No. 6
Beyond Perfect
At a woodworking exhibition at Japan House in London, someone who saw a kumiko screen wrote:
"Apparently it took the master over a year. I spent ages just staring at how beautiful it was."
More than seven thousand others echoed these few words. The reaction — just standing there, transfixed — struck me. What held him was not flamboyance, not any obvious opulence. It was the precision of wood meeting wood without the slightest gap, not a single nail used.
"Why such complicated joints?"
There is a question people abroad first ask on encountering Japanese woodwork: why use such laborious joints?
One person wrote out both the question and their own answer:
"I used to think, why make all these intricate, complex joints? But actually, if you use these joints instead of fasteners, the entire wooden piece can move as a unit and avoid cracks and damage."
This is, I think, one of the most accurate explanations of "functional beauty." Japanese joinery is not complex in order to look beautiful. It is complex in order to keep company, over long stretches of time, with wood — a living material that swells with humidity and shrinks as it dries. Beauty arrives afterward, as the result of pushing function to its limit.
Not decoration, but the limit of use
Reading responses abroad, you often meet voices comparing Japanese functional beauty to automobiles — the way a car engineered exhaustively to run well turns out, as a result, to be beautiful.
But there are words that cut deeper. A Japanese carpenter, praised for being "meticulous," replied:
"Meticulous? No, it's just pride in craftsmanship. This is becoming a lost art, and you are a master."
Here lies an important distinction. What looks, from outside, like "abnormal meticulousness" is, from the maker's side, merely ordinary "pride." It is not that they aim at perfection — it is that not cutting corners is simply a given. One person abroad caught this as a trait of Japanese society as a whole: "They don't shortcut, they don't scrimp, they don't cut corners."
The strict eyes of experts
There is another layer not to be missed in any piece about function: the experts who understand the technique precisely.
Beneath a science video on sword-steel, a correction appeared: "Slight error at 18:20 — the combination of ferrite and cementite is Pearlite, not Perlite. The latter is a volcanic glass used in gardening." Under another, a voice corrected a misconception: it is not a single precisely cut piece, as people assume, but two separate parts meticulously made to fit almost perfectly.
These remarks may seem pedantic. But I see in them the quality of trust Japanese craft has earned abroad. People who value accuracy are trying to see accurately. They want to know, as fact, what exactly is excellent and how — not vague mystification. Which is why, when speaking of function, the maker's side too must be accurate. The phrase "centuries of magic" only undermines the trust of such experts.
The beauty of use cannot become a concept
In the previous chapter, I wrote that wabi-sabi is easily consumed as a concept. Functional beauty, however, resists becoming one.
Because function cannot lie. A kumiko screen takes a year because it requires that much precision; a joint is complex in order to absorb the movement of wood. There is little room for interpretation. Whether it is beautiful depends on the viewer — but whether it fits or not is decided by the wood.
This seems to bring people abroad a certain reassurance. Unlike wabi-sabi, a beauty "understood only by those who understand," here the precision, the labor, are plainly conveyed to anyone. What the transfixed viewer was looking at was a beauty requiring no interpretation — an honest beauty, refined for the sake of use.
Beyond perfect. It lies not beyond a perfection pursued as decoration, but as the natural consequence of pushing function to its very limit.
Next (Chapter 2, No. 7)
"Why Is Nakaya Called a 'Grail'?"
Fountain pen collectors abroad speak of a single workshop as a destination, a grail. How did one maker, one workshop, become an object of worldwide longing? Reading what happens when a maker becomes a brand.
