Taking Things Apart, and the Reason Beneath

I was born in 1971 in Furukawa, Miyagi Prefecture, and as a child moved with my parents — who had fallen for the region — to Shiojiri, in Shinshu.

As a boy, I remember being scolded often for taking apart pendulum clocks and sewing machines and never being able to put them back together. I simply followed my own need to know how things worked — to understand the reason hidden beneath them. I loved building things, but I broke far more than I ever built. After enough repeated failure, I grew into an adult without much confidence in myself.

What slowly began to change me was work repairing houses. My main sites were in the Kiso‑Hirasawa district — a town known for its lacquerware, home to many elderly residents, lacquer artisans, and lacquerware dealers.

Fixing roof flashing, mending leaks, repairing walls — as I used my own hands to solve, one by one, the problems in places that mattered to their work and their daily lives, I began to hear, more and more often, “Thank you — you really helped us.”

Around 2007, I bought a small lathe and taught myself to carve pens. The reason was my father, who was fighting cancer. He had lost his voice to laryngeal cancer, and the only way he could reach us was by writing on paper. Driven by a single wish — that he might use something I had made — I threw myself into making pens.

But the following year, when my father moved into hospice care, my days went to visiting him, and there was no time left for making anything. My hands fell still. A long pause followed. Looking back now, I believe that empty stretch of time was necessary — a period in which the meaning of making pens could quietly deepen and mature within me.

In 2016, my daughter was born. Faced with the arrival of new life, I felt a strong pull toward making a pen that could help me look inward — one that could draw out what lay deep within — and I stood before the lathe again. Each time I looked back over the notes my father had left behind, an unspoken longing rose in my chest: I wish, back then, he could have shared more of what was inside him. That feeling, too, pushed me forward.

To put my own thoughts into writing, it had to be a fountain pen — nothing else would do. That conviction ran deep in me.

But I knew almost nothing about making a fountain pen, and everything began by feel. To understand the basic structure, I drilled test holes into wood, shaped several versions of the form in my head, held each one to check it by hand, and refined it little by little. After many prototypes, my first two models finally took shape: Seihitsu (“Quietude”) and Shikkoku no Mori (“Forest of Black Lacquer”). This was the true beginning of Tsuzuriya.

That wish was never granted. But it still flows quietly within me, and it is held in the name Tsuzuriya — “one who binds and writes” — and in the very origin of my craft.

The turning point that led me to shift fully into making writing instruments in earnest came in the period from late 2019 into 2020. With the global spread of COVID‑19, it became difficult to keep visiting Kiso‑Hirasawa and working face to face on house repairs for my elderly clients, as I had before.

It was a difficult time for me too, with no clear sense of what lay ahead — but I also found myself thinking of the harsh circumstances facing the local lacquer artisans who had supported my repair work over the years. Out of that almost prayer‑like feeling, I began, little by little, a collaboration in which local artisans apply lacquer to the fountain pens I carve.

Once, during a house repair, I watched lacquer work being done in Kiso‑Hirasawa, and it made me reflect on the true relationship between people and nature. Onto a tree that had survived harsh conditions, scarred and twisted, lacquer settles gently, layer upon layer, as the tree heals its own wounds. Watching this quiet act of living repair, I set aside the arrogance of making things, and came instead to feel only reverence for nature.

In truth, people cannot create nature. Nor can we create anything entirely from nothing. All we can do is discover the overwhelming beauty already present on this earth, borrow that gift for a time, and, by combining forms, pass it on to someone else.

It is said that people feel an unconscious tension merely at the sight of a straight line — something that does not exist in nature. That is precisely why the natural irregularity of grain — the knots, burls, and scars in trees that grew twisted while surviving Shinshu’s harsh climate — and the depth that lacquer, born of natural tree sap, brings with it, offer a moment of ease to a tightened heart. I believe it is this irregularity and depth that quietly loosens the tension of daily life, and helps us look inward, into ourselves.

There is a question I always ask myself while making writing instruments: What is true value? How can its essence — what lies at its innermost depth — be conveyed?

Within our hearts, and within the mysteries of nature, there are feelings and forms of beauty that cannot be neatly divided by words alone. That is why fountain pens like Tsukiyo (“Moonlit Night”) and Seihitsu (“Quietude”), and Shinga (“True Self”), which looks inward at one’s honest self, take their details from prime numbers — numbers that, by their very nature, can never be divided evenly — as an expression of those indivisible feelings.

When asked what sets me apart from other makers, I sometimes think, half‑mockingly, that it takes so much time and effort I may actually be at a disadvantage. To begin with, the idea of outsourcing parts to someone else never occurred to me. I had no funds to order in bulk, and at the time I could not even draw a clear technical diagram to explain my own designs to someone else.

But more than that, I think what stayed with me — faintly, persistently — was something my father once said.

Those words, spoken to me as a child, took deep root at the foundation of my craft. Not buying ready‑made parts and assembling them, but facing the material itself — clumsy as I might be — and giving it form. Alongside wood, I also work with ebonite, a material that gains more luster the longer it is used. Why have I insisted on doing every single step myself, in‑house? The answer to that question lay in my father’s words from long ago. At the time, working alone in my workshop, sharpening blades and shaping material without speaking to anyone, there were days when a bottomless solitude settled over me.

And yet, following the impulse that rose from within, I would push the line toward a precision without the slightest deviation. And so, after fierce trial and error, when the “first model” — the original form — finally took shape, there were times I could not explain, even to myself, how it had come together. A single pen that seemed to have been born pushed forward by some force greater than my own skill.

That is precisely why I keep reaching, by feel, for that same sensation once more — repeating the trial and error, alone, again and again.

In the moment of carving, every unnecessary thought falls away, and a time of no‑mind arrives, in which I am absorbed only in the line before me. When I pick up a finished pen, I feel as though my fingertips have brushed, ever so faintly, against a world of “deep blue” — a place just this side of where light can no longer reach, ruled by a deep, dense stillness.

It is my wish to hand this — the quiet, noiseless world I reach through making things — to the person who now holds the pen.

In our daily lives, unnamed thoughts and feelings that resist words rise like bubbles and vanish again. Just as I once fixed leaking roofs and quietly stood alongside my clients’ peaceful days — I want this pen, in turn, to stand alongside your inner stillness, and to catch, without losing, the quiet, unspoken feelings that matter most.

The tools I carve are not simply writing instruments. They quietly erase the noise of everyday life and descend with you into your own depths. I hope to be a quiet companion for that time — one who travels there with you.