When you meet other woodworkers who have traveled to Japan and ask them for recommendations on places to see, chances are they will tell you to visit the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kobe (竹中道具館). I’ve been hearing about the carpentry museum for a while now, and a couple of weeks ago my wife and I had a chance to go over golden week.
It is a truly amazing museum if you are interested in Japanese woodworking and carpentry, and I highly recommend making the trek to Kobe to see the place. There are displays on the history of Japanese woodworking, roof and joinery models, TONS of amazingly beautiful tools, a mind-blowing kumiko panel, a teahouse, and a mock-up of a blacksmiths shop, among other things. If you’re an English speaker but don’t speak Japanese that’s really no problem, almost all of the displays and videos have English options.
Below are some pictures of highlights from our visit.
When we visited there was a special exhibition taking place about the history of Japanese water wheels, and their construction.
Below is an old gear from a water wheel:
Here a new gear has been made detailing using the same type of construction and a serious amount of joinery:
As you continue into the museum one of the first things you encounter is this full size temple roof construction:
It’s not really visible in the photo below but a lot of the surfaces on this roof model have been done with a yari-ganna (spear plane) which leaves a really beautiful texture to the wood.
This model shows examples of boards that have been surfaced with chouna 釿 (Japanese adze) and yari-ganna 槍鉋(spear plane) , along with chips from the process …. how cool is that. This display along with the following few images detailed the evolution of Japanese woodworking from simple axes and adzes, to chisels and the spear plane, followed by saws and eventually the introduction and use of kanna 鉋 (Japanese handplanes).
Other displays showed how various specialized tools are use , like this saw that was used for cutting grooves for shoji screens. I have never seen a saw handle quite like this one:
This display was also really amazing, showing some of the most commonly used trees in Japan. All these logs were cut and hand planed, with the shavings of each tree available to handle in front of each log.
Tool time! One room in the lower level is devoted to masterpieces of Japanese carpentry tools.
Pictures do not do the scale of this plane justice. This thing was HUGE! I cannot imagine the amount of work and skill that goes into making not only the blade and dai of a kanna like this, but to actually make it take a shaving that thin is astounding!
Equally astounding was this pair of kumiko panels, which again pictures do not do justice. Much of the kumiko in these panels is somewhere on the scale 2 mm thick. I would love to have seen this while it was being made.
Some of these kumiko patterns looked like they were inspired by Islamic patterns.
Lastly for this post, is the tea house. Fully constructed except for the plaster, which allows you to see many of the ordinarily hidden details that go into a building like this. Tea houses like this are small, and yet the level of detail that goes into them means that they can easily cost as much as a full size house, if not more.
Details, details, details….
Well that’s it for this brief tour of The Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum. There’s a lot more to see so please go visit if you are in Japan and can make the journey. Pictures cannot suffice for the experience of seeing this work in person. Thanks for visiting.
Amazing. Hope one day I can visit
Beautiful workmanship. Truly works of art and utility. Love the thin shaving Kanna(?)!
We were in Japan for a week last year and went to Kobe specifically to visit the Takenaka Museum. It’s a marvelous place to experience. The exhibits are amazing but the grounds and buildings are also quite beautiful. We’ll be back in Japan this September and I’m tempted to return.
That looks like an amazing place to visit. Another must-see woodworking exhibit is Sakurayama Nikkokan in Takayama. This place exhibits tenth-scale models of Nikko buildings. It was apparently built as a tribute by local craftsmen to show their skills which, needless to say, are extraordinary. Definitely worth a side trip…
Sounds wonderful, thanks for the recommendation!
The fact this museum exists is a insight into Japanese culture. Amazing- thanks for posting it!
On a similar theme, I came across a video of a shoji makers exhibition a few years ago in Shizuoka City- very impressive!
Some 20 years ago, I worked my way through a warehouse of tansu, doing repairs to get them ready for the US antique market. It was enlightening, among all the fancy ones, with burled wood and trim, one stood out- it was made from perfectly straight grained keyaki, almost unadorned, with perfect proportion and workmanship- I had looked at the guts of hundreds by this time, and the bottom of a drawer or the inside could tell as much as the face- it was made by a master.
Like a suguha hamon on a blade- it can seem simple,and yet somehow be more beautiful than the fanciest pattern.
Thanks Ed!
There have been a few shoji/kumiko exhibitions since I’ve come to Japan, but so far they’ve been to far away for me to visit. They look amazing though, some truly astounding craftsmanship!
Going through a large collection of tansu must have been pretty eye opening. I’ve only really seen the cheaper ones in person, and the guts are definitely pretty basic, and done as quickly as possible. We got a hold of a set of tansu for dirt cheap when we first came to Japan, and they are nothing fancy and cheaply made, but I still really like them.
A couple of years ago my wife and I went to a craft museum here in Tokyo, showing work from Japanese national treasure artists who made tansu, lacquered boxes, etc. And like you said above many we made with fairly simple ornamentation but the proportions, lines and details really stood out and made the work special.
The universal repair on those tansu was shortening the drawer boxes- coming from an era of no central heat in Japan, and having long grain drawer sides and crossgrain cabinet sides resulted in all the drawers sticking out from the face, since they were stopped on the back of the case. Most of the older drawers were pegged together with tapered wooden nails. I would run cross cut appropriate wood on the chop saw, then run them though the table saw to form wedged shaped stock, then the “nails” could be split off with a knife as needed.
And replacing the sliding door runners, worn deep from years of use.