An American Carpenter Finds Success in Japan

This article is part of our Design special section about the reverence for handmade objects.

Jon Stollenmeyer, 42, grew up in Ohio and studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati. In 2005, he visited a classmate in Japan with the idea of seeing the work of modern architects like Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma. He soon revised his itinerary when he encountered the country’s antique temples, farmhouses and teahouses and became infatuated with Japanese wood architecture.

In 2009, Mr. Stollenmeyer persuaded the distinguished firm Nakamura Sotoji Komuten, in Kyoto, known for its work in sukiya-zukuri, or teahouse architecture, to take him on as its first and only American carpentry apprentice. The company’s portfolio includes tearooms or teahouses for Nelson Rockefeller’s estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.; the Huntington library and gardens in San Marino, Calif.; and the famed Shinto shrine complex in Ise, Japan.

Sukiya carpentry favors materials in their natural states, encouraging a complex interplay between uncut stone, earthen walls, bark-covered logs and paper screens. It has influenced the design of palaces, temples and traditional residences, not to mention the work of Western architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

Today, Mr. Stollenmeyer is a partner at Somakosha, a carpentry workshop in Okayama, Japan, that is opening a school this month to teach Japanese carpentry techniques to visitors from abroad. He lives in Okayama with his 6-year-old son, in a 110-year-old house he restored himself.

In an interview, Mr. Stollenmeyer spoke about the monumental effort required to find and keep a foothold in the insular world of Japanese woodworking. The following conversation took place in person in Honolulu, a stop on his way back to Japan after visiting family in Georgia and a client in California. It has been edited and condensed.

How does an American become a Japanese-style carpenter?

In 2007, I was looking for Japanese carpentry apprenticeships in the States, but there wasn’t enough work to go around. Len Brackett, a Northern California woodworker who trained as a temple carpenter in Kyoto, said, “Just go to Japan.” So I signed up at a Japanese language school, got my visa and went there.

In Zen stories, people with ambitions are constantly turned away. You go to the gate wanting to be a monk, and they throw vegetables at you. You return and get pelted every day, and then I think it’s something like six days in, if you’re still crazy enough to keep going back, you might get let in the door. I lived at a Zen temple at one point. That was the standard I knew before arriving in Japan. I think that made things easier.

What was your point of entry?

A tea master I met loosely introduced me to somebody who introduced me to somebody who told me to just go to the back door of this carpentry firm in Kyoto and knock. Since he didn’t know me, he didn’t want to make a direct introduction.

Nobody answered the door. So I walked into a massive shop where the only people around were two older gentlemen. Have you ever seen those Kurosawa movies where the samurai are sitting on tiny little seats with their hands on their knees, their feet flat on the ground and their backs perfectly straight? These two guys were sitting on either side of this fireplace like that, looking at me. I’m saying, “Hi, is anybody here? Excuse me? Excuse me?” But they don’t say anything. They don’t even move. They were like Buddha statues. It was intimidating.

With my simple Japanese, I said, “I’d like to meet the head of this place,” which was absurd. They continued to ignore me.

I ended up coming back every day for maybe a week. At some point, I came back and suddenly, the place was crazy busy, as if an entire village had returned from battle. “What the heck are you doing here?” I was asked. “You’re in the way.”

Finally, I was allowed to meet the director. He asked what I wanted, and I explained as best as I could. “Well, there’s no way we’ll ever hire you,” he said. Then he told me I could do kengaku, which means “study by watching.” I was being given a chance.

For the next nine or 10 months, I went to the workshop every single day, getting yelled at because no one else knew I had permission to be there.

I would go and sweep the floors. And people would say, “Get out of here; what are you doing?” I found out later that if the boss returned to the shop and there were no wood shavings on the floor, he would take it as a sign that people weren’t doing any work and get really angry.

Sometimes, I would sit at a distance and watch people working on interesting things and they would just lose it. I got kicked out in every way you can imagine. But some people were kind and scooped me up after these rejections.

Eventually I was allowed to be on building sites, and then I knew I had broken through. I was trusted with not screwing up the work or offending the client. I went from being intolerable to tolerable.

I also asked the right people the right questions. Some were about carpentry, some were about culture, some were about what it means to be alive. Figuring out what was appropriate was hard, and I made a lot of mistakes. Because, you know, if you’re planing a piece of wood that’s worth $50,000, it’s not the time to be answering questions from some silly foreigner.

With just a couple of months left on my visa, I said: “Look, if I don’t get a job, I have to leave Japan and I don’t want to leave Japan. I want to keep learning this.”

And the owner of the firm said, “OK, start tomorrow.”

What made him realize you were a valuable addition?

I found out later I had made observations about traditional Japanese carpentry that showed I understood the influences on the firm. The head carpenter was impressed, and he vouched for me secretly to the boss.

Once you were officially employed, what kind of work did you do?

I got to be part of repairing the teahouse at the Grand Shrine in the city of Ise. In this building complex, everything gets taken down and rebuilt every 20 years, but the teahouse stays for eternity.

And then?

After my three-year apprentice contract was up, I was invited to assist Kohei Yamamoto, a carpenter in Okayama, who worked with ishibatate, a style of building that places posts directly on stones that act as the foundation. My boss told me to “steal” more craft from somewhere else and bring it back.

What was that experience like?

At first, we didn’t have any money, people or machines. We would have 50 round logs that needed to be squared and moved to a building site. But we had no sawmill or hoists; we’re moving massive, 20-foot logs with old-school techniques, and then hewing them with an ax

Why are you and Kohei Yamamoto opening a school?

It’s about sensitivity. I love the modern architecture I see all over the world, but I think it could be even better if the craftspeople brought more tradition to it. Modern architects, they aren’t craftspeople. They are very sensitive to craft, in a way, but they don’t know how good it can be or they would ask for better woodwork and stonework. And we can teach that.