Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered

On Tuesday, January 28th, the great Japanese pipe maker Hiroyuki Tokutomi, 76, passed, following a weeklong hospitalization for pneumonia. He had been in poor health for much of the past 12 years, struggling with a variety of ailments.

For the decade between 2002 when he and I first met and the early 2010s when his health began to fail, the pipe world enjoyed what was arguably its most fecund period of creative genius in the past 40 years, propelling pipe design in very new directions. Drawing on both Danish Functionalism, as imagined by Sixten Ivarsson, and 19th- and early 20th-century Buddhist sculpture, Tokutomi reimagined what pipes could be and influenced artisanal pipe making as it flowered globally over the past two decades.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader

I first met Hiroyuki Tokutomi in Barnabas Suzuki's office in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in 2002. I was 21 years old, at the outset of my professional life; Tokutomi was 54 but had toiled as a pipe maker in relative obscurity for more than twenty years. As soon as Tokutomi laid out the six or seven pipes he had with him, I knew I was in the presence of genius. The 21-year-old me couldn't yet explain why I knew Tokutomi was brilliant, but there was no question in my mind, and nothing since has shaken that assessment.

While I vaguely knew of Tokutomi's existence prior to that meeting, I'd never seen a good photo of one of his pipes and certainly never seen one in person. Keep in mind that the web was in its infancy, from both a technological perspective and volume and depth of information available. Though I had a vague sense that there was serious pipe making in Japan aside from Tsuge, and I first went to Japan in search of pipes, our first meeting was serendipitous, largely thanks to the efforts and kindness of mutual friends.

That moment with Hiroyuki Tokutomi changed the course of modern artisanal pipe making, remaking my life and Tokutomi's in the process. For the next five years, I built Smokingpipes around high-grade Japanese pipes. While that included the work of others — Smio Satou, Kei Gotoh, and Takeo Arita, most notably — it largely centered around Tokutomi. His passion became exploring the new aesthetic lexicon he was developing for pipes — an aesthetic that merged Danish Functionalism pioneered by his teacher Sixten Ivarsson with themes from 19th and 20th-century Buddhist art, most clearly articulated in the mid-20th century by the Zen Moderne movement — and my passion became figuring out what in the world he was doing and communicating that to the wider pipe world.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader

In 1976, interested in pipe making, a not-quite 30-year-old Tokutomi traveled to Denmark across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to meet, and hopefully train with, Sixten Ivarsson. Following considerable misadventures, he spent a few weeks working with Sixten, absorbing all he could of the craft from the progenitor of handmade pipe making himself. Retrospectively, this puts him in the historically significant company of the likes of Lars and Nanna Ivarsson, Poul Rasmussen, Jess Chonowitsch, Bo Nordh, and Jørn Micke.

Building upon that experience, paired with a keen eye for design, Tokutomi set out to build a career in pipe making. It was not easy. The 1980s and early 1990s were among the most difficult years in the pipe industry. Tokutomi resorted to supplementing his income from pipes with work in various crafts, most notably working in ivory, making netsuke.

But, in 2002, all of that changed, and really quite suddenly. When his pipes found an audience, his creative genius accelerated. By 2003, he began playing with the classic Danish Crossgrain, redefining the shape, bringing energy and movement to the composition in truly novel ways. And he did so by purposefully rejecting the rules of Danish Functionalism (and, arguably, Western Art more broadly) and leaning instead on very Japanese (indeed, specifically Buddhist) artistic ideals to keep the shapes coherent. While his early pipe making was instructed by Sixten Ivarsson and particularly influenced by Sixten and Lars and Jørn Micke, his wider artistic sensibilities were deeply influenced by Meiji-era Buddhist sculptor Kōun Takamura. He would go on to reimagine other classic Danish compositions in similar ways, infusing compositions pioneered by great Danish pipe makers with influences derived from Japanese artistic traditions.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader

In one discussion in 2003, he showed me the first prototype for his new cross-grain Blowfish design wherein he had curved the bisecting line, relying instead on the relative weight and implied spaces created to hold the pipe together aesthetically. It was completely new — pipes, a fundamentally Western craft, reimagined through a completely different aesthetic tradition — and it was beautiful.

Tokutomi's early work leaned heavily on these ideas, often playing with shapes pioneered by either Sixten Ivarsson or Jørn Micke. Indeed, many of the shapes we often attribute to Tokutomi are reimaginings of one Micke shape or another. Later, Tokutomi's work became more formal and monumental, with his pioneering Blowfish Cavalier shapes and other more formalized, larger compositions, a style that predominated in his work during the second half of the first decade of the 2000s. In doing so, he had largely left Functionalism for a time, in the function-over-form sense that defined both Danish pipe makers' work and the wider mid-twentieth-century artistic movement, behind as the defining characteristic of much of his work, emphasizing massive, compositionally complex creations that, while literally functional as pipes, were more fundamentally art than craft.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader

By the early 2010s, his health had deteriorated and his output had fallen considerably. But for a decade-long period, beginning with our meeting in 2002, Tokutomi's body of work came to dominate the aesthetic narrative of the period, influencing a generation of younger pipe makers. He instructed some Japanese pipe makers directly, notably Ichi Kitahara and Ray Kurusu, but his work was deeply influential on that of his friend, Kei Gotoh, and on a raft of American pipe makers, including Jeff Gracik and Adam Davidson, who he worked with directly, both in his workshop in Maebashi and in Adam's workshop during visits to Smokingpipes in South Carolina.

Beyond those he taught directly, Tokutomi's influence on the aesthetics of modern artisanal pipes is difficult to overstate. Along with Lars Ivarsson, Jess Chonowitsch, and Bo Nordh, Hiroyuki Tokutomi's work became the springboard for shapes that would dominate the aesthetic discourse of pipe making in the 2010s. Indeed, his influence — ironically much like that great influence on him, Jørn Micke — is often there in the work of American or Brazilian or German or Greek artisans today without even the artisan knowing it: certain shapes (notably the Blowfish and certain Volcano interpretations) and certain ways to think about how to use negative space so suffused modern pipe making that pipe makers tend to use that language unconsciously, much as everyone uses Sixten Ivarsson's design language and approach to shaping unconsciously. Often, indeed, I've heard younger professional pipe makers attribute a shaping idea to another pipe maker in the generation following Tokutomi, without realizing that these were ideas fundamentally derived from Tokutomi's stylistic fusing of Danish Functionalism inherited from Sixten Ivarsson and Jørn Micke with Japanese aesthetic traditions, inspired directly by the modernist Buddhist work of Kōun Takamura.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader

Though I knew Tokutomi for almost a quarter-century and we had a close working relationship, there was always a certain distance in our relationship, partly because of language and cultural barriers, and partly because of our age difference. Yet our collaboration — with Tokutomi as artist and me as critic — was the most intertwined and fertile of my relationships with pipe makers: He was formative in the way I thought about pipes, and my response to his work was, in turn, influential in his thoughts about pipes.

Tokutomi and I put each other on the map, so to speak. In our first five years working together, he exploded onto the world stage while Smokingpipes grew rapidly, developing a reputation for taking pipes seriously and engaging with them with intellectual rigor. As he broke new aesthetic ground, I worked to develop an intellectual framework and lexicon for describing pipes as art, in discourse with a group of collectors, especially including Thomas Looker and Rex Poggenpohl.

Tokutomi loved to make pipes, to play joyously in wood. He was most alive when realizing new ideas. At the shaping wheel, Tokutomi was an unparalleled creative genius: he could see past the wood, and he shaped with a level of simultaneous complexity and speed that I've never seen outside of his workshop. He could see in three dimensions with unmatched facility, twisting shapes on multiple axes, holding them together with balancing visual weight and implied space. His sketching on blocks was minimal, in no small part because two-dimensional representations were inherently limiting for him: He could keep whole creations in his mind as he worked, visualizing them through the wood.

Hiroyuki Tokutomi — Toku to his pipe friends — was predeceased by his wife, Kazue, in 2019, and is survived by his daughter, Yuki, and his grandson, Rinto. And a world of pipe makers, and a wider pipe community, that are forever in his debt.

Bridging East and West: Hiroyuki Tokutomi Remembered | Daily Reader
Category:   Pipe Line
Tagged in:   Broken Pipe Hiroyuki Tokutomi Pipe Culture

Comments

  • DrMike on January 30, 2025

    A giant has fallen. It's so sad.

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  • Mu on January 30, 2025

    "Empty-handed I entered the world
    Barefoot I leave it.
    My coming, my going-
    Two simple happenings
    That got entangled." Zen monk, Kozan Ichikyo

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  • Heath M. on January 31, 2025

    Great story, Sykes. I look forward to your thoughts on the passing last year of that other great Japanese pipe maker, Kazuhiro Fukuda.

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  • LC Kid on January 31, 2025

    A true Master now teaches from heaven.

    Yasuraka ni o nemuri kudasai Toku San.

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  • cdsmitty on February 2, 2025

    A great article, and tribute to a master.

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  • Tina Mascarenhas on February 7, 2025

    Hiroyuki Tokutomi’s artistry was truly one of a kind. His legacy will continue to inspire artisans and enthusiasts alike. RIP!

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  • Cliff D. on February 7, 2025

    Truly one of the greatest artists of our generation, regardless of genre or medium.

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  • Benjamin C. on February 7, 2025

    So sad. Wonderful tribute. Thank you!

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