In 2019 I was approached by the new owner of the Kumagawa Kudari, a downriver tour boat company established in the early 1900s on the Kuma River in Kumamoto Prefecture. He had a fleet of six old boats and asked me to build him two new ones, part of his plan to eventually replace the entire fleet. Covid hit which stalled our planning, then in the summer of 2020 the region was struck by some of the worst flooding in recorded history. The company lost all its shoreside infrastructure and the entire fleet was severely damaged. The plan then pivoted to building an entirely new fleet of six boats. Over three trips to Japan in 2022 and 2023, I undertook the building of the boats replicating the originals. I believe this project was the largest wooden boat project in Japan since the launch of the replica ship Michinoku Maru  in 2006.

The company was too engaged rebuilding their shoreside facilities to host my work, so I turned to Yuuwamokusou - they primarily build interior cabinets for small Japanese cargo ships - whom I had worked for in 2017 building a boat for Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu. They agreed to partner with me on this project and sourced the lumber and fastenings and became the primary contractor. They rented a space for me to work and provided housing for me and my staff. The finished boats were trucked to Kumamoto from Takamatsu. They also secured for me and my staff work visas which allowed us to enter Japan during the country’s Covid lockdown.

Prior to starting construction we traveled to Kumamoto to measure one of the boats. We met an 85-year old retired boatman who had helped build the last fleet and he stressed that we had to build a distinctive reverse curve, or hollow, into the bottoms. This was essential to the design and in fact while traveling through the region in 2018 on a research grant I had seen this feature in other boats. We also had one of the damaged boats shipped to our site so we could use it as a reference as we worked. According to my research, the design of these boats has not changed substantially over the last one hundred years.

I had assistants working with me during all three sessions in Japan. For the fall of 2023 Milo Stanley, a former student of mine from Searsmont, Maine joined me. In the spring of 2024 Justin Morande of Vermont worked with me followed by Mitchell McDermott of Sydney, Australia. In the fall of 2024 Rowan Shaw-Jones of Rhode Island assisted me followed by Randall Henson of Vermont. In addition to my staff several volunteers from around Japan and Germany dropped in to help. I incorporated some western boatbuilding techniques, mainly because our shop space was in a high-ceilinged steel frame building with a polished concrete floor. Japanese boatbuilders depend on props from above and below to anchor the assembly during construction. We built a sturdy framework off the wall and ceiling so we could prop the backbone in place and create the curve in the bottom. We made three molds — not a Japanese technique — which we set up on the backbone of the boat and clamped our planks to them. All our fastenings were traditional and made by a blacksmith in Aichi. Given we were building six identical thirty-six foot boats I patterned literally every part. The process got refined with each new boat. Our first one took almost four weeks to build while the sixth boat we built in just two weeks and one day.