Kesurokai

Craft learning and "the crit"

"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.

Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.

It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!

Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.

This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!

I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...

Traditional craft apprenticeship

As a great admirer of traditional craftsmanship, I am saddened when craftsmen come to the end of their working practice without having passed their unique skills on. However, the more I read about traditional apprenticeship, the more I can see why this has happened and cannot wish for a return to the old ways of teaching.

I just finished reading "Edo Craftsmen, master artisans of old Tokyo" and of the twelve featured craftsmen only two appear both to have long-term viable businesses and trained apprentices to pass on their skills. Part of the problem is the increasing accessibility of cheaper, mass-produced alternatives to whatever they make. However, many craftsmen manage to market their produce in such conditions by selling a small volume at higher prices to more discerning customers. The failure is in part caused by a lack of younger people coming into the crafts with the vision to exploit such markets.

The descriptions in the book of the craftsmen's experience of traditional apprenticeship reveals both the rigour and the modern-day drawbacks of the system. They would start very young and spend several years doing menial tasks whilst observing the breadth of the practice, then gradually take on small tasks followed by increasingly complex ones as they grew older and more able. The emphasis was not on teaching, but learning; observing and imitating, rather than being shown how.

With a good master and a willing student this clearly works well. In her study of the Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada, Susan Peterson describes the relationship between deshi (apprentice) and master: “To learn as a deshi means to submit one’s self to the master, to leave one’s own self, to become ‘in’ the master. This ‘surrender’ to the master does not mean just blind imitation, but gives a spiritual discipline and the opportunity to absorb a skill into one’s bones.”

However, it is a system that relies on a huge amount of trust and non-verbal communication between master and apprentice, and that is not always going to work well. Whilst a very strict master might ensure that very high standards of craft skills are passed from one generation to the next, it might well be at the cost of creativity and the ability of the younger person to see new opportunities and develop new markets. Given also that young people stay in school much longer nowadays, I cannot see a traditional craft apprenticeship being a very appealing option.

The future, however is not all bleak, I think there are craftsmen who have adapted to new ways of teaching and also multimedia offers huge potential to record and transmit quite complex skills. In my last research project I worked with traditional Sheffield knife makers and made an online resource which was successfully used by a variety of learners. The wonders of the internet mean information travels fast and those who wish to learn in this way can readily access such resources and conduct their own apprenticeships in their own way.

Edo craftsmen: master artisans of old Tokyo

 

I have only read the "Temple Carpenter" section of this book so far but am very impressed. The book is beautiful, both with its fabulous black and white images and its sensitively-written text which gives the impression the author has spent some serious time with the craftsmen rather than just whisking in and out with a photographer. Many thanks to Heinrich H for the suggestion!

Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo / text by Thomas F. Judge ; photographs by Tomita Hiroyuki. ISBN 0-8348-0280-5.

Books / Japanese aesthetics

I recently started re-reading Soetsu Yanagi's book The Unknown Craftsman and am feeling a little frustrated. I enjoyed it so much last time, but now I have mixed feelings.

Having read Brian Moeran's book Folk Art Potters of Japan (see background reading) I am tuned into the close relationship between Yanagi and Bernard Leach, and see how they greatly influenced each others thinking. Now, as I read the Unknown Craftsman, I am not sure whose voice I hear. Leach reveals in the foreword that he had to abandon his original manuscript after an assistant, who was fluent in both English and Japanese, revealed it was "too much my [Leach's] interpretation of Yanagi to be called a translation."

I feel as if I am reading Yanagi through a lens created by Leach and would love a more neutral translation. Of course the best would be to read it in Japanese, but I have to be realistic and acknowledge that will never happen. (I am a huge fan of classic literature and have always had a fancy to read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in their native language too!)

It is none the less a good book, I just see it in a different light now. The Leach / Yanagi vision of aesthetics is an east-west fusion, interesting in its own right, but perhaps not the insight into traditional Japanese aesthetics I was after.

Off on a tangent with a different flawed beauty...

 

Ouch! Robin just took a nasty chunk out of his Japanese axe, catching it on a nail that must have grown into the wood he was hewing for fence posts for his bridge. That will need to go on the grinder to be removed...

Website auf Deutsch

As Kesurokai's organiser, Hannes Schnelle, and many of our craftsmen are German I have just updated our German website www.kesurokai.de This was not the easiest task because it is a long time since I studied German at school!

So, many thanks to green woodworkers Michail and Katy Schütte for translating the bulk of the text and my kind friend Michael Hohl for helping me finish it off.

Background reading

I feel acutely aware of the cultural differences between Europe and Japan and in preparation for out visit I have been doing some background reading. (I will confess to being a prolific reader and, with Robin being a prolific book-buyer, I have plenty to go at!)

First was Japanese woodworking tools: their tradition, spirit and use by Toshio Odate. This book not only describes the tools in great detail but also gives a wonderful insight into the life of Japanese craftsmen. The author now lives in America but was born in Japan and served an apprenticeship as a traditional sliding-door maker. [ISBN 0-85442-075-4]

Then there is an interlocking trio of books which are actually about pottery rather than wood working but again provide insight into Japanese aesthetics and craftsmanship.

• The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of Japan's folkcraft movement, is a classic book looking at the values of art, beauty and handwork. [ISBN 0-87011-352-6]
• Susan Peterson's book Shoji Hamada: a potter's way and work provides a lovely description of the workings of the pottery over the four-month period spent there by the author. [ISBN 0-7136-6772-9]
• Folk art potters of Japan: beyond an anthropology of aesthetics by Brian Moeran is a more scholarly tome, but puts the other two in perspective. It discusses the British origins of the aesthetic ideals of Yanagi and Hamada and how they influenced and indeed changes the lives of Japanese folk art potters. [ISBN 0-7007-1039-6]

I could go on and read the various texts by and about Bernard Leach but I think I might have learned enough about pottery for now!