VERGENNES — Wooden boat-building expert Douglas Brooks of Vergennes has just released his latest book, “The Cormorant Fishing Boat: A Japanese Craftsman’s Methods.” 

The book is a how-to volume, describing the process of building a 42-foot wooden boat in Mino, Gifu Prefecture, Japan in 2017. During that building project, Brooks worked under the direction of Seiichi Nasu, who was 85 years old at the time and one of the last active builders of a very distinctive boat used in a unique fishery. 

Fishing with cormorants has been conducted in Gifu for 1,300 years, but today it is done solely for tourists. 

“The six usho, or cormorant fishermen, maintain hereditary positions and are paid a stipend by the Emperor via the Imperial Household Agency,” Brooks said. 

The book’s introduction, written by Richard King, describes the history and culture of this fishery.

Brooks said his work and this book are the direct outgrowth of his research in Japan that goes back to 1996 documenting traditional Japanese boatbuilding. He has apprenticed with nine boatbuilders from throughout Japan, all craftspeople in their 70s and 80s at the time, building a wide variety of traditional boats. 

“I lived and worked in the role as deshi, or apprentice, one that has been integral to the transmission of crafts in Japan for centuries,” Brooks said. “Mr. Nasu was my seventh teacher. During my last research trip in 2019, just before the country shut down due to COVID, I studied with two more craftspeople in Niigata and Toyama Prefectures.”

“The Cormorant Fishing Boat: A Japanese Craftsman’s Methods” by Douglas Brooks

Brooks first met Mr. Nasu in 2002. When the novice asked the expert if he could study with him, Nasu at that time said no. Brooks returned to see him twice more over the years and received the same answer. 

“Finally, he told me he had become too old to build these boats and had passed his customers on to an apprentice he had taught 40 years previously,” Brooks explained. 

Brooks briefly explored working with the younger man but that fell through in 2016. Brooks was shocked when after that Nasu asked to meet with him. 

“He got right to the point: ‘I can no longer do the physical work,’ he said. ‘If I lay down the dimensions and lines are you willing to do all the labor?’ I agreed instantly,” Brooks recounted. 

The Vergennes craftsman secured funding from the Freeman Foundation (formerly based in Stowe and the earliest supporter of Brooks’s work in Japan). Later Tobunken, an arm of the Japanese Ministry of Culture, became involved. The actual boat building for this project was at the Gifu Academy of Forest Science and Culture, where Brooks and his colleagues built a temporary shop outside their woodworking department.

Like many crafts in Japan, boatbuilding is threatened first by a loss of apprentices as generations turned away from crafts due to the country’s meteoric economic rise. Also, the nature of the craft leaves almost no documentation. Most boatbuilders work entirely by memory, using no drawings whatsoever. All dimensions are memorized, along with various patterns that only the boatbuilder knows how to use. Secrecy is central to the craft, Brooks points out. 

“My work is challenging because I must first fulfill the duties of the apprentice, but also make sure to record, transcribe, photograph, and sketch all the myriad details and information pertinent to building the boat,” he said. “My goal is to create a publication containing all the information necessary to build this particular boat (which includes drawings). 

“The Cormorant Fishing Boat” records the design secrets and techniques of Brooks’s teachers, which in the past would have been carried forward by apprentices of old who carried on their masters’ work. 

“My goal has been to document the processes and publish the results,” Brooks said. “I also actively teach, involving Japanese apprentices in various boatbuilding exhibitions I have done in Japan for museums and arts organizations, and leading students here in both university and craft school boatbuilding classes. 

Brooks has taught Japanese boat-building classes four times in Middlebury College, as well as at Bates College, University of Illinois and Deep Springs College. In January he will teach in the graduate program at Harvard University’s Reischauer Center for Japanese Studies. He has lectured on his work throughout Vermont through the Vermont Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau series.

“The Cormorant Fishing Boat” is the first in a planned series to be published by Floating World Editions of Monroe, Conn. Each title in the series will detail the construction of a particular Japanese boat type. 

Floating World published Brooks’s most ambitious book to date, the beautiful 2015 work “Japanese Wooden Boatbuilding,” which chronicled his first five apprenticeships in Japan and is the first comprehensive survey of the craft.