to document and study boatbuilding from the last masters of the craft, experiencing a craft culture wholly unlike the American one they are familiar with. 

What We Need

The project has already received partial funding with a $10,000 grant from the United States-Japan Foundation of New York, and a $2,000 John Gardner Grant from the Traditional Small Craft Association. We are seeking an additional $15,000 to travel to Japan and document tenmasen’s design and construction, as well as to prepare the results (narrative, video, photography, and drawings) for publication.

This money will help cover things like:

• Airfare
• Transportation within the country
• Living expenses
• Building materials
• Training fee for the boatbuilder
• Manuscript preparation
• Video editing
• Preparation of measured drawings
• Publication costs

If you don't have the ability to contribute financially, you can also support us by sharing this campaign with friends, colleagues, and family or posting something about us on social media. We appreciate any and all support!

What You Get

Everyone who contributes to our campaign, whether it's a donation of $1 or $1,000, will receive our e-newsletter with updates on the project and photos of our progress.

In addition to our gratitude, you also have the chance to receive small perks, like a baseball cap, magnet, or handwritten postcard, as well as large perks, like a boat!

Why Preserve Traditional Japanese Boatbuilding?

A statement from Douglas Brooks

I believe exposing people to another culture’s craft offers important insights which go far beyond the craft itself. There are ways of learning we do not know and they can be important windows to the self. The apprentice system as found in Japan is very much a values-based education system centered on the person, versus our skills-based training with its commitment to efficiency. Deeply rooted in Japanese culture, craft apprenticeship shares many elements of Zen Buddhist monastic training, such as humility, fealty to one’s teacher, repetition, and training in silence. It was not efficient; the typical boatbuilding apprenticeship was six years. In my case I worked with each of my teachers for the time it took to build one or two boats, from one to seven months. All of my teachers told me at the outset there would be no speaking in the workshop; the workday was conducted in silence.

This begs the question: how does one learn in silence? The answer lies in those long apprenticeships. While the apprentice was sweeping, sharpening or fetching tools they were constantly watching their teacher, learning by observation. It may be months or even years, but one day the master would ask the apprentice to do something, and expect them to do it perfectly. As an experienced boatbuilder, I was brought into the work fairly quickly (though my first tool was always the broom). Nevertheless, if I made a mistake, I was sent back to sweeping. I can say it made me a very highly motivated student. While one can fairly raise objections to this sort of “teaching,” it focuses all responsibility for learning on the apprentice.

I call this values-based learning - as opposed to western skills-based learning - because of the intense demands it places on the learner. It requires the humility to respect one’s teacher; powers of observation to learn every detail of the craft; and the perseverance and patience to painstakingly develop one’s skills. It requires an incredible level of focus and attention. At a glance the process can seem slavishly imitative, but in fact the crucible the apprentice finds him/herself in demands constant attention and creativity. 

I often found myself working alongside my teachers, having been ordered to keep up with them while we chiseled mortises or piloted nail holes. My teachers could cut hundreds of identical mortises without laying out any lines beforehand. I could not. In desperation, so as not to fall behind (the broom was always waiting), I would quickly make little patterns out of scrap so I could trace uniform shapes consistent with their work. It may seem insignificant and hardly revelatory, but it was symptomatic of an intensity I have never found in any other educational setting. It also points to how my teachers made me responsible for every detail of the work, all without saying a word. 

My association with Japan began with the straightforward goal of preserving the skills of traditional boatbuilding. Since then, I have developed a much deeper appreciation for apprenticeship, its crucial role in sustaining the craft, and what it can teach us about learning. This project hopes to do both: nurture a new generation of boatbuilders through cross-cultural exchange, exposing them to lessons both tangible and intangible. 

Looking back, I am deeply indebted to my teachers for humbling me, for making me uncomfortable, forcing me to concentrate. In the end, they made me think like the apprentice they wanted me to be. They showed me how to listen for the meaning in the silence.