On a quiet country street outside the city of Maebashi, Japan, near fields
that once grew mulberries for silk, I stand in the bright autumn sun and
listen to the random twitter of birds and the dry hum of wind blowing down
Mt. Akagi. The contemplative calm of this warm November day envelops me …
until, abruptly, the dull throb of an air-compressor breaks the stillness.
The noise is coming from the back of one of the long, low houses nearby.
Then the explosive rasp of a sanding disk on wood slices into the
landscape like a sword blade, silencing the birds and challenging the
wind. Hiroyuki Tokutomi has begun to make a new pipe.
Tokutomi's home and workshop lie within the historic Tone River valley on
the northwestern corner of the Kanto plain, 100 kilometers northwest of
Tokyo. Surrounded by a special mixture of natural and cultivated beauty
(mountain peaks and hot springs, flower gardens and temples) the small
city of Maebashi is proud of its traditions of commerce, culture, and the
arts stretching back several centuries. And though no silk industry
remains, one of its quieter citizens continues to make beautiful objects
that delight and astonish people around the world.
For, out of this unique landscape, a new vision for briar pipe design has
emerged and spread throughout the international community of pipemakers.
Hiroyuki Tokutomi's imagination has mixed the classic Danish principles of Sixten Ivarsson with his own distinct Japanese sensibilities, and, in the
process, developed what I'd call a "new aesthetic language" for pipe
carving. Tokutomi's unusual, startlingly-beautiful work has shaken up the
way many pipemakers look at briar and suggested new possibilities for
expression and exploration.
Built onto the back of his one-story house, Toku's studio is a large
rectangular room whose unstained wooden walls are decorated with
photographs, pipe calendars, a street map of Copenhagen, a poster for the
Grand Ole Opry radio program, and decorative ceramics. The familiar tools
of the pipe-making trade spread out comfortably between work tables, a
desk, and storage areas. In opposite corners stand his large lathe and big
blue sandblasting machine. Appropriately enough, Toku's two shaping disks
sit in the middle of the workshop, near two buffing and polishing disks.
All four wheels have special electronic controls that Toku has built
himself.
The most unusual tools in the shop play the most significant role in
Toku's pipe designs. Toku uses "air turbine" Dremels, high-speed
hand-drills powered by air pressure rather than electricity. The Dremels
hang from the ceiling above Toku's desk like a collection of dentist
drills. These air-powered tools have much more torque than those driven by
electricity; the extra power gives Toku's hands much greater control – and
his imagination much greater freedom – to mold briar into astonishing
shapes.
Toku as "dentist." (In fact, his very
first Dremel-like machine was an old dentist's drill.) |
On the afternoon that I visit Toku, he is working on a large briar block
carefully chosen from the latest box of wood to arrive from the Italian
master cutter, Mimmo (Romeo Dominico) in Taggia, Italy. (Whenever anyone
asks Toku why he makes pipe shapes the way he does, the first answer is
always, "Mimmo's briar!" For his part, Mimmo loves preparing
unusually-shaped blocks for Toku, partly because he can never be sure what
shape Tokutomi will come up with.)
Toku has selected this particular block because he likes the way its rough
plateau will fall on the side of the "elongated blowfish" he sees in the
wood, rather than along the top or bottom. (Toku actually thinks of this
newest blowfish variation as a Salmon, with its long, sleek bowl and
thick, often "fluted" shank. Unfortunately the Japanese word for Salmon is Sā-ke, which non-Japanese speakers might confuse with the beverage, so
Toku has refrained from making the name official.)
To see Toku shaping a pipe is to observe a master improviser at work. He
has few set patterns for his pipes, no rigid templates that he applies.
Occasionally he will draw pictures of pipes he'd like to make and he
usually has a general idea of the shape he sees in a particular block. But
once he sits down in front of the sanding wheel, conscious ideas tend to
evaporate. He becomes aware only of the briar in his hands: the twists and
turns of the emerging grain, the flow of the lines he is defining, the
feel of the forms beneath his fingers. Like a jazz musician who plays by
ear (and Toku has been a guitarist since his student days in the 1960's),
Toku's creativity is kinesthetic and experiential, rather than
intellectual and analytical.
Toku presses his briar block against the spinning sandpaper with a coiled,
athletic intensity. His feet are spread wide and his small body leans
forward on the edge of a stool as his hands guide the wood up and down,
back and forth, against the rough surface. The force that Toku applies and
the speed with which he moves suggest a wiry toughness and powerful
creative drive lurking within his thin frame, and his friendly, ingenuous
personality.
Toku alternates his periods of intense activity with moments of
concentrated reflection, during which he sits back on his stool and stares
fixedly at the wood. Sometimes he traces an invisible line with his finger
before resuming his work on the sanding disk.
"When I start making the bowl, I'm
already beginning to think about the shank. When I'm working on the
shank, I'm thinking about the mouthpiece. It all follows in
sequence." - H. Tokutomi |
Once Toku has shaped the block into a generally ovoid form he moves to a
smaller sanding wheel to clean up the plateau and shape some of the
tighter angles and surfaces. In this particular pipe, Toku has merged the
shank and bowl in a new way – the curves of the bowl flow directly into
the curves of the shank. From here on, his task will be to separate and
distinguish the two sections of the pipe from each other.
By the time Toku turns off both sanding disks (about 45 minutes after he's
started), the rough chunk of briar has been transformed into a smooth,
undulating form whose curves and contours already seem distinctively "Tokuish."
The underlying blowfish theme is apparent in the pattern of grain, as both
sides of the briar are splattered with birds-eye, while the circling edge
displays vivid cross-grain.
Central to his design will be a long, narrow space "in the middle" of the
shank, a bridge or ribbon of briar that will run from the rear of the
shank to the top of the bowl. This open area will help lighten the overall
composition. At the same time, the curved shapes of the ribbon will create
a sense of rippling movement, further evoked by its flowing grain, and
varying textures (the left side will contain a line of plateau).
Toku will use a Dremel to "excavate" the bridge and add contours to the
ribbon, but to get things started, he first moves to the familiar pipemaker's lathe. Precisely at a moment when many carvers would use their
lathes to drill length-wise into their blocks to make air-holes and
tobacco chambers, Toku sets up his machine to burrow a small hole across
the pipe, marking the spot from which the crucial curve of empty space
will grow.
Toku marks where he will drill the hole in
the shank.
Most of the time, Toku uses this lathe to
drill tobacco chambers, air-holes, and stems. |
Once Toku has completed his drilling, he moves to his old wooden desk. He
grabs one of his dangling Dremels and then sits down in a comfortable
arm-chair. He wraps sandpaper around an appropriately-sized bit, lowers
his head, and starts "digging."
Toku works with surprising speed. He knows exactly what he wants and is
extremely dexterous with the Dremel (which, by the way, he has specially
designed for his left hand). Toku quickly enlarges the hole, then, using a
smaller bit, he starts contouring its sides. Astonishingly, the more briar
Toku takes away, the softer become the lines and shapes of the remaining
wood. He makes a briar pipe look as though he had molded it out of clay,
and as his small hands manipulate the whirring Dremel, I know I am
witnessing part of that magical transfiguration. Yet how can a high-speed
"air-turbine" drill, that gouges out sprays of sawdust from hard,
beige-colored wood, create lines that seems to flow like water and shapes
that seem to move and grow like organic matter? To my eye, Toku's sorcery
rivals that of the sculptor who strikes a mallet against marble and makes
a human body that seems alive.
Curiously enough, a fascination with just that kind of artistic alchemy
lies at the heart of Toku's life-long fascination with the briar
pipe.
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