A Month in Yamanashi
October 25th 2026
I recently spent a month in Yamanashi Prefecture at Fuji Woodworking Society run by Tak Yoshino. I was a volunteer which meant that I spent the time there mostly attending to chores and tasks on the grounds. There is a lot to do, my day started at 9 am, a break at noon and over at 4pm. Tak would usually start with a 15 minute meditation in the morning before a meeting with his family and the apprentices (and me) During this meeting all of the tasks for the day were laid out.
My tasks were the less glamourous ones, but at this place they were always interesting. I spent nearly a week stripping the bark off of a cherry tree sourced from Kichijoji, a small sub-city in Tokyo. Other activities included preparing taks tools for shipping to the united states, tending to a moss garden and greasing clamps used for putting furniture together.
In the off hours I got to work in the studio. It was there that i learned some of the basics of joinery and preparing traditional tools such as nomi and kana. These tools are not ready out of the box, apprentices take years to learn how to tune and sharpen them properly. I brought my own cheap kana and nomi purchased at a local hardware store. These were good practice tools as they were inexpensive and allowed for me to make mistakes in preparing them. That said, I treated them as if they were expensive highly precious tools. Because to me on my budget, thats what they are.
The experience taught me about patience. And interfacing with reality, as strange as that sounds. In our digital world we are many levels removed from the actual physical world. It seems that our modern experience is one of ethereal disconnection from the consequences of our own actions. Undo, save as, delete, back up. But when you make a chip in your kana, you cant undo, every stroke on a whetstone is reflected in the quality of the final sharpness of the blade. Many hours were spent just sharpening one chisel or kana blade. Had I not had a rough go of it in Tokyo for the past four years I may not have been ready for what can be a humbling experience. But I kept at it and made my tools workable. But by no means amazing. Although I did get some positive remarks about their sharpness.
Now that I'm back in Tokyo, I brought with me a collection of whetstones and my trusty kana and nomi. I am continuing the practice as best I can in a tiny apartment with paper thin walls. I hope I can share the results with you here.