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Although repeatedly telling my assistants to think logically at work, I think the world filled with believers in logical thinking like me must be super boring. In Japan these days, the word, EBPM, becomes popular: the abbreviation for “evidence-based policy making.” From my experience of working as a government official, I can understand it could be the principles of behavior for government agencies for accurate budgeting, but negative effects may be larger to improve people’s lives. Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeff Bezos (Amazon)—these people couldn’t have had firm evidence for their business because they developed what had not existed yet. In order to drive the world forward, EBPM is not enough, and we need human pathos or passion.

Another good example would be railway development. Tokyu Railways is the second largest private railway company managing the rail network in areas around Tokyo. About 100 years ago when Tokyo was still much smaller, the founder aggressively bought land in the outskirt of Tokyo to build rail stations to expand the rail network. People laughed, saying “It can’t pay. Who uses the stations in such deserted areas?” Contrary to such criticism, many people moved, and towns were formed around the stations. His passion for city planning without evidence overcame logic or the common sense to improve the society.

It’s not like we are inspired by the past lessons, but our product development is not in line with EBPM. It’s still product-out driven, but not in an arrogant way, like “we just want to make what we want to.” I have to admit we are lack of ability to predict the market correctly. Even if we can, however, there’ll be another big problem—if we can make it marketable. Even now, when technology has improved so much, such things very often happen as we’ll never know until we try, because of the characteristics of wood: no two are the same. I guess this would be why our products are still made mainly based on the pathos and passion of designers and our production team.

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Photo Credit: https://humanities.byu.edu/passion-vs-reason/

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Do you know how to distinguish genuine leather? Japanese import tariff on leather and leather goods is very high in order to protect domestic industry. When I worked as a customs inspector, it was important and also difficult to distinguish genuine and artificial leather declared to customs. Some of you may say “I can tell by the smell,” but that’s not correct. The smell generally believed as leather smell comes mainly from oil used at the final process. Some genuine leather doesn’t have the smell. The quick trick customs inspectors use is to put a nail mark on leather (behind declarer’s back, of course). When it’s genuine leather, it remains longer (sometimes forever—I’m sorry, importers). Unfortunately, this trick is not always effective. Correct leather thickly polyurethane-painted and furthermore embossed shows almost the same reaction as artificial leather. The introduction has become quite long, but today’s subject is skin and a sense of touch.

Even now, I have exposure to leather, and what I always think about is “how thick cowhide is, compared with our skin.” The average thickness of cowhide is about 5 mm; that of ours only about 1 mm, which is said to be one of the big factors that separate human from animals. Our skin is so thin and delicate, not fully covered with hair, and so, we can get much more information than animals. According to a recent survey, our skin can sense light, sound, and even smell. In other words, it’s like high-performance interface connecting us with the outside world. In order to record, manage, and process such a huge amount of information, our brain is developing much more than animals.

With such a keen sense of touch of our craftspeople, our furniture is processed one by one, which separates our products from other mass-produced ones. And also, with the same, customers clearly feel the difference, I believe. By the way, the advancement of technology makes smaller the difference between genuine and artificial leather these days, but this keen sense of touch may be the reason why many of us still cling to genuine leather. For your information, all of our leather collections for upholstery are genuine, though I’m personally not pro-leather, to be honest.

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Photo Credit: https://www.condehouse.co.jp/journal/restore-lokal-chair02/

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Business organizations can be divided into two types by hiring method: job-description type and membership type. The former organizations clearly define the tasks that they want their employees to fulfill, and accordingly, employees focus only on their own tasks. On the other hand, in the latter organizations (most of the Japanese companies), each of employees is required to be a member of an organization, which means we have to do all sorts of tasks in Japan.

For about a month, our headquarters shop had been under renovation, and it was just done last week. I’m in charge of overseas sales, but I was engaged in the renovation as a member of the company, slaving for the planning division: moving, disassembling, and assembling furniture, adjusting the positions of lighting, etc. Today, please enjoy some images of the result of our sweat, blood, and tears.

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Photo Credit: https://www.condehouse.co.jp/

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Just before entering the furniture business, I worked in the fishery industry and often took overseas clients to the biggest fish market in Tokyo (now-closed Tsukiji market). Wonderful days when I could have good sushi together with the clients at the company’s expense. Besides a sushi restaurant, there was one more place many of the clients were looking forward to visiting. It’s a Japanese knife shop. In the market, there were many such shops packed with foreign tourists. My clients innocently asked me to interpret their questions to the sales staff, which always made me sweat with fear because the staff’s explanation didn’t make sense to me at first even in Japanese. Over time, I learned a lot about Japanese knife crafting, and now feel like it has something in common with our furniture making.

The feature of Japanese knives is they can be categorized into two types by material: made of a single kind or multiple kinds of steel. In case of the former, the steel is high-carbon like more than 1.0% of carbon is included, and this type of knives is super-sharp but brittle and high-maintenance, mainly for professional users like sushi chefs. On the other hand, the latter combines multiple kinds of steel in order to improve ductility and toughness, which is a manufacturing method unique to Japan. Due to the mixture of different types of steel, the blanks of knives have to be kept for a while before forging. They are likely to be distorted because the different kinds of steel are different in the amount of residual stress. The same can be said for wood planks. The crafting of Japanese knives and wooden furniture needs time even in their preparation phases.

The heating process is another big challenge in the Japanese knife crafting. The different kinds of steel have different suitable temperatures for forging. That requires fine adjustment, and knife craftspeople have to do that only by eyes. Similarly, every piece of wood is different in strength, flexibility, etc. even if wood pieces come from the same log. Our furniture craftspeople also decide by eyes a right part where each piece should be used. The crafting of Japanese knives and wooden furniture is similar because both still have an area where experience matters.

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Photo Credit: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2018/05/16/our-lives/sword-expression-absolute/

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