JapanCraft21 works to preserve disappearing crafts

• Name: Steve Beimel
• Title: Founder, JapanCraft21
• URL: https://www.japancraft21.com/
• Hometown: Los Angeles
• Years in Japan: 35

After witnessing the quiet vanishing of Japanese artisanship over two decades, former tour company founder Steve Beimel, a longtime admirer of Japanese crafts, realized something needed to be done to preserve Japan’s centuries-old practices.

“I’ve never experienced the amazing depth and breadth to which unique craftsmanship is just so infused into a culture as I have in Japan,” he said. “I was so moved by it, I always made it a big part of our tours.”

With experience running in-depth cultural tours through places such as Kyoto, covering everything from Japanese gardens to traditional crafts as well as visiting shrines and meeting Shinto and Buddhist priests, Beimel began to notice how traditional artisans were aging and leaving.

“I’ve just been watching as crafts disappear, people quitting or going out of business — maybe someone retires, and then they don’t necessarily pass on the craft for whatever reason. And then, as the craft world is so interconnected and interdependent, if you remove the toolmakers, it then makes it so hard for the next craft down the line to survive.”

Many crafts, from making obis to building houses, may rely on up to 15 other craft shops working in collaboration to supply them. “If two or three of those makers went out of business, then everyone’s scrambling, so it really caught my attention, and I could just see things getting worse. So I decided I had to do something.”

With a dedicated and supportive network of craft enthusiasts he met over the years as a tour organizer, many of whom regularly took his tours, Beimel knew he had what he called “an extended family” of devotees to draw upon. So after retiring from the tour business, he quickly got busy, channeling his energies and experience into setting up JapanCraft21, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of traditional craftsmanship.

Beimel initially set about trying to restore Kyoto’s machiya house-building traditions, as he had witnessed the creep of modernity slowly blight what he believed to be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. “I first visited Kyoto in 1972, and there was just street after street of machiya townhouses, with a consistently beautiful cityscape, but today, I don’t think it could still be described as such a beautiful place as it once was,” he said.

He enlisted the help of Tomohiro Naito, a young fourth-generation traditional carpenter he had met who had been doing restoration work around Kyoto. With their shared love of traditional construction, Beimel began what he called “a big Don Quixote dream” of setting out to build new, authentic Kyoto machiyas from scratch. “The problem was that there were very few young carpenters who were being trained in joinery, of doing bamboo mud walls,” he said. “So we decided to start a school.”

In 2019 Beimel co-founded the School of Traditional Building Arts (Shin-Machiya Juku) in Kyoto to teach these rapidly disappearing skill sets to young working tradespeople.

“One of the reasons the machiya were being torn down was due to earthquake safety and fire regulations, but there hadn’t been much thinking about how machiya can actually be built and still be fireproof or have earthquake stability,” he said.

Confident that they could meet regulations, Naito began speaking to officials at Kyoto City Hall about the need to change the regulations. “They were actually very open to the idea, and were really cheering us on, and after five years, we managed to change the laws, and we’ve now just completed our first house, the first authentic machiya to be built in Kyoto in 90 years — no nails, all joinery.”

Beimel is hopeful that this victory will usher in big changes for Kyoto and believes it is also a win for sustainability. “The Kyoto mindset for the last 90 years has been basically ‘you cannot build a machiya,’ so now that it’s possible, we’re hopeful that people will start building them again,” he said. “And what’s more sustainable when you compare a modern house riddled with chemicals which is knocked down after 30 years to a machiya that has no chemicals at all, will last until your great-great-great-grandchildren, all of which can be fully reused?”

With so many traditional crafts in need of revitalization, Beimel decided the most practical solution was to set up the Japan Traditional Craft Revitalization Contest. “We didn’t know where to begin, so we decided to hold a contest and look for the most energetic people, and then let them tell us what their problem was and how we can help. We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of amazing applicants. Our prize is also creating a lot of connections and a lot of cross-pollinations in the craft world.”

Beimel sees a return to traditional crafts as a vital component in creating a more sustainable world. “Let’s look at textile dyes. It’s one of the biggest polluters in the world, but if you look at silk-dyeing in Kyoto, they use brush dyeing, which uses only 1% of the dye and 1% of the water used in conventional dyeing, and you can still do gorgeous things, and it’s very sustainable. Washi paper, it’s 100% sustainable — you don’t need to cut down a tree in the forest, you can have your own tree that can last 60 years and harvest the paper. Even housing — all that material has to be growing, or the house isn’t built. It’s all sustainable.”

Beimel believes Japan has always had a tradition of maintaining forests to harvest and replant to sustainably support housing. “Sustainability can be essentially effortless — especially when you can feel the effort of something that’s been made by hand, you’ll always take care of it.”

Beimel hopes that anyone interested can help by going to www.japancraft21.com and donating, sponsoring a student at the school or volunteering to assist in one of many ways, even if just for a couple of hours a month.

For now, Beimel sees himself as fully committed to preserving as many crafts as possible over the next decade before a last generation of craftspeople passes away. He stays motivated because every time he finds a new craft, several more supporting crafts appear. “It’s like being interested in something like opera — the more you get to understand it, the deeper it gets.”

The only time he likes to give himself is to reconnect with his original love, Japanese gardens. “They come from a beautiful, well-thought-out culture — they offer a portal into nature, and it’s all subconscious.”