I haven't yet discussed with Toku whether he consciously asked himself this question during the summer of 2003, when the first pipes with such rotated bowls appeared.  Perhaps Toku's imagination simply manipulated the form while he was engaged in spontaneous playfulness.  But the question does express an idea that I think is implicit in the series of pipes that culminates in the "Rotated Blowfish" Cavalier:  What possibilities emerge once you start twisting and bending the bowl of a blowfish pipe as though it were made out of clay ... ?

These two early Snail-grade pipes [see below for additional pictures] appeared late in 2003, during a period of astonishing growth and development in Tokutomi’s pipe-making. These pieces show Toku at the height of his improvisatory creativity – bending lines, molding forms … re-imagining briar as though it were clay.

The pipes contain the seeds of many future ideas. (For example, note the hints of hard edges and angles which will come to predominate in Toku’s later stone-like carvings.) Here, these pipes and those immediately following illustrate how Toku started to spin the bowl of the blowfish off its normal axis.