For a brief period in my early days of photographing shokunin in Japan, I was drawn to chasing Living National Treasures. Looking back, I understand the appeal—the honorific definitely simplifies the process of finding subjects. They are deeply experienced, often photogenic and, of course, recognized as the pinnacle of their craft. But like so many things it took me years to understand, the simplicity of that approach belies just how difficult it is to segment mastery, let alone rank it. The marginal difference between one craftsman and another, at that level of experience, is often more a matter of nuance than skill. I also didn’t factor in that within the craft world in Japan, Living National Treasures are already among the most documented practitioners…they don’t really need another photog coming into their studios.

Over the past thirteen years, authorship and recognition have expanded beyond any simple hierarchy and become key factors in the transmission of both skill and lineage. If the Mingei movement of a century ago was about celebrating anonymity, the disappearance of the craftsman into the work itself, today the two are, at the very least, on equal footing. And that’s a good thing because it meets the current moment and accepts that adaptation is survival.

Deep down, I remember thinking when I first started out that perhaps the more famous the subject, the better chance I might have of publishing the project, getting it exhibited…making my own mark (definitely not the ethos of The Unknown Craftsman).

But all of those early ambitions were built on the same assumption: that the individual was always the center of the story.

What I missed in all of that philosophical tussling and rereading of century-old essays is that ecosystems matter too. Not just the big picture, thirty-thousand foot view—why particular regions in Japan (or Mexico, or Morocco) have developed specific industries, skill sets and patterns of transmission around craft—but the micro-features of a place. Water, earth, necessity, lineage—all function as a sort of terroir as well.

As has been the case over and over with In Practice, I set out to write a simple profile to accompany a photo essay. After revisiting the interview transcript, I realized I was instead trying to make sense of a set of contradictions that had only become visible with hindsight—in this instance, a Living National Treasure papermaker whose work will never be signed and who insists the craft cannot be separated from its environment.

I was told Ichibei Iwano might not want to be photographed.

I had taken a day trip from Kyoto to Echizen, one of Japan’s oldest papermaking regions, hoping to meet the person behind some of the world’s finest washi. By then, Iwano was already in his eighties and widely regarded as one of the country’s greatest papermakers. I was also warned that the trip might end without a single photo. In fact, my translator and guide cautioned me against even bringing up the subject. Instead, I was advised to prepare for a long conversation and the possibility that the visit would simply end there.

So we drank tea and talked. I sat awkwardly on the tatami floor, trying to ignore the creeping numbness in the lower half of my body while conspicuously avoiding the very reason I had made the trip. For the better part of an hour, I tried not to think about how badly I wanted to photograph him.

Then I noticed an old twin lens reflex camera sitting on a shelf behind him.

When I asked about it, Iwano smiled. It was the one camera he had never gotten rid of. He had owned it since he was twenty years old. Others had come and gone over the years, but this one remained.

It felt like a small opening. My translator saw it too and suggested I show him some photographs from earlier in my travels—a knife maker in Sakai, a bow maker and several aging blacksmiths from Kyushu. He studied them carefully before showing me images of his own.

Before long, we were discussing archival prints, specialist printers and the possibility of printing photographs on his paper. I learned that what fascinated him was not just the image, but the idea that a print could outlive its maker.

He spoke about permanence. Images might fade, he said, but on the right paper they could survive for generations.

The paper was important not just as an object, but as a vehicle. Its purpose was to carry the work of others forward. It echoed a pattern I noticed throughout our conversation—whenever I tried to steer things toward his reputation, philosophy or designation as a Living National Treasure, he redirected the credit elsewhere.

Ultimately, he said, it came down to the water that ran through Echizen, softening the fibers and making this particular paper possible. If he moved to another region, he told us, he could not make the same paper there. The work was inseparable from its environment.

What I initially took for humility was actually a statement of fact.

In the end, Iwano invited me to photograph him. I watched him alongside his family, cleaning strips of kozo bark and walking me through a process refined over generations. Yet what stayed with me wasn’t the act of making paper itself. It was the realization that nearly everything he did would disappear into someone else’s work.

An artist creates an image—perhaps a photograph or a woodblock print. A printer understands how to work with washi and transfers the image to paper. The papermaker stands behind all of them, creating the surface itself. Each is essential, but only one is likely to be known.

And perhaps that is what makes papermaking stand out when I think about all the other crafts I have documented.

A potter usually signs the bottom of a bowl. A woodworker stamps a box. A blacksmith leaves a mark on a blade. Their names, especially in this modern moment, are inseparable from the object.

Paper rarely affords the same luxury. It exists largely in service of something else.

In that sense, papermaking may represent the ultimate dissolution of ego in craft. The better the paper, the more seamlessly it becomes part of the image itself.

I had traveled across Japan looking for masters whose names were inseparable from their work. In Echizen, I found a Living National Treasure whose greatest achievement might be the opposite.

I am writing this while drinking a bitter Lavazza at the Girona airport the day before Father’s Day, slightly fatigued before another intra-European flight and thinking about the things we inherit from others without ever realizing we’re inheriting them.

My father spent much of his career in the commodities business, a path that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I eventually followed myself. I suspect he was often unfulfilled in that world, unhappy even.

Upon retirement, he threw himself wholeheartedly into art and making things with his hands. In many ways, it felt like he was finally giving shape to a part of himself that had always been there, one I had only seen in glimpses before.

It was the happiest I had ever known him.

A talented amateur photographer for many years, he put my first camera in my hands at a young age, a classic Canon AE-1, showed me the basics and then, without much more instruction, encouraged me to play with it.

That was largely his style. Always encouraging, never demanding. He would expose me to an interest or a passion and then let me take it from there.

Things were shown more than described.

Even now, at 82, he is constantly creating. Sculptural lighting, paintings and projects that seem to appear out of nowhere, often with no audience in mind beyond his own curiosity.

He gets deeply invested, puzzling through problems and returning to them again and again with a patience I could only dream of until a path forward begins to reveal itself.

I never harbored any grand ambitions around photography as a kid. But, like him, I eventually found myself returning to a more creative path after leaving the relative comfort of an office job.

Lately, I have been more aware of the similarities in how our lives have unfolded, and have begun to understand even more of what my father was actually giving me.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with Taka Yagi, the sixth generation at Kaikado, a tea caddy workshop in Kyoto. I first photographed his father more than 12 years ago now and have since had the opportunity to watch the next generation shape its future.

A few months ago, Taka and I were speaking about what he had learned from his dad when he made an observation I have not been able to stop thinking about.

“There’s something your father passes on that can’t be taught. You can’t see it. You just have to feel it.”

In a workshop, perhaps that means an intangible sense of judgment—like learning to recognize when an object is ready simply from the sound of a hammer striking its surface.

But that wasn’t what stayed with me.

It was something more abstract.

The way someone approaches a problem. Their persistence. Their curiosity. Their standards. Their particular way of moving through the world.

That’s what my father had been showing me all those years ago, and I am only now beginning to realize it.

I’m writing from Orly Airport today, taking a short breather and reflecting on the past ten days in Europe, with a few more still to go. This is perhaps a bit of a departure from the standard IPJ essay, but this trip was specifically organized around the ethos of In Practice and a number of thoughts have been rattling around in my head.

I started in Copenhagen, attending the excellent 3 Days of Design festival. I happened to go on a bit of a lark last year, and I credit it with reinvigorating my own push to more seriously document and understand craft around the world. Like most design festivals, it draws makers from everywhere, but unlike many others, much of it takes place in small studios, historic buildings and intimate spaces rather than large exhibition halls. There is a distinct sense of community and connection and, it must be said, Danish summer is pretty close to paradise.

Through Ark Journal, one of my favorite design publications, I visited the studio of glass artist and Loewe Craft Prize finalist Maria Koshenkova. There, I spontaneously ran into Georg Mengel, an engineer turned furniture maker who designed one of my favorite pieces in my own home, the MA Stool. After seeing Maria’s kinetic and organic glass work, we walked over to Georg’s small studio to look at some of his newest pieces.

Earlier that week, I had the opportunity to dine with my old friend Matt Orlando, whose restaurant ESSE was recently awarded its first Michelin star.

Matt’s work is as much a reflection of craft as anything I have encountered in Japan. Each dish arrives looking deceptively simple, but that simplicity conceals extraordinary amounts of forethought and preparation, sometimes days of work condensed into a few bites.

The paradox, of course, is that the more skill one possesses, the easier things appear.

The more time I spend around craftsmen, chefs and makers, the more I realize that the best work often rewards attention, revealing all the effort and years of practice often taken for granted at first glance.

From Copenhagen, I headed to Paris to interview some of my favorite artisans working in the luxury space. These conversations will eventually become a new feature on IPJ (more on that soon).

I spent an evening with renowned shoemaker Christophe Corthay, whose work, much like Matt Orlando’s cooking, contains immense difficulty within an elegant final form. Christophe spoke about the path dependency of shoemaking. Get an early step (for example, a tiny error while carving the last) even slightly wrong and, much like errant navigation while sailing, the entire process drifts off course.

The following morning, I visited Maison Bonnet, the legendary eyewear artisans who have been making bespoke glasses for clients ranging from Yves Saint Laurent and Le Corbusier to Pedro Pascal and Brad Pitt for nearly a century. We have collaborated before and I always enjoy spending time watching Franck Bonnet, the fourth-generation head of the house, work at his bench.

Luxury is an area I want to explore further in future essays, particularly as it relates to authorship, eco-systems and how certain forms of craft survive and evolve.

As I hustled toward the airport, I made one final stop to pick up a few loaves of bread at Jack Henry, a relatively new bakery run by 23-year-old American, Jack Kos. I’ve known Jack since he was about nine years old and have been amazed to watch him build a reputation for producing some of the most compelling bread in Paris. His commitment to whole and ancient grains and his obsessive focus on process place him in rarefied company.

Once again, I found myself returning to the same though that hit me hard during dinner at ESSE—the very best work often understates effort and judgement, which I think is one of the defining characteristics of mastery itself. Whether the end user realizes it or not, really doesn’t matter.

From Paris, I head to Barcelona and then London, with several more interviews to follow. I’ll return to the archives and more traditional profiles in the coming weeks.

Until then, wishing everyone a wonderful start to summer.

I put the cart before the horse in my first essay on tattooing in Japan, beginning with history, context and the deep connection to Japanese woodblock printing. Important, yes, but not the door through which I entered. That came through a tattoo artist named Horiren 1st.

Her studio is in Warabi, on the edge of Saitama, a working-class suburb with little to distinguish it from countless others ringing Tokyo. Not far from the train station, you turn down a narrow side street and find a small house, otherwise nondescript save for the Māori-inspired motifs painted across the exterior walls, a nod to Horiren’s interest in tattooing traditions from around the world.

Inside, the space is quiet in a way that takes a moment to register, at least in comparison to the tattoo parlors I had visited in places like New York or Havana. When Horiren is working by tebori, there is no mechanical hum of the tattoo gun, only the soft, repetitive tick, tick, tick of needles entering skin by hand. Her cat, Necoste, wanders through the room, only to be shooed away when he gets too close to the action. A small television murmurs in the background, an everyday soundtrack of Japanese daytime talk shows that sits in strange contrast with the concentration and almost ceremonial feeling in the room.

It was a far cry from the other ateliers I had spent time in across Japan, where objects are forged, formed or woven through a series of well-choreographed steps. Further still from the places I had come from before that: a corporate office, a trading floor, rooms defined by speed, intensity and the illusion of control.

Horiren is my entry point to a world few people see up close—my guide, a friend and the only person outside of a medical setting who has ever put a needle into my skin.

I had seen photographs of her before we met, and she is undeniably striking: small, monk-like (she is now an ordained Buddhist nun), her shaved head tattooed with waves and lightning. Still, it took nearly a year of back-and-forth before I was allowed into her studio with a camera. That first visit reset my understanding of what access and intimacy can mean in Japan, where so much still happens behind closed doors. I spent most of the day doing little more than watching.

A young man bearing the inked amulet of a Tokyo crime syndicate lay back as Horiren finished work on his chest using shamisenbori, a rare manual technique practiced by only a handful of tattooers in Japan. The motif itself was equally visceral: namakubi, or severed heads. Later, a father wearing a full back-piece completed over many years by Horiren arrived with his daughter for her first tattoo: a snake and lotus on her thigh.

“Her mom’s going to kill me,” he said, half-joking.

Horiren smiled and got to work.

I left buzzing, aware that it was a privilege to have been there at all. I came back almost immediately, this time without a translator, and again stayed the entire day. Horiren even brought me along to her barber appointment for a head shave. From there, I kept returning whenever I could.

Despite the language barrier, we fell into an easy friendship that has included some of my most memorable experiences in Japan: joining her team at Sanja Matsuri and carrying a multi-ton mikoshi through the streets of Tokyo; late-night gatherings where clients stripped down to reveal full-body tattoos; even a strangely innocent visit to what was described as an “old-lady strip club” on one of my birthdays. And then there were the long, silent hours spent together as she worked on my own body, something I never imagined for myself.

Even then, it took years before she sat for a proper interview. When she finally did, in 2019 for the London-based magazine Huck, we spoke for nearly eight hours through an extraordinarily patient friend who translated for us. Rather than reproduce that article here, I returned to those conversations and tightened them against the story I had already told, filling in what matters most.

Tattooing, Horiren told me, was the first thing she had ever chosen freely. Everything before it had been shaped more by necessity than desire.

She grew up in Kisarazu, in Chiba Prefecture, in a family that ran multiple businesses, from farming nori to repairing motorcycles. Her parents were strict, almost militaristic. Although she showed artistic talent early, her father did not believe art could provide a living. Determined to make her own way, she saved enough money to attend design school in Tokyo without her parents’ support.

She went on to work as both a graphic designer and mural artist, contributing to projects including the wildly popular Dragon Ball series before walking away to pursue tattooing.

The turning point came during a trip to Australia. After receiving several tattoos from flash sheets, she found herself in a Sydney pub speaking with a man who proudly showed her a design identical to one on her own body.

“I thought, ‘Holy fuck, I have the same tattoo as this guy?’”

On the flight home, she made a decision: she would become a tattoo artist and would only create original work.

That choice came at a cost. She did not tell her father how she was earning a living until she was thirty-three, leading to a rupture that lasted for years and only began to heal after her mother’s illness and death. Near the end of her life, her mother offered a simple form of permission: if you believe in what you are doing, that is enough.

The first time Horiren was properly paid for tattooing, the client was heading to prison. He wanted to be tattooed before he went inside and paid her well. The exchange stripped away any remaining romance. This was not about taste or trend. It was about marking a threshold.

One of the clearest distinctions Horiren makes is between art and craft. The artist, she says, works for themselves. The craftsperson works at the behest of another.

Tattooing, in her view, belongs firmly in the latter category.

Her responsibility is not self-expression so much as an obligation to the person in front of her and to the image they will live with long after she is gone. As she puts it, getting tattooed is “like buying a house”—a commitment that deserves time, seriousness and care. Originality matters, but it is secondary to technique and execution.

She did not set out to focus exclusively on traditional Japanese imagery. For years, she did whatever came through the door: skulls, tribal designs and biker motifs. This was less a matter of ideology than economic survival.

As word spread, low-level yakuza began to appear, first attempting to shake her down, later requesting work. Large traditional pieces followed. She learned the iconography the same way she learned everything else: by listening closely and taking responsibility for what she did not yet know. “My clients were my teachers,” she told me.

In many ways, Japanese tattooing is a direct continuation of the ukiyo-e tradition. The same verb, horu, is used for both carving woodblocks and tattooing the body. Motifs once cut into cherry wood and printed on paper by Hokusai and Kuniyoshi are translated instead onto living skin. However enduring they may appear, they are carried by a body that, like everything else, is just passing through.

Tebori, which the phrase “stick and poke” grossly oversimplifies, came later still.

Without a master to apprentice under, Horiren learned by being tattooed herself, watching closely and paying attention to technique. In effect, her own body became both sketchbook and classroom. She practiced linework and shading on her arms and legs.

Tebori is slow, physically demanding and unforgiving. By most estimates I have heard, a tattoo gun is three to four times faster. The results are different as well: less mechanically uniform, more painterly, at times almost three-dimensional.

Horiren never insists on the technique. She is perfectly happy to use a machine. All of the tattoos she has done on me, however, have been made by hand.

The technique serves the work, not the other way around.

Traditional Japanese tattooing is not designed to accommodate isolated fragments or mixed motifs in the way many Western tattoos do. The body is treated as a single, continuous field.

Horiren compares it to a kimono: conceived as a whole, not assembled piece by piece.

The work must also resolve through movement. A tattoo that only works when standing still has failed. Visibility is incidental. The true audience is the person carrying it and those closest to them.

After the earthquake and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, Horiren stopped tattooing altogether and spent a year volunteering in the affected regions.

One of her earliest clients died during that period. At his cremation, she watched the dragon she had tattooed disappear with his body.

Tattooing suddenly felt inadequate in the face of so much loss. As she put it, she was Japanese first, a tattoo artist second.

She returned to tattooing only after meeting a young man in Iwate Prefecture whose town had been almost entirely erased by the earthquake and tsunami; 700 of its 760 homes were destroyed. He had lost nearly everything, yet believed that a tattoo might give him the resolve to continue.

That encounter clarified something essential for her.

Tattooing is not an argument against impermanence.

It is one way of meeting it.

For most of its history, basket making in Japan occupied a utilitarian place in daily life. Baskets were used, worn out, replaced—designed for carrying fish or rice, hung in kitchens, barns and boats. Their makers were largely anonymous.

Basketry belonged to the world of mingei—folk craft shaped primarily by use, and technique passed on informally. Many baskets remained practical objects in which function outweighed form.

Bamboo was the ideal material—strong, flexible and fast-growing—but it demanded precision at every stage. Each stalk had to be split, shaved, dried and handled with care. As with any craft, skill accumulated slowly, through doing the same thing well over many years.

As Japan modernized and industrial production accelerated, plastic, metal and standardized containers gradually replaced many of the bamboo baskets once used in daily life. What had long been indispensable became increasingly unnecessary.

Over time, Japanese basketry began shifting away from utility, with two paths emerging. One leaned further toward refinement and ritual—baskets made for tea practice and flower arrangement, often incorporating lacquer and more elaborate surface treatment. The other moved toward sculptural expression, where bamboo became a medium for dramatic form suited to galleries and museums. Both paths preserved skill, keeping bamboo visible, while also marking the gradual emergence of authorship within traditions where the maker had long remained secondary.

At the same time, both paths represented a departure from basketry’s original role as a subtle, functional presence in everyday life.

It is within this landscape that Chifuyu Enomoto works.

In the summer of 2014, I visited him at his house and atelier deep in a bamboo forest in Ishikawa Prefecture. An old friend made the introduction and accompanied me to translate. As rain poured outside, Enomoto and his wife served us cold grapefruit soda and we spoke about his background before he settled in and began to work.

Enomoto is not part of a multigenerational lineage. His parents sold rice. He did not inherit a workshop or a name. He came to basket making indirectly, after years of travel and encounters with baskets from other cultures before deciding, without much explanation, that this was work he could commit to.

Traditionally, a bamboo basket is woven first and lacquered afterward. Form emerges and surface follows. Enomoto reverses that order, pioneering a technique in which each strip of bamboo is lacquered before it is woven. Only then does the basket take shape.

Lacquer transforms bamboo from a material defined by flexibility into one that resists correction and locks decisions in place. Weaving lacquered bamboo allows for no shortcuts. Every strand must be finished, every intersection resolved, before the object can exist. There is no cosmetic layer at the end. No moment where surface redeems structure.

The basket must succeed from the inside out.

Enomoto works with a wide range of bamboo varieties, some sourced from far beyond the forest that surrounds his home. Among the rarest are lengths salvaged from the ceilings of old shrines and temples, darkened over decades of incense smoke into deep brown and black tones impossible to reproduce artificially. Asked about pristine surfaces and perfect uniformity, he shrugs them off. “Clean baskets are boring,” he says.

Enomoto taught for five years at the urushi school in Wajima, one of Japan’s historic centers of lacquerware production, and has exhibited internationally, but he had no designated successor when I photographed him. His technique exists because he continues to practice it, day after day, piece after piece, without much concern for how it will be categorized or preserved.

When asked about inspiration, he demurs.

He describes what he does simply as making baskets.

On the eve of my recent fiftieth birthday, my mother—herself no stranger to an interesting life—asked which moments from the past half century had stayed with me most.

While there have been some pretty incredible memories, one experience came to mind almost immediately.

Floating off the coast of Mie Prefecture, watching a sixty-three-year-old woman disappear beneath the surface with nothing but a mask and a metal chisel.

The chance to dive with the Ama was uncertain from the start. A close friend from Osaka, Yuko Suzuki, pulled some strings to arrange a visit to the small coastal city of Toba, one of the communities where Ama divers were still active, and joined me as translator. She warned me in advance there was no guarantee the women would be working during our visit.

We stayed the night at a small guesthouse owned by one of the Ama I hoped to photograph, dining on massive amounts of sashimi and assorted seafood before bedding down on futons and waiting to see what morning would bring.

I woke the next day, still slightly hazy from sake, unsure whether the dive would happen.

I had wanted to photograph the Ama since I first learned of them—Japan’s mermaids, old images of pearl divers, woodblock prints of thriving fishing villages. Like so many of the people and places I was drawn to in Japan, they seemed to belong to another age.

When the call came that the women would be in the water, I grabbed the cheap mask and fins I’d purchased a few days before, a waterproof housing for my camera and headed down to the dock to watch them prepare.

A few weeks earlier I had been photographing the blacksmiths and toolmakers in Kyushu I wrote about in IPJ 04—craftsmen working at the edge of a way of life whose usefulness had begun to fade. Work like that often becomes heritage, then nostalgia, as the world that once required it moves on.

But tradition and modernity don’t always separate cleanly. Across Japan, more often than not, I have found the two living side by side: an exquisite fabric for kimono still woven and dyed by hand, the knifemakers of Sakai City forging world-class blades on century-old equipment, a tattoo artist building living tapestries without a machine.

The few remaining Ama occupy similar ground. Their numbers have shrunk and the economics of their trade are uncertain, but the practice remains in the hands of those for whom it still matters.

The waters of Matoya Bay near the fishing village of Osatsu are murky even in June. After an hour of treading water in only swim trunks, I begin to suspect showing up without a wetsuit was a mistake.

The thought vanishes when an older woman bursts through the surface a few meters to my left.

Her head is wrapped in white cloth tied tight like a nun’s habit. The mask looks decades out of date, like something from Jacques Cousteau or a Connery-era Bond film. Her face is obscured, but I’m pretty sure it’s my host, Sayuri Nakamura. She is sixty-three years old. In one hand she holds a sea urchin.

She gestures for me to swim closer and pulls a kaginomi from her belt—a long metal chisel used to steady against the rocks and pry abalone and urchin loose from the seafloor. Two quick movements and the shell is open, the orange flesh exposed.

We float there in the bay and eat it immediately, the sweetness of the uni mixing with the salt around us. If setting counts for anything, it is the best I have ever had.

She laughs at my momentary giddiness, flashes a smile bright with silver fillings and disappears beneath the surface again.

That morning Nakamura is joined by two friends: sixty-seven-year-old Sumiko Matsui and sixty-year-old Yoshino Uemura.

They move with the easy rhythm of people at home in the water: a deep breath, a glance toward the rocks below, then the dive.

For a moment the water is empty.

Then a head appears. Another breath. Another descent.

From above it looks almost casual.

It is not.

The divers sometimes call it the fifty-second battle: just enough time to pry a shell or two loose before the lungs begin to burn.

The risks are discussed matter-of-factly—shifting currents, depths of up to thirty feet, no room for carelessness. Each dive requires quick decisions: where to descend, which rock to check, whether the catch is worth the effort. A mistake can be fatal.

In recent years the Ama have appeared in documentaries, a popular NHK television series and the occasional magazine feature or photo essay. There is nostalgia attached to them now, the sense of something lingering from another era.

But the women I met in Osatsu were not performing for visitors. They were going to work.

One of them later told me diving was a steadying influence. When they were upset, they dove. When they felt unwell, they dove. The water offered refuge and a measure of independence.

The prizes are abalone, sea urchin, seaweed and occasionally octopus hidden among the rocks. For generations the Ama have harvested them this way, relying on strong lungs and experience rather than modern equipment.

Today the practice continues in a narrower form. Fewer divers remain and most work only a handful of days each month, supplementing their income with farming or tourism.

Diving no longer fills the calendar the way it once did, but it continues.

A few more dives follow before Matsui, perhaps noticing my lips turning blue, signals it is time to head back.

The women gather their equipment and begin the slow swim toward shore. On the beach they hoist everything onto their shoulders and start the short walk back to the Ama Goya, the small wooden clubhouse where divers rest, warm up and socialize after outings.

We stop at a freshwater tank near the local fish market to rinse salt from wetsuits and gear.

Matsui, the oldest of the group and clearly the ringleader, begins mugging for the camera. Suddenly the rinsing turns into something else. Buckets of water start flying. One woman splashes another, who retaliates immediately. Within seconds the scene dissolves into a small water fight.

They wave me over and before I can react a bucket of water lands squarely across my back. The women double over laughing.

Eventually the rinsing resumes. Wetsuits are hung to dry outside the Ama Goya and the day’s catch is sorted.

When I first began photographing workshops in Japan, I was drawn to handicraft—weavers, woodworkers, potters. It felt like the clearest expression of shokunin: people who had spent decades refining a single skill.

But the word has always carried a broader meaning. It can describe a train conductor, a cleaner—think of the movie Perfect Days—or even the person stocking shelves at a convenience store. The category matters less than the seriousness with which the work is approached.

Watching the Ama move through the water that morning, the idea felt especially clear. Free diving is dangerous. The margin for error is narrow. In that sense the discipline becomes a kind of concentration: small things done correctly, over and over again—the same accumulation of skill found in any craft.

Like the blacksmiths I had photographed days earlier in Kyushu, the Ama exist at the edge of an older way of life whose place in the modern world remains uncertain. Some chefs have rediscovered the value of hand-harvested seafood, relying on coastal foragers and divers as they might a truffle hunter, but the market remains small—unlikely to sustain many livelihoods.

The practice will continue, at least for a time. It will draw visitors, photographers and the occasional television crew. That attention may help keep it alive. But as the economic necessity fades, and age inevitably slows down those still diving, nostalgia—including my own—will almost certainly play a larger role in what survives.

In the waters off Osatsu, for now at least, the rhythm remains.

A breath.
A dive.
Then the long ascent back toward the light.

An earlier version of this story first appeared in Roads & Kingdoms.

I’ve been back from Japan for a few days and, as the jet lag fades, the gifts are unpacked and the laundry pile begins to shrink, I’m left reflecting on how quickly three weeks can pass when each day is filled with rich experiences and the dopamine hit of seeing old friends while eating as much yakitori as I can stomach. This was my twenty-sixth trip in fourteen years. It feels like both a lot and very little — a series of extended drop-ins that pale beside those who have spent their adult lives trying to better understand cities as opaque and layered as Tokyo or Kyoto.

Over the past few trips, I felt something unfamiliar and uncomfortable: some of the electricity of my early visits had faded. Things were beginning to feel, I hate to say it, routine. That realization scared me. If this place can’t move the needle, what possibly can? Had I changed, or had my relationship with Japan shifted in some unalterable way?

There’s no question first trips are easy to romanticize, and few cities hit me as hard as Tokyo did in those early days. I had a long-standing ritual of watching Lost in Translation the night before traveling to Japan because it always stoked my excitement, capturing a mix of wonder and total unfamiliarity filtered through the floating haze of jet lag. An aperitivo before the main course.

I’m smiling even writing this, thinking about getting chased out of the old Tsukiji market during an unsanctioned tour back in 2012, that ritual bowl of ramen right off the plane, Katsuji Daibo’s coffee — and don’t even get me started on listening bars — to say nothing of the feeling of photographing on the street, which came as close to a flow state as anything I’ve experienced.

It was a heady brew of fatigue, tuna fat and late-night convenience store canned highballs stacked alongside kindness, deep intention, a reverence for nature and an appreciation of attention to detail that I rarely see elsewhere and find deeply moving.

When the electricity of all that started to fade, I mistook it for loss. It was destabilizing, as if a foundation had shifted. A low point came last fall, walking the streets of Osaka with a fellow long-time traveler and lover of Japan. We both confessed to wrestling with the same high-class problem while, like a pair of junkies, searching for something that could recreate that first high. Had the drug finally worn off — and worse, never to work again?

My uneasiness seemed to peak last November. Between then and now, I started writing In Practice and revisiting old journals, photographs and interviews. Seeing my own journey through a different lens revealed an unexpected shift. As that perspective deepened, I discovered something subtler, but more valuable: a second kind of wonder, built less on the initial rush than on continuity and the rewards of return.

Early on, the endorphin hits came rapid-fire — a magical bite or a moment captured on camera, skeleton keys opening a succession of hidden doors, the thrill of access to new worlds. Today, they come through relationships and time, appearing in places novelty alone could never explain: in rooms shaped by years of practice, in seeing a craft handed down from one generation to the next, in friendships that had, without fanfare, crossed into their second decade and in the strange pleasure of realizing how time had been working on all of us while I wasn’t looking.

In the last installment of In Practice, I wrote about the ceramic artist Moriyasu Kimura and my friendship with Kyoto-based gallerist Robert Yellin. After the article ran, Robert suggested we visit Kimura-san to bring him a printed copy and show him the photographs from that shoot twelve years ago. It’s busy season in Kyoto, but Robert found a free window and we drove out to the suburbs to visit Kimura, now ninety-one and planning to keep pushing until at least one hundred, he tells us over tea.

So much creative work flashes briefly on a screen, only to be swallowed by the next thing in a never-ending stream of next things. There was something deeply satisfying about translating the article into Japanese and watching Kimura read it. And he isn’t slowing down. In fact, he has just developed yet another new, mind-blowing glaze.

The day after our visit, the photography festival Kyotographie opened. I’ve attended on and off for more than a decade and have had the pleasure of sharing some of my own work there as well. The same group of friends has converged for the past three years, and it has become something of a tradition to experience it together. What makes Kyotographie so special is the chance to see world-class art installed in some of Kyoto’s historic buildings, many open to the public only during the festival.

It struck me that two of the featured artists this year, Daido Moriyama and Anton Corbijn, both embrace a certain imperfection in their photos. Because of that, they feel more alive, more intimate. Both have inspired me since I first began taking photography seriously, and I’m more drawn to rough, mysterious images now than ever. Not simply as a reaction to how easy it has become to dial up something polished and tuned, but because the emotion of those pictures transcends perfection. Not everything is immediately legible. Some images require the viewer’s participation before they reveal themselves, and there’s value in that dialogue.

Corbijn’s work in particular inspired me to reload my old Leica M6 with Kodak Tri-X and see what might happen when I stopped trying to control every element of a portrait. I felt a small surge of excitement at what might come of it.

In between exhibitions and socializing, I found a short window on a rainy afternoon to visit the Kawai Kanjiro House Museum. Kanjiro was a potter and a central figure in Japan’s mingei (or folk-craft) movement, which began just over one hundred years ago. The idea of the “unknown craftsman,” and that handmade objects carry something of the person who made them, sits at the heart of that philosophy. The movement itself emerged in response to rapid modernization and the rise of industrial production. In refocusing on process, material and use in the face of technological and societal change, it’s hard not to see parallels to our current moment, a century later.

On my last day in Tokyo, I had a quick coffee with an old friend I first met thirteen years ago, when she had just moved from Australia to Japan. In that time, she has woven herself into the fabric of the country, working deeply with craft, design and creative culture. On parting, we reminisced for a moment about those early days and the fact that we’re both still here, still inspired and still learning.

From the outside, process can look effortless. From the inside, it is shaped less by novelty than repetition: the same streets, the same gestures, the same people. This is how trust is built, how vision sharpens, how an acquaintance becomes a friend and, over time, family. Going deeper rarely feels dramatic while it is happening. More often, it simply means continuing to show up. And I’m finding a more lasting pleasure in what that reveals.

I’m writing from rainy Kyoto, where the city feels especially alive this week—late spring tourist crowds mixing with a run of art and cultural events. Theaster Gates has just opened Glorious Robe, a collaboration with the storied textile house Hosoo, founded in 1688. One of my favorite photography festivals, Kyotographie, begins this weekend.

Before sitting down to write, I visited the Kawai Kanjiro House Museum—a temple to craft and to the philosophy of the Mingei movement. It’s impossible for me to be here and not feel deeply connected to the history of makers and objects in this place, with ceramics looming especially large.

That said, I’m surprised it’s taken this many journal entries to finally bring up pottery. Before I began traveling to Japan in earnest, I didn’t give the ceramic arts much thought. I understood their cultural significance mostly through photographing tea ceremony and kaiseki meals while working on Rice Noodle Fish, but that was the extent of it.

Had I not been introduced to the Kyoto-based gallerist Robert Yellin, it’s unlikely I would have the appreciation—or the steadily growing collection—that I do today. I’m half-convinced he pushed me toward a daily matcha habit just to accelerate my addiction to chawan (tea bowls). Like any good dealer, Robert eased me in gently: a sake cup here, a vase there and suddenly I was hooked.

To understand how ceramics became a meaningful part of my life, though, I need to go back to the summer of 2014.

I set out on a two-month journey across Japan, working north from Kyushu toward craft-rich Ishikawa and eventually Kyoto. I planned to spend about two weeks in the ancient capital, splitting time between workshops within the city limits and more rural studios across Shiga and Fukui.

I recently rediscovered my handwritten journal from that stretch. Despite my borderline illegible penmanship, a few things stood out immediately. First: almost from the beginning of the trip, I was dealing with intermittent bouts of intense stomach pain, likely from a parasite picked up on a reporting assignment in Haiti shortly before leaving for Japan. Nearly every entry begins with some variation of woke up feeling like shit… Second: several of my Kyoto shoots were suddenly in jeopardy due to miscommunications with a fixer, and I was terrified I might not get what I came for. One entry from that stretch, summarized for decorum’s sake, essentially reads:

fuck me, why am I doing this? I feel very alone…

It was in that moment—physically depleted, mentally frayed and overly self-critical—that I found myself in Robert’s gallery, then located in a quiet old tea house at the foot of Daimonji, on the eastern edge of Kyoto. The space carried its own history. Jazz legend Chick Corea had once lived there. David Bowie was rumored to have passed through for tea ceremony during his Japan-obsessed years. But at the time, all I really knew was that I was exhausted, lonely and in need of a friendly face.

Robert must have read that immediately. Despite barely knowing me, he stepped in to resolve the fixer issues and, generously, suggested we visit one of his favorite artists—a man named Moriyasu Kimura—offering to translate if needed.

Kimura-san would turn eighty that year. He had been working with clay since he was twenty. When I asked how long it took before he felt satisfied with his work, he laughed and answered plainly: “I’m not satisfied at all, even now.” It didn’t feel like modesty, just a refusal to stop pushing.

I’ve tried to keep In Practice from becoming overly object-focused, but describing what Kimura does with glaze makes it hard not to fanboy a little. His surfaces feel less like decoration than revelation—as if you’re peering through an interstellar telescope at something mid-formation. I see constellations. Astral dust trails. Molten planets. Not a finished universe, but something still coming into being.

The vessels themselves are classical in form—the kind that wouldn’t look out of place in a tea room centuries ago. What sets the work apart is the glazing technique known as tenmoku, an incredibly volatile choice.

Tenmoku is an iron-rich glaze that came into Japan from China more than a thousand years ago, alongside tea culture. It’s prized for its depth and darkness, but also known for its unpredictability. Small shifts in minerals, kiln atmosphere or temperature can radically alter the outcome. Even master potters can’t fully predict what will emerge once the kiln cools.

Kimura embraces that uncertainty. Rather than attempting to reproduce historical tenmoku surfaces, he has spent decades developing his own glazes through repetition and failure. In that first interview, he spoke openly about mistakes—ruined pots, adjusted recipes, firing again, letting experience accumulate slowly. “You learn from the failures,” he said. “And then you keep going.”

What struck me most was how little interest he seemed to have in the finished object as an achievement. The work, he explained, only reveals itself after the firing—until then, even he doesn’t fully know what it will become.

The kiln, in this sense, is not a tool of control so much as a collaborator.

As a young man, Kimura studied historical Chinese ceramics deeply, but he was adamant about not imitating them. “I’m not trying to reproduce the past,” he told me. “If I did that, it wouldn’t be my work.”

Robert and I returned to visit Kimura again in the fall of 2024. It was a friendly pop-in rather than a formal photo session. Later, I rediscovered a video of us giggling like kids as Kimura showed his most recent work in preparation for an upcoming museum show. He was nearing ninety then—still creating and still remarkably generous. At one point, he casually handed me a chawan, saying simply, in English, “Present.” It was almost certainly worth more than I was comfortable accepting. To him, that seemed beside the point.

The bowl now holds a place in my daily routine, glowing green when matcha contrasts with the glaze. Through it, I get to interact, in some small way, with Kimura-san each morning. Most people don’t know the hands behind the objects they use. But something of that presence remains, consciously or not.

Kimura-san has no apprentice. No declared successor. When he stops working, much of what he’s learned over seventy years of accumulated experimentation will stop with him.

But the work doesn’t vanish. It moves—into tea rooms, into galleries, into hands. Into routines.

For now, he continues working and that seems to be enough.

I can trace my initial interest in traditional Japanese tattooing to a single, clear moment: encountering Martha Cooper’s photo book Tokyo Tattoo 1970. The black-and-white photographs—studios from fifty or so years ago, humble tools worn smooth by use, work executed entirely by hand—felt instantly familiar and yet totally alien at the same time.

The hallmarks of these tattoo parlors aligned with time I had already spent in other Japanese workshops, places where technique changed slowly and continuity mattered more than novelty. But the tattoos themselves captivated me just as much as the process, leaping off the body with an intensity I hadn’t seen before.

At the time, I didn’t know whether many artists still practiced tebori—the manual method of tattooing I had seen in Cooper’s photos. I reached out to Horiyoshi III, the only Japanese tattoo artist whose name I knew, to ask if I might visit his studio. He told my interpreter that once he discovered the tattoo gun, the manual process had become far less appealing. His health wasn’t what it once was either, and he wasn’t working much.

Tebori, I would later learn, is brutally labor-intensive: slower, physically demanding and unforgiving. But it was precisely that resistance—the refusal of efficiency—that made it impossible for me to ignore. A tattoo done by hand feels closer to a painting, with softer lines and an almost three-dimensional depth than something mechanically applied. You see a version of this today in the popularity of stick-and-poke, though scaled nowhere near the complexity of traditional Japanese work. Tebori, for skill alone, belonged alongside every other craft I had spent years documenting.

Finding access, however, was another matter. Tattooing—especially in the most traditional motifs, often referred to as irezumi or wabori—lives in a very different cultural space in Japan. It exists far from prying eyes, shaped by legal ambiguity and deep-rooted taboo, and historically tied to the criminal underworld (though no longer a requirement of membership).

Through friends and fixers, I began asking around. I was told there were only a handful of artisans still practicing the old techniques. Somewhat to my surprise, one of them was a woman who had taken the artist name Horiren 1st. It was through her that I gained entry to a previously hidden world.

I’ll return to Horiren in depth in Part II. For now, what matters is the larger context her work sits within.

Traditional tattooing does not occupy a comfortable place in the official narrative of Japanese craft. It is not recognized as intangible cultural heritage. There is no Living National Treasure of tebori. Until recently, tattooing existed in a legal gray zone; as late as 2015, artists in the Kansai region were arrested for practicing. That case eventually reached Japan’s Supreme Court, paving the way—at least partially—toward formal recognition.

Legal status, however, tells only part of the story. Cultural stigma remains pervasive. In 2012, the mayor of Osaka required all 38,000 city employees to disclose whether they had tattoos, arguing they undermined trust in civil servants. Those bearing ink—particularly traditional irezumi—are often barred from public baths and gyms and can face discrimination in other areas of life.

While tattoos have become more visible with Japan’s tourism boom and more broadly accepted as personal expression, the most traditional forms remain deliberately hidden—designed to be revealed selectively and often conceived as a single, unified composition across the body.

And this is where the deeper lineage becomes unavoidable.

Tattooing flourished during the Edo period, drawing from the same visual world as ukiyo-e woodblock prints, kabuki and serialized literature—most notably the wildly popular Chinese epic Suikoden. The audience was largely the same: those outside the ruling classes but deeply invested in visual culture.

As Donald Richie writes in The Japanese Tattoo, Japan stands alone in this regard:

“Other than in Japan, there is no instance of tattooing becoming a prevailing social fashion (for certain levels within the society), and there is likewise no example of tattooing becoming so unified, so imaginative, and so technically assured.”

The relationship between tattooing and woodblock printing goes beyond subject. Both rely on line first, followed by large areas of flat color, with strikingly similar approaches to shading. The tools differ, but the logic of image-making is closely aligned.

Tattooing, like ukiyo-e, was never court art. It was popular art, produced for a broad, working audience and regarded by official Japan as subversive precisely because of that popularity.

The linguistic connection reinforces this continuity. Hori, from the verb horu (to carve), links tattooing directly to woodblock printing, and appears as a prefix in many artists’ names—Horiren, Horikazu, Horiyoshi. Both techniques involve pressure, repetition and an intimate understanding of line. The difference is the medium. Tattooing replaces wood with flesh, paper with skin. The surface breathes. It flinches. It gains and loses weight, scars and ages. If wood and stone are unforgiving, the human body is infinitely more so.

This shift in surface is where the contradiction sharpens.

A work like Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—a mass-produced image originally made for popular consumption—now sells for seven figures, sanctified by museums and collectors as cultural heritage. Framed, conserved and elevated, it is safely admired at a distance.

Yet when the same visual language—waves, dragons, heroes, turbulence, flow—is carved into the human body, it becomes taboo. The image does not change. The lineage does not disappear. What changes is the surface. Paper can be archived. Bodies cannot (though there are apocryphal stories of tattooed skin being sold). Ink on paper can be owned, traded, insured. Ink in flesh must be lived with.

This is where the line between the sacred and the profane is drawn—not by imagery, but by embodiment.

Ukiyo-e, once associated with courtesans and kabuki actors, was eventually purified by time and distance. Tattooing, bound permanently to the body and to the present tense, resists that sanitization. It cannot be separated from the life that carries it.

To inscribe these images onto the body is to collapse art and life into the same space. The tattooed body moves, ages, sweats and suffers. It enters baths, public spaces and workplaces—it refuses containment.

Head to Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood in late May and, if you time it right, you can catch the Sanja Matsuri—one of the few moments where traditional irezumi appears openly, carried through the streets on the bodies of those who wear it. For a few days, what is usually concealed is exposed—full-body suits revealed as men in loincloths shoulder multi-ton shrines through dense, heaving crowds.

Here, the boundary gives way. What emerges is the practice, made visible: a form that has persisted for centuries, drawn from the same visual language as Japan’s most celebrated prints, executed by hand and embedded permanently into the most unstable material imaginable.

Ukiyo-e translated from paper to skin, from the floating world to the living body.

I should note that the ukiyo-e images paired with my photos are courtesy of Ronin Gallery in New York, longtime friends and third-generation dealers with one of the largest collections of woodblock prints in North America.

In 2014, I made my first serious attempt at long-term documentary work, something I was then calling The Shokunin Project. It would take me across Japan for much of the spring and early summer of that year.

I started in Miyakonojo, a small city on the island of Kyushu, with Reimei Yokoyama, a traditional bowmaker (yumi-shi). I arranged the shoot through a local prefectural office that helped coordinate access and translation. We met for the first time at Yokoyama-san’s workshop, exchanging what would become a familiar set of formalities before starting. I was figuring it out on the fly.

I had worked out the bones of a plan for a series of photo-shoots before leaving New York, but carried a nagging sense of being out of my depth—hoping what I lacked in experience I could make up for with curiosity, openness and a bit of luck.

Miyakonojo is small enough that after arriving, I quickly realized I had little hope of finding a restaurant with an English menu. Dinner, without the aid of today’s modern translation tools, felt like the first test. I remember walking into a tiny robata joint, smiling, repeating omakase and hoping the chef would understand that I would eat whatever he put in front of me. Fortunately, he did and I ate incredibly well.

Reimei—his craft name; his given name is Hiroshi—comes from a lineage of bowmakers. His father was Reimei before him, and his grandfather before that. The name is inherited to preserve the line rather than the individual. Whether his son would eventually take it was undecided at the time of my visit.

A single bow takes roughly three months to shape, but that figure is eclipsed by a much longer timeline: the materials must dry for several years before they can even be used. He works on dozens of bows at once because each moves at its own pace. The labor is physical and exacting—pounding, bending, pressing, testing for resistance—all guided by hand and feel rather than machines, which he insists would weaken the bow.

When asked what he thinks about while working—a question I posed in every early shoot, usually framed with an almost spiritual bent—Reimei offers no poetry. He concentrates on making a good bow, resisting philosophical framing and redirecting the conversation to materials and balance. Kyūdō, the discipline for which the bow is made, matters—but his attention remains on the object itself: bamboo, sumac, glue and string. The bow as a system.

I had intended this to be a short, image-forward essay—a simple profile of an early subject. Revisiting the photographs, however, sent me back to my journals, and to a version of myself I barely recognize. My notes are blunt. Be more assertive. You got what you wanted, but it could have been better. I sound like someone who believed this was the one shot—the only chance to justify being there. The pressure was intense, and entirely self-imposed. I was trying to extract something rather than let it emerge.

Looking back now, most of that pressure is invisible. There are images I genuinely love. Others feel like necessary steps. What’s clearer to me is that these early essays for In Practice have become as much a record of my own apprenticeship as they are of anyone else’s mastery. Watching Reimei work—patiently, repetitively and without flourish—I’m reminded that the finished piece has a way of hiding the friction behind it.

The irony is that I thought this shoot—and that subsequent two-month stretch in studio after studio across Japan—was both the beginning and the end.

More than a decade later, I’m still here, still learning how to navigate a small workshop, how to see, when to wait and when to get out of the way—hanging around just long enough for the work to leave its mark.

Why do some crafts endure and evolve while others recede into history? The question emerged during my first visits to workshops in Japan and has followed me ever since. Nowhere is it more visible than in a room where a lifetime of skill sits on the edge of disappearance.

In those rooms, transmission was almost impossible to ignore. I asked the people I photographed about apprentices and what might come next. The answers registered, but the moment kept moving. I was trying to hold a conversation, often through a translator, while documenting what was unfolding in front of me—sometimes seeing a technique I had never encountered before. Only later, reviewing the images and transcripts, or simply reflecting on the day’s work, did the weight of those exchanges settle in. In a few of those rooms, I may have seen something nearing its end.

What struck me most was how plainly many craftspeople spoke about whether their practice would outlast them. Some had taken on apprentices who stayed briefly, then left. Others were still hoping someone might commit to the long arc. The stakes were not always the same. A renowned multi-generational ceramics studio or a knife maker with myth and demand behind them occupies a different position than a blacksmith producing everyday tools. Nearly everyone I met wanted the work to continue and was prepared to teach it, even if finding someone willing to stay was difficult.

It’s easy to assume endurance is the measure of value, especially when you’re face to face with someone who has spent fifty or sixty years honing a skill and would love to see it survive. But the reality is that across Japan, and around the world, workshops shutter not because the work was poor, but because the world that once required it has changed.

Materials evolve. Apprentices try, then leave when things do not come easily. Children pursue their own paths. A tool that once justified a lifetime of training can now be made faster, cheaper and well enough by a machine. This is not a failure of tradition. It is its limit.

And not every form of work occupies the same place in the cultural imagination. A hand-forged knife for a sushi master carries a different weight than a farming implement (even if the technical DNA is similar). Some tools gather stories around them. Others depend almost entirely on use.

Museums can preserve an object long after its function has receded, but markets are far less patient. They respond to what remains necessary, or what becomes necessary again in a different form. Craft survives through use, meaning—or both. When neither condition holds—when usefulness fades and nothing new replaces it—even the most disciplined work eventually falls silent.

Over time I learned that Japanese craftspeople often describe this tension using two different words: dento and denshō.

Dento refers to tradition as recognized form—named, codified and sometimes protected. It is tradition as structure: the kind of designation that can elevate a tea bowl, lacquerware or a style of weaving into something formally preserved.

Denshō, by contrast, describes the act of transmission itself: knowledge passed from one person to another through observation, repetition and time. Where dento can be designated, denshō must be received.

The two do not always move in unison. A craft can endure as dento long after denshō has faltered. And denshō can fail not through neglect, but because the circumstances that once sustained long apprenticeship have changed.

This issue of In Practice is not about preservation. It is about limits—about what survives, and what does not, when usefulness, authorship and time fall out of alignment. The photographs that follow document a small group of blacksmiths and toolmakers on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. Some are no longer working. Some may no longer be alive. What remains is the work itself, and the record of the conditions under which it was made.

Tadaki Kono

Tadaki Kono worked as a blacksmith in Ōita for nearly fifty years and was a local fixture. Over the past decade, whenever I mentioned his name, I was met with the same flicker of recognition: “ah yes…such a cool guy.”

Before opening his own workshop, he spent a decade training as a swordsmith under masters in several regions of Japan. His education was deliberately broad. He forged, shaped and finished everything himself, never outsourcing a single step.

People came to learn from him. None stayed. His children chose different lives.

By the time I met him in 2014, he was known less for swords than for knives and farming implements—tools still used in small plots where rice is planted and harvested by hand. He could forge a simple sickle in roughly twenty minutes.

The speed was not efficiency so much as accumulation: decades of judgment compressed into a repeatable act.

The most recent information I could find suggests that, as of the spring of 2025, his workshop has closed. The phone is disconnected. What remains is the work—precise, resolved and inseparable from the person who made it.

The Yoshida Brothers

A few days after visiting Kono-san, I was in Shimabara, near Nagasaki, with the Yoshida brothers. Judging by the photographs, they appear to have discovered some kind of fountain of youth. Noriyuki was ninety-two at the time. Kitai was eighty-six. Kenji, eighty-three.

Their workshop traced its history back nine generations—possibly to the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637, though I cannot confirm that in my recordings. All three learned from their father. Instruction came through observation rather than explanation.

You watched, you tried, you failed and you tried again.

Even after ten years, they said, they still felt like beginners. Only after forty did they begin to feel a measure of confidence. Even then, they insisted they were still learning.

Their work was practical: agricultural implements and cutting tools made for daily use. There was no sense that the work required reinvention, only that it be done properly.

Given their age in 2014, it seems unlikely they are still working. I found references online to a knife maker in Shimabara who may be a relative, though I could not confirm the connection.

What I remember most from that shoot was the atmosphere in the workshop—a lightness, a shared rhythm between the brothers as they worked. The portrait of Noriyuki remains one of my favorite images.

I’ve been listening through old interview tapes—conversations recorded more than a decade ago, when I first set out in earnest to photograph craftspeople in Japan. At the time, I was calling it The Shokunin Project, which felt suitably serious. What strikes me now is less what my subjects said than what I was trying to get from them—especially a baked-in reverence for their own practice. Hearing my voice on tape is a particular discomfort. Worse, in retrospect, is the slightly cringey subtext—I can hear the earnestness, the assumptions, the naïveté of constantly reaching to connect the work to something larger.

Those assumptions didn’t come out of nowhere.

They began forming during my first sustained run of workshop visits, while I was in Japan working on Rice Noodle Fish for Matt Goulding and Anthony Bourdain. The project focused on food and food shokunin, but somewhere along the way it occurred to me that if we were profiling chefs at this level, we should also look at the tools they relied on. Knives, especially. Someone mentioned Sakai City, just outside Osaka—famous, possibly legendary, for its cutlery. I was told I’d be visiting a “factory,” which I took to mean something conventional: rows of workers, a production line, maybe a glimpse of the kaizen manufacturing philosophy I’d learned about in business school.

What I found instead were small workshops—sometimes a single room cocooning one person—each responsible for a narrow part of the knife-making process. Forging. Sharpening. Finishing. Equipment worn smooth by decades of use. Machines that looked unchanged for a century. From these modest spaces came some of the most sought-after chef’s knives in the world. It hardly made sense that any of this could still exist in a country as relentlessly modern as Japan.

I remember standing there with my camera, barely able to fit alongside a translator, overwhelmed by the contrast between the scale of the place and the scale of its reputation. That visit to Sakai did something to me, much the way Daibo’s coffee once had, pulling me deeper down a rabbit hole. It accelerated a feeling I’d already been circling: that what I was seeing wasn’t just skilled work, but something closer to devotion. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but I had the posture. Reverence—not just respect, but something approaching awe.

By the time I began systematically photographing and recording longer interviews, that posture was already fixed. I had studied the literature, steeping myself in Sōetsu Yanagi’s seminal work The Unknown Craftsman. I’d built a vocabulary around craft—the tension between function and beauty, the idea that handmade objects carry the heartbeat of their maker, that the work might even possess a spiritual dimension. It didn’t hurt that many of the people I photographed seemed almost monk-like in both focus and lightness, a spirit I rarely saw in the beaten-down salarymen I drank alongside in Osaka’s tachinomiya. Craft as religion felt plausible.

I went into those early shoots thinking I was prepared, thinking I understood mastery. I had read deeply, thought carefully, built a framework that elevated what these men and women did into something nearly sacred. In the photographs, that reverence still holds. The hands feel charged. The process carries weight. Rendering the work as almost heroic became part of my visual language.

But those first interviews tell a quieter story.

Again and again, I can hear myself on tape sprinting toward meaning—toward philosophy, legacy, intention—attempting, in retrospect, to lead the witness. My subjects answered plainly. They talked about materials, routines, mistakes. Trial and error. Fallow periods. The feast-and-famine cycle of a creative life I know all too well from my own practice. They described their work in ordinary terms: meaningful, yes, but without exultation. Not humility as performance, but as fact.

At the time, I didn’t quite know what to do with that gap. In some cases, I didn’t even recognize it until much later, when I returned to the original Japanese and compared it with the translation I’d been working from. Looking at it now—still a little aghast at my eagerness—I can see that I was standing at the beginning of something my subjects were already deep inside. I was encountering their work for the first time. They were making it for the ten-thousandth.

Only recently has it occurred to me that the refrain I heard so often—it takes ten years just to learn the technique—applies as much to my experience as to theirs. Apprentices begin by watching, lingering at the edges, absorbing the work sideways through repetition and proximity rather than instruction. In much the same way, my own education unfolded through osmosis: years spent standing quietly in workshops, watching movements punctuated by the click of a shutter.

I don’t imagine I’ll ever stop being awed by what I see in these ateliers. As much as I cringe listening to myself on those early tapes, they mark the beginning. I still feel a thrill walking into a new studio for the first time—seeing a technique up close, watching the work and what it reveals about the person behind it. But the ordinariness I hear in those original interviews makes sense now in a way it couldn’t in 2014. It isn’t a revelation. Just practice doing what practice does—slowly, incrementally adjusting the way I see.

“I thought the craftsman’s job was to erase individuality—but I realized you can’t.”

What could be more humble than a wooden bucket? Designed for rice preparation, food storage, or splashing about in a public bath, it’s hard to imagine an object more functional—or mundane. It is also nearly obsolete. A few generations ago, Kyoto supported hundreds of cooperages producing these utilitarian vessels. Today, only a handful of workshops remain.

One of them is run by Shuji Nakagawa, a fourth-generation maker of oke (wooden buckets), whose work recasts an ancient form in contemporary terms while still transmitting the technique and spirit of the original craft. “Tradition is not preserving the past,” he says. “It is meeting the present. If it doesn’t change, it won’t survive.”

I chose to open In Practice with Nakagawa-san not only because our time together remains one of my favorite shoots visually, but because he thinks deeply about the relationship between art and craft. His work deliberately blurs that line—simultaneously modern and traditional—balancing singular expression with perfectly reproduced form.

The boundary between artist and craftsman is a tension I return to often, especially as the handmade confronts a culture that rewards speed and frictionless consumption. In working with Nakagawa, I found someone who could move the craft forward without loosening his grip on technique—giving an object once purely utilitarian new weight.

His workshop—tiny, redolent of cedar and cypress, lined with tools handed down from his father and grandfather—feels like stepping into an alternate dimension where time slows down. We fell into an almost choreographed rhythm: him working, me photographing, in a space barely larger than my bathroom. As the wood was shaved and shaped, incense-like aromas filled the small atelier as they might in a Zen temple during meditation practice. It was an easy scene for me to romanticize. The work itself resists that. It is physical, repetitive and exacting.

Nakagawa, internationally known for his more sculptural and conceptual work, comes from a serious lineage of craftsmen. His father was designated a Living National Treasure for bucket-making, an honor awarded to an individual practitioner charged with preserving a specific craft within Japan’s intangible cultural heritage.

By the time Nakagawa came into his own, demand for handmade wooden buckets had already declined sharply. He studied sculpture and photography at university, searching for a personal voice outside the inherited gravity of his lineage. This was less a rejection of the family business than an exploration of other forms of expression. Through that process, he came to realize that what he loved most was making things regardless of medium, and that being born into a “craft family” was, in retrospect, a kind of luck.

Rather than pursue the volume-driven production that sustained earlier generations and their apprentices, he reoriented his practice around structure, material and technique. The work slowed, intentionally—what his father and grandfather might have produced in a year could take ten. During our shoot, he was working with semi-preserved cedar buried somewhere between one and three thousand years ago, using tools that have changed little in five centuries.

A single bucket might require months of preparation before shaping even begins. The wood must first be split and dried for up to half a year. By then, it is no longer soft or forgiving; it behaves more like stone than timber. The physical demands are considerable. Nakagawa was drenched in sweat by the end of our session. And yet nothing ever appears rushed. Every surface matters, inside and out, even those rarely seen.

In many of my early interviews with shokunin across Japan, I asked some version of the same naïve question: How long does it take to master this skill? While the answer was almost always ten years, the framing feels inadequate in retrospect—mastery of technique suggests arrival, when in reality, it’s just the starting point for the path that follows. A few craftsmen, however, answered more poetically. Nakagawa was one of them. A dedicated hiker, he framed mastery not as a destination but as a recurring illusion:

“You think you’ve reached the summit. But when you look, there’s another ridge beyond it. That repeats again and again.”

The idea for this journal has been lodged in some corner of my mind for a long time—more than a decade, at least—waiting for the right combination of patience, nerve and lived experience to coalesce. While I’ve written the occasional article, I generally feel more at home behind the camera, hovering just outside the frame, watching how things unfold and letting the images speak for themselves. Writing a personal journal around these experiences feels like stepping out from that position of safety, which probably explains why it took so long to start.

Over the past 12 years, though, something accumulated. Through a long, bordering-on-obsessive interest in craft and process-driven work, I’ve built an archive: photographs, interviews, notes and long afternoons spent in workshops where time seems to slow down. Nearly all of it centers on solitary artisans, people both preserving and quietly pushing forward ancient traditions, breathing life into many of the everyday objects we often treat as disposable.

In Practice is my attempt to share this work more broadly, under my own terms: to revisit those rooms and conversations, to draw lessons on creativity and repetition and to reckon with my own ideas about craft, art, the nobility of work and the value of things made by hand. Before getting there, though, some context is probably useful.

My personal technicolor, Dylan-goes-electric moment arrived over hand-drip coffee.

I started my post-graduate professional life as a physical coffee trader, trained to cup as part of a corporate apprenticeship. While most of what I tasted was destined for the big red Folgers can, or maybe Dunkin’ Donuts (this was just before the Third Wave coffee boom) I still felt reasonably assured I could hold my own with most coffee nerds. That confidence lasted about ten years.

In February 2012, I was ushered into a modest second-floor coffee shop in Tokyo’s Omotesando neighborhood. Behind the counter was an elderly man named Katsuji Daibo. He moved slowly, deliberately—sifting, roasting, selecting beans—before hand-dripping them through what looked something like an old sock. The whole process took close to twenty minutes. What emerged, though, was borderline hallucinogenic alchemy. The flavors I’d spent years trying to name with confidence—fruit, cocoa, spice and acidity—showed up fully formed, impossible to miss. It felt like tasting coffee for the first time.

And Daibo wasn’t at all precious about it. Customers could add milk if they wanted. There was no sermon attached, just care (joy, even), meditative repetition and a deep familiarity with both the work and the raw material. Each cup was simultaneously the accumulated wisdom of thousands of hours and also just a simple, unfussy coffee dripped through a sock.

Instead of sending me further down a coffee rabbit hole (which could have easily happened), the experience had a deeper effect. It made me wonder where else I might find that same level of attention and devotion to a single thing done well. And, perhaps more importantly, whether I could tap into that ethos myself.

A little over a year later, I had resigned from my job managing a commodity portfolio at a large investment fund. I had no master plan, just an unshakable sense that something inside of me had permanently shifted. I was coming out of a painful divorce and still carrying the residual stress of trading through two of the most volatile stretches in pre-COVID markets—the Global Financial Crisis and, later, the Arab Spring. Photography, a childhood interest I’d slipped back into almost as a form of therapy, offered something trading no longer did: presence, purpose and a way to stay connected to the world around me.

My first real editorial home as a photojournalist was a new-ish publication called Roads & Kingdoms. I’d followed their work since they were just a Tumblr blog, and when I reached out, half expecting silence, they took me seriously. That small vote of confidence quite literally changed the course of my life.

Through R&K, I found myself back in Japan and once again at Daibo-san’s counter only this time alongside the writer Matt Goulding, who was profiling Daibo for his book Rice, Noodle, Fish. More improbably still, the project was backed by one of my idols, Anthony Bourdain. I served as lead photographer (a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming moment for a former desk jockey) and I suddenly had real license to dig deeper into the world of craft and the people behind it.

A central theme in Rice, Noodle, Fish is shokunin, the Japanese word often translated as “artisan,” though it carries something more nuanced. Shokunin aren’t chasing perfection. They’re committed to refinement: showing up every day to do the same thing a little better than the day before, largely out of view, because the work, and society as a whole, is better for it.

I was quickly hooked. I began returning to Japan consistently, spending long days in workshops and ateliers, watching hands repeat motions honed over decades. Eventually my projects spread beyond Japan and continue today around the world, but the feeling has remained the same: each shoot is a narrow window into something quietly sublime—a fly on the wall during the act of creation.

When I first started photographing these craftspeople 12 years ago, it felt like documentation (and in some cases, maybe even preservation). What surprises me now is how alive the work remains, and I’m especially heartened to see interest accelerating. There are echoes of the Mingei, or folk-craft, movement that emerged a century ago during a similarly disruptive period of technological and societal change, and refocused society in Japan on the value of the unknown craftsman and the subtle heartbeat of something made by hand.

Many of the people I photographed early on are now well into old age, still refining, still pushing. In some cases, their children or apprentices have stepped in, adapting the work just enough to keep it relevant, nudging it gently forward. In others, the lineage has ended altogether, folding back into history.

In Practice grew out of these rooms and conversations. It’s less interested in finished objects than in the person behind them and what happens along the way: the repetition, the incremental improvement, the mindset—all the small decisions that slowly elevate functional things into carriers of meaning, while never losing sight of their first obligation: to be used. Because photography will be a primary medium, In Practice is firmly grounded in the belief that working reveals more about a person than a posed portrait ever could.

In Practice isn’t a how-to guide. It isn’t about mastery by proxy. It’s closer to standing in the corner of a small atelier while someone works, paying attention to what surfaces in the process.

Some of these photographs have appeared in publications and exhibitions over the years, but much of the material—especially the conversations—has lived untouched in my archives, in some cases only now being transcribed. While the world accelerates toward speed, scale and frictionless consumption, I’ve found myself encouraged by a countercurrent: a renewed pull toward things made slowly, things that carry the marks of the person who made them.

As creativity becomes easier to replicate and distribute (and in some cases fully commoditized) care and intention may be the only things that can’t be automated. In Practice is my way of staying close to those principles and the people who live them daily, of keeping a seat in the workshop even as the door keeps trying to close.

New issues of In Practice will be published every two to three weeks. I hope the frame is broad enough to allow the journal to keep pushing into other process-driven creative spaces—exploring the tension between art and craft, between reverence and practicality, and serving as a small counterweight to a world that too often mistakes speed and efficiency for progress.

Michael Magers, Austin TX, February 2026