Tokutomi's Improvisatory Carvings

Expanded text of an article published in
Pipes and Tobaccos Magazine, Summer 2006

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The Improvisatory Carvings of Hiroyuki Tokutomi

by Thomas Looker

(A shorter version of this article was originally published in Pipes and Tobaccos Magazine, Summer 2006)

When 27-year-old Hiroyuki Tokutomi climbed aboard the trans-Siberian railroad in 1974 on the first leg of his journey from Japan to Denmark, he looked like many other world travelers of his generation, in his loose-fitting clothes, black beard and long hair. But "Toku" was already propelled by a uniquely creative and adventurous spirit. The young wood-carver from Tokyo had become fascinated with briar after making a few pipes on his own and was determined to learn more about the craft from Scandinavian pipe-makers. After a week at W.O. Larson’s factory, Toku made contact with the legendary Sixten Ivarsson, who welcomed the enthusiastic young man from Japan into his workshop. So began Toku’s brief, intense, and enormously fruitful apprenticeship with the man who would forever inspire and inform his pipe carving.

A month later, Toku returned to Japan. He never forgot Ivarsson’s final words to him. The Swedish master shook the young man’s hand and told him to come back for a visit once he had become a successful pipe-maker. "And when you return," Sixten Ivarsson added with a smile, "wear a jacket."

It took almost thirty years for the modest and self-critical Japanese craftsman to return to Denmark. Though he made many beautiful pipes in his spare time, Toku worked primarily as an ivory carver during the 1980’s and 90’s and it wasn’t until the turn of the century that growing renown, particularly in the United States, allowed him to devote all his time to pipe-making. Then, in late October 2004, Toku boarded a plane in Tokyo and flew to a pipe show at the European pipe-smoking championships in Copenhagen. There, some of the finest pipe-makers in the world saw an exhibition of Tokutomi’s work and responded with admiration and enthusiasm. Carvers as diverse in style as Teddy Knudsen, Bo Nordh, Lars Ivarsson, Jess Chonowitsch, Peter Hedegaard, Ulf Normeister, and Poul Ilsted praised the skill of Toku’s technique and the fertility of his imagination, even as they were occasionally challenged by the very Japanese aesthetic in some of his compositions. Perhaps the highest compliment paid to Tokutomi’s work was the way it inspired both public discussions and private imaginings about innovative pipe designs.

Toku’s reception by the Danish pipe-making community was heartwarming for the Japanese craftsman. But the emotional high-point of his visit to Denmark took place after the show, when, on a cold, misty November morning, the 57-year-old pipe-maker walked into a Copenhagen cemetery and stood alone in front of a small stone laid to honor the memory of Sixten Ivarsson. Head bowed, eyes glistening with tears, Toku recited silent prayers for his mentor, who had died in 1999. Toku’s greying hair is cut short these days, but he retains a small moustache and dresses in casual, loose-fitting clothes much of the time. On this occasion, however, he wore a neatly-tailored dark jacket and a tie.

It seems to me that Tokutomi’s journey to Copenhagen in 2004 represents an important moment in the history of contemporary pipe-making. When the master carver from Japan returned to Denmark after an absence of three decades, he brought with him not just a refined and matured recapitulation of Sixten’s innovative principles of design and engineering but, often, a full re-imagining of his mentor’s ideas and shapes. Tokutomi’s new style of carving and composition blends European and Japanese traditions in surprising and original ways. A Tokutomi pipe may evoke simultaneously the clear outlines of a Danish cross-cut pipe and the feathery forms of Japanese brush drawings; it may combine the linear suppleness of a plateau-horn by Teddy with the three-dimensional flexibility found in the "asymmetrical balance" of Buddhist rock gardens and ivory carvings. Tokutomi’s designs would not have been possible without Sixten’s influence, but neither could they have evolved without Toku’s deep imaginative connections with Japanese artistic traditions.

Humor and a joyful kind of improvisation also lie at the heart of Tokutomi’s pipe design and his most perplexing pieces become comprehensible only when we understand the playful spirit with which he approaches his work. Toku says that when he sits down in front of his disk sander, his goal is to "play elegantly" with the briar. Further, he once told me that as he is shaping a pipe, he will check to see if any straight lines have appeared in his composition. If they have, he will "correct" them by making them curve or twist. In my understanding of traditional Japanese art, straight lines are considered artificial, unnatural, and less beautiful than the free-form undulations and irregularities that appear so often in Nature.

Toku’s use of asymmetry and the kind of visual energy it brings to his carving can sometimes strike the Western-trained eye as unsettling or even disturbing. But if we put aside some of our familiar assumptions about symmetrical balance, I think we can discover a special, contemplative serenity lying within many of Toku’s most challenging designs.

Such is the strength of Toku’s craftsmanship and the communicative power of his art, that after seeing his pipes in Denmark, a number of carvers said they hoped to experiment with more flexible shapes in their own work. And, indeed, during the past year, I’ve seen pipes from many makers that seem to play around with innovative asymmetries: from Denmark, Tom Eltang, Teddy Knudsen, and Peter Hedegaard; from America, Todd Johnson and Michael Lindner; from Japan, Kei Gotoh and Smio Satou; and even from Turkey, where certain new meerschaum blowfish designs look remarkably "Tokuish." I expect that in the future, as Tokutomi becomes increasingly well-known and appreciated, we’ll see more and more cross-fertilization between his Japanese aesthetic and other pipe carving styles. Some of the most original pipe designs may well emerge from the newest generation of carvers in "third countries" like America, whose artistic traditions are so used to incorporating external influences.

But I find myself particularly intrigued by the ways that the people of two small (predominantly) island nations, Denmark and Japan, seem to share enough similarity in culture and craft that their pipe designs have developed along complementary lines. For example, Danish artisans have long pushed their work into that fascinating middle landscape that lies ambiguously between art and craft. Fine Danish furniture combines function and expression in the same way that certain pipes by Kent Rasmussen might be considered "smokeable art." Similarly, an art historian colleague of mine at Amherst College has compared Tokutomi’s pipes with the furniture of George Nakashima, and in everything from wood joinery to flower arrangement, Japanese culture often delights in juxtaposing and conflating what we in the West so often divide into the separate categories of "arts" and "crafts."

I have only just begun to study the aesthetic underpinnings of Tokutomi’s work and I still have much to learn about the Japanese artistic tradition. But in this collection of pictures and commentary I present some preliminary thoughts about Tokutomi’s fascinating approach to pipe design and the new possibilities it suggests for how we might define and enjoy "a good pipe."