VERGENNES/MIDDLEBURY — Douglas Brooks has just returned to his home in Vergennes from two months in Japan, his third trip there in the last year. It was part of an ambitious project building six 36-foot long wooden river boats for the Kumagawa Kudari, a company in Kyushu that takes tourists down a whitewater river. 

Why did a Japanese company look to Vermont to find a boatbuilder? 

The answer lies in Brooks’s experience in Japan and the changing landscape of Japanese craft. It turns out that Brooks, a writer, a teacher, and a boatbuilder who has three decades of experience creating beautiful watercraft using traditional techniques, was exactly the right man for the job.

This Saturday, Jan. 27, Brooks will give a free, public talk about his 30-year career studying traditional Japanese boatbuilding and this unusual project in Kyushu, Japan. His talk is sponsored by the Middlebury College Japanese Club and will take place at 3 p.m. in Axinn 229 on the college campus.

In 2019, right before COVID, the new owner of the Kumagawa Kudari (the Kumagawa is a river and Kudari means downstream boat ride) was looking to start replacing the company’s fleet of six boats. The boats used to be built in-house by the boatmen, but the only boatman with any experience building the boats was 85 years old and retired. There were no boatbuilders left in the region. Like many crafts, boatbuilding has dwindled to the point where there are just a handful of craftspeople nationwide.

CRAFTSMEN WHO BUILT the six wooden boats constructed over several years under the direction of Douglas Brooks used traditional techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation in Japan. Photo courtesy of Douglas Brooks

Brooks knows this phenomenon all too well. 

“I’ve studied with nine boatbuilders from around Japan since 1996,” he says. “My teachers were all in their 70s and 80s when I worked with them.” The craft has always been renewed by a traditional apprentice system, but Japan’s rapidly growing economy through the 1960s,’70s and ’80s saw young people lured away from rural ways of life to corporate and factory jobs in the cities. The result was a loss of apprentices. 

“I am the sole apprentice for seven of my nine teachers,” Brooks says.

Right after agreeing to build two new boats for the company, the pandemic hit and Japan was shut down to visitors. Then, in the summer of 2020 the worst flooding in history hit the region. All the company’s infrastructure was destroyed: its shoreside buildings, landings and its entire fleet of six boats. 

“The owner got in touch with me and said he now needed an entirely new fleet,” Brooks recalls. Suddenly the project had gown exponentially. It would take over two years to organize materials, arrange a work site, and secure work visas (the COVID shutdown was still in place). 

Brooks also knew he would need help.

He has developed a university course on Japanese apprentice pedagogy, which he has taught at five schools nationwide, most recently at Harvard. In the course, students build a Japanese boat in addition to their readings, journals and writing. Brooks debuted the course in Middlebury College’s J-term program in 2015, 2016 and 2018. His 2020 class at Middlebury built a teahouse. For assistance in Japan, Brooks hired Milo Stanley of Searsmont, Maine, a student from his 2015 Middlebury class. 

“Milo had been working around boats all his life,” remembers Brooks. “He had built himself a boat before going to college, but he never said anything to me about that during the class, but it was obvious how comfortable he was with the tools and how passionate he was about boatbuilding.” 

Stanley purchased a wooden sailboat while a senior at Middlebury and after graduation sailed it to Portugal and back. 

The youngster joined Douglas on his first two-month stint in Kyushu in the fall of 2022 getting the project started. He’d never been to Japan but he fell in love with it immediately. 

“Milo was exploring by bicycle from the minute we arrived. He discovered a fascinating old fishing boat that we measured one Saturday, and later I was able to track down the builder,” Brooks recalls. 

When Stanley couldn’t rejoin Brooks in the spring of 2023 to continue the project, Brooks turned to another Middlebury graduate: Justin Morande, who had graduated in 2022 with a degree in architecture. Having secured a fellowship to study in Japan, Morande reached out to Brooks during his senior year for advice on finding internships. 

A 2022 GRADUATE of Middlebury College, Justin Morande stands with one of the boats he helped Douglas Brooks construct as part of a fleet of six wooden boats made using traditional Japanese building techniques. Morande also completed an internship with a preservation architect in Japan. Photo courtesy of Douglas Brooks

“Through my contacts I was able to introduce him to a preservation architect who gave him a two-month internship,” Brooks says. “Then I gave him the chance to work with me, and when we wrapped up our work together I recommended him to a bucket maker with whom he studied for another month.”

Finally this past fall, Brooks was joined by Rowan Shaw-Jones, a graduate of the furniture design program at Rhode Island School of Design. His twin brother, Maxwell, was another student in Brooks’s Middlebury J-term calls. They were also joined by Randall Henson, a former Windsor chair-maker and an old friend of Brooks. 

“I was very lucky to have had excellent help throughout this project,” Brooks says. “Not only were they all great craftspeople but they were fun to live and travel with.”

KUMAGAWA KUDARI BOATSMEN take customers on an adventurous ride down a whitewater portion of the Kuma River in Japan in wooden boats build under the direction of Vergennes boatbuilder Douglas Brooks. Photo courtesy of Kumagawa Kudari

Brooks points out this was the largest wooden boatbuilding project in Japan since the construction of the replica ship Michinoku Maru in 2006. Does he see other opportunities for work? 

“Absolutely,” Brooks says. “In fact I have a bid on the desk of city hall in Ozu, Ehime, for five new tourist boats.” 

If this project comes through he would like to organize the construction as a training program. 

“Sadly, the apprentice system could not save the craft of boatbuilding in Japan. What the country needs is a boatbuilding school,” Brooks says.

It is a bold prescription, but Brooks has been trying to do his part in preserving the craft, with five published books based on his research with his own teachers, university classes, and workshop taught across the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia.

To see more of Brooks’s work visit douglasbrooksboatbuilding.com.