Yanagi Sōetsu's Century-Old Warning Still Fits Today's Engineers

This started because someone passed me the “Book Cover Challenge” that went viral during the lockdown period. Digging a bit deeper than “books I like,” I ended up searching for “books I somehow can’t get rid of.” Since leaving my parents’ house to start my career, I’ve moved eight times total: four times in Hamamatsu, twice in the US, and twice crossing back and forth between Japan and the US. Because of that, I keep my belongings close to minimal, and I’ve disposed of a huge number of books too. Given that situation, the books that keep surviving narrow down to just a handful. “The Way of Craftsmanship” (Kōgei no Michi) was one of them.

Sōetsu Yanagi, “The Way of Craftsmanship” (first edition 1929, revised edition 2005)

The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty

Not many people may know Sōetsu Yanagi, but I’d guess a fair number know Sori Yanagi, the well-known industrial designer who often comes up in connection with the Olympics and similar contexts. Sōetsu was his father. The reason not many people know him is simply that Sōetsu belonged to an earlier generation. He was a famous philosopher of religion who even received the Order of Culture and was the central figure in the “Mingei” (folk craft) movement that arose from the Taishō era into early Shōwa. “The Way of Craftsmanship” collects Sōetsu’s writings and magazine contributions from around 1920 to 1930. Put simply, the Mingei movement moved away from ornate, luxury-oriented art and pursued the beauty found in humbler, simpler, everyday things, and it’s fair to say it had a real influence on the field of industrial design that followed. I’ll leave the details to Wikipedia.

Reading it again after 15 years, this book — now nearly a century old — is astonishingly rich in insight. Weaving what I’ve experienced over these 15 years together with Sōetsu’s context produced yet another new context. Needless to say, I’m not a craftsman, so I’ve read it substituting “engineer” and “making things” wherever appropriate.

We are now living in the future that this book, written 100 years ago, worried about. Unfortunately, the warnings of past sages have become the present we are tracing exactly (I felt the same thing reading Eiichi Shibusawa’s writings), and I can’t help feeling both chastened for our foolishness and strongly pressed for a clear vision and concrete strategy for the future.

The Definition of Craft

At the time, categories of fine art, craft, and additionally craft art had emerged. The pace of change had accelerated and definitions had grown fuzzy, with new things being born and forgotten without culture ever being elevated. Wait, is this about the present day? No, no, this is Sōetsu talking about 100 years ago.

In one exchange, Sōetsu answers as follows.

Q: What is the beauty of craft? A: It is beauty that follows use.

Service to use is the heart of craft. Intimacy as a daily companion is the nature of craft, Sōetsu says. Craft is the opposite pole of what we call fine art. Setting aside the fact that fine art has been highly esteemed since the medieval period, wasn’t there beauty to be found in the various objects at hand for the common people too? That was the question Sōetsu and his circle posed to society.

At the time they gathered numerous vessels they called “gete-mono” (crude things) — a term coined then as the antithesis of “jōte-mono” (refined things) — and found beauty in works by prolific, anonymous makers, not the one-off pieces of named artists.

The strengths of folk craft

• Never departs from use
• Is inexpensive
• Can be made in quantity
• Serves the common people
• Has no disease of technique
• Is without self-consciousness
• Is simple, natural, without artifice

The existence of a vessel must not be for a human being to express themselves. It must be a monument to nature.

Craft art is sometimes said to have branched off from craft, but given its strong individuality and pictorial quality, it seems more natural to consider it a branch of fine art.

Working as an engineer building products, I look at various competitor products in the course of competitive analysis, and among them I do sometimes sense beauty. For instance, what strikes me (this may be a bit niche) is a PCB designed so that technical rationality and visual honesty coexist — nothing wasted, an orderly design that conveys a wealth of information at a glance without even needing to look at the schematic. Seeing something like that can really move me.

I also sometimes play bass on stage (though that’s dropped off sharply since coming back to Japan), and in a sense I’m a rather hopeless bassist — I can’t read sheet music, and my grasp of music theory is half-baked. Once we’re actually performing, most of it is improvisation on stage. To avoid falling back on habitual licks, when I play I listen to what the other members are doing, think things through, sometimes calculate in detail (performing is math, really — since my skills are insufficient, I often don’t know the answer and end up doing mental arithmetic while I play). But the times I play well are, more often than not, the times I could let go of all that thinking and entrust everything to the natural flow and some larger will. I do have that experience. To put it a bit presumptuously, isn’t this what’s called selflessness (muga)?

What Is Beauty

Beauty is not entertainment. It is the great foundation that makes life truly life. Nor does the law of beauty distinguish past from present. Reverence is not directed at the past — it is reverence toward eternity.

The beauty of craft is a “healthy beauty.” Sturdy, unthreatening, possessed of quality and stability. Free of sentimentality, decay, disease. Self-assertion is not permitted. Beauty of service. Beauty of grace.

Plain, unadorned things often radiate beauty. “Simple” is not “monotonous.” Kabir (the poet): “Simple union is the best.”

The earliest tea masters recognized a particular beauty even in small flaws and distortions. “Shibusa” (astringent understatement) is a robust beauty.

Isn’t it a great comfort to be told that beauty is the foundation of life? It can also be taken as a message urging us to raise the resolution of our awareness — to look toward small things, cherish them, be satisfied with them. That such a life is beautiful.

Sōetsu praises the “first generation” of tea masters. At the same time, he directly criticizes the tea masters who came after. This is a very interesting point: in its early days, tea ceremony, through fresh perspectives and insight, found value and beauty in things previously thought worthless, including “shibusa.” That must have been an exceedingly rare undertaking. But the tea masters of later generations, he says, merely used the templates their great predecessors had built up, doing nothing but sullying them with “power” and “money.”

This point might resonate in the field of industrial design. Especially with smartphones — screen UI, and by extension UX — there’s an undeniable tendency to treat tracing some kind of template as the correct answer. Is that really beautiful? Is that really correct? We must never lose the philosophical, critical stance of continually throwing that question at ourselves.

The Contrast Between Fine Art and Craft

Fine art grows more beautiful the closer it approaches the ideal; craft grows more beautiful the more it mingles with reality. High-level fine art occupies a lofty position; high-level craft draws near and becomes intimate.

Fine art is the way of genius, the way of understanding, the way of individuality. Craft is the way of the people, the way of selflessness, the way of self-forgetting. However, self-forgetting is not the denial of individuality but its liberation.

Arrogant intellect is a sin in the world of beauty. Arrogant wisdom is childish wisdom. One should know how powerless one is before nature. That made things carry little beauty is the penalty for turning one’s back on nature. Those who insist on themselves and take pride in their knowledge are called small in the eyes of God.

The individual artist demands genius. But genius is a rare thing. After that genius departs the world, must we wait for and entrust ourselves to the next one? A great deal of technical strain arises in the personal work of genius.

Sōetsu does not say which of fine art or craft is better or worse. He says: do not equate them, understand each on its own path. But then again, 100 years ago, was what was called the “medieval period” really so distant a past even then? It comes through in his phrasing that he feels indignation at the tendency to prize wealthy, high-end art. But I wonder whether that has changed all that much even now. High-end art is both a lucrative investment and, as a kind of status symbol, satisfies a desire for ownership — a market product with characteristics somewhat removed from ordinary people’s lives. Just going by figures published in Japan alone, annual transaction volume is said to be on the order of $2.8 billion, so it’s a reasonably robust market. But how large a share of the population, proportionally, actually benefits from this kind of “THE fine art object”?

Is it displayed at the entrance of a luxury hotel? Viewed in a museum?

Surely, far beyond that scale, regardless of country or region, whether rich or poor, there exists a “beauty” that may be small but is genuine, something one can hold in one’s hands, something to be a daily companion. This is a genuinely hopeful proposal.

The Right Relationship With Machines

Those who defend mechanization always say, “The population is going to explode from here on, so this is a reasonable response.” And then they say, “As mechanization advances, output will increase and goods can be provided more cheaply.” But looking at the current state of things (100 years ago), machines have generated competition, competition has brought oversupply, and the ranks of the unemployed have grown. Who became happy? A handful of capitalists in whom the wealth concentrated. The people grew poorer and society was steeped in vulgarity. What have the machines that promised happiness to a growing population actually done for us, other than manufacture yet more anxiety about life?

Machines are an assistant to people. When master and servant are reversed, ugliness runs rampant. I am not saying to eliminate machines. I am saying to put people back in the master’s seat. A culture that ignores machines cannot stand, and I do not deny that machine-made products can have a particular beauty of their own. At the same time, a culture in which human beings become slaves to machines cannot stand either. Society should therefore not demand machines without limit.

When the application of human wisdom leads humanity to unhappiness, is it foolish to have the courage to abandon it? Should we let ourselves be captured by the fact of having “advanced” and close our eyes to the unhappiness that springs from it?

Saying that hand-work has ended because machines were born is the same as concluding that religion has become unnecessary because science has advanced. If anything, the more scientific the age becomes, the more the significance of faith ought to be reconsidered.

As is clear from economic analysis, mechanism has impoverished the masses. Mechanism could never have developed to this degree were it not for the capitalist system.

Sōetsu champions hand-work. I imagine this is because thoroughgoing mechanization was advancing at the time (100 years ago).

Looking back at my career, what I’ve been doing — not just in startups but in “launching a business,” “launching a new product category” — has been something close to a lifelong practice, done almost as a matter of breathing. When engaging in that kind of activity, a self-critical stance is very important. “Is this product or service really necessary?” “Who does it make happy? Isn’t there another way to make people happy?” I often run a somewhat twisted internal debate along those lines. And in the course of that, a question like this has come up.

“Is technology really making people happy?”

“Who decided that economic growth is a good thing?”

I can hear the retort — “how edgy” — and I think it’s fair, and if someone called me “socially maladjusted” I’d think that’s fair too. But this too is part of me.

I think someone like Sōetsu earned his standing precisely because he took a critical approach and still properly systematized it into a theory, then translated that conclusion into actual practice. Otherwise this kind of talk is just idle chatter from someone with too much time on his hands.

Capitalism and Guild Socialism

Why does capitalism kill the beauty of the people? Because things are made for the sake of profit, with use relegated to second place.

The beauty of craft cannot be born from a capitalist system. All ugliness stems from a social organization that has crumbled. There, we find tyranny without mutual love, only slaves and no brethren, only the denial of personhood and no freedom, only estrangement and no bonding, only class struggle and no mutual support, only insecurity of livelihood and no stability, only the gap between rich and poor and no equality. The purpose of the product shifted from service to greed for profit, and labor turned from sincerity into suffering. All that remains is vulgarity that panders to the public, and shoddy work made purely for self-gain.

Craft and guild socialism have a great deal in common. This is not an anti-economic idea; there ought to be a point of settlement where economic growth and the development of craft meet.

I’ve laid this out in more detail separately, in the piece on “Why Liberalism Failed.” https://www.clazytech.com/2020/10/369/

Should we call it sheer foresight that this kind of perspective already existed 100 years ago? Or should we take it as evidence that history repeats itself, and that we have been carried along the same rails without ever reflecting on it at all? I wonder what Sōetsu would say if he looked at the present day.

What Is a Guild

A guild is a group bound together by the power of brotherly love. There is an order grounded in morality, and that morality tolerates no wrongdoing in quality, process, or value. Because of that, it earns social trust, and stability follows from it. It aims not at “the realization of individuality” but at “the realization of an integrating humanity.” The association does not exist for the sake of livelihood; rather, livelihood exists on top of the association. The association is an idea (Idee).

Capitalism offers restraint without order; individualism offers freedom without order. To seek order is to turn to association.

The shift from individualism to a principle of union. To begin with, many of the great works of old were collaborative. We must build a great road that anyone at all can walk.

The correctness of a vessel demands the correctness of the system. Once, the world was such that people helped one another and protected their happiness, respect was visible and courtesy was maintained, society kept its order, and the guild was firmly protected, profit enriched not the individual but the association, and rescued the poor, the master loved the apprentice, and the apprentice honored the master. As a result, life was orderly, prices held steady, and the economy was stable. There was attachment to one’s work, and the heart was devoted to making things correctly. Gain was no more than the mild reward that accompanied all this. The maker was, in most cases, one and the same as the one who ran the business, and was also one of its users.

Even if, as the guild socialists say, guilds came to control the market, what would await next is conflict between nation and nation, and machines would eventually be put to use to win it.

I believe that any effort to rebuild the beauty of craft under a capitalist society will end in vain labor. I also give up any patience for expecting the beauty of craft from the individual path. I expect the beauty of craft only from the association.

A group of seekers of the way is called a monastery. A robust beauty. Personal salvation is a joy, but it is the smallest of joys. Just as individualism does not hold up within religion, individualism carries no great value in beauty either.

The idea that forming a collective could be one answer to capitalism is, again, exactly what was laid out with concrete examples in “Why Liberalism Failed” mentioned above. Pushing that further as an inquiry into economic actors, Sōetsu’s distinctly idiosyncratic claim might be that we need something like an occupational collective with guild-like properties.

The Attitude a Craftsman Should Hold

If there is beauty in making something rare, there is even more beauty added in making something ordinary. If you feel joy upon making a work that no one else could have made, you are already distancing yourself from beauty.

To see beauty and be conscious of beauty is still secondary. Happiness is when you enter into beauty and forget beauty. Great quantity approaches forgetting. Make much, and make quickly. A living, vivid force of nature can be attained that way.

In silence, hear the words of nature, and enter the realm of peace and stillness.

If one deliberately aims to make something ordinary, that in itself is already rare. The craftsman must live in an everyday mind.

Making in quantity brings the price down and lets the work serve the common people. And departure from special self-consciousness, simplicity without waste — these are the rewards that quantity brings, and they lead to beauty.

One might think the individual path is freedom itself. But religious experience teaches, again and again, that there is no freedom greater than devotion. Devotion to order, devotion to nature — freedom comes together with responsibility.

The beauty of order over the beauty of individuality. Rightness is possible only when one follows the laws of nature and organization.

There is no true self without entering the greater self. Only then does a person cease to be confined to individual limits.

In medieval Christian art there is a word: “infallibility.” Infallibility produces no error. Craft should aspire to the same.

Infallibility. If we leave things to nature, no error arises, so why assert the ego? That is Sōetsu’s question. Trusting nature, making the most of materials, accepting things as they are, coexisting with them — that is where the richest results come from, and yet twisting all of that to force out an answer only makes the “disease” worse.

On this point, there does seem to be something like a process of human growth. In my younger days, I don’t think I was a particularly conspicuous character within any group. I don’t mean things like good grades, or being put in charge of the student council, or being captain of the soccer club. I mean, was I one of the “cool guys”? That kind of question. I do think I sensed, myself, that I wasn’t, and I was probably indignant about it at times. Probably. (I don’t really remember well anymore.) I tried paying attention to my clothes, tried dyeing my hair. I never rode off on a stolen motorcycle, but I remember groping around, trying various things, searching for direction. But now, in my 40s? My hair just needs to be short and clean, that’s enough. As for my beard, shaving leaves a blue shadow, so growing it out is simply less unpleasant, and that’s the only reason I keep it. I’ve looked like this for about ten years now, so I no longer care in the slightest how people around me see it. My clothes have inevitably become more monochrome, and comfort matters more to me than brand names. I have zero interest in chasing trendy business ideas. What I want, more than that, is to genuinely be of use to the world, to make society even a little bit better. Whether or not I can raise funding, either is fine with me. Either way, I already have the skill and know-how to turn something I’ve decided to “do” into reality. Whether I’m the one out front or working behind the scenes when that happens, whether my name gets attached or not, none of that matters either. If possible, I’d rather not be out front; it’s a hassle. It’s very natural, free of strange affectation, free of greed. And I find that “cooler.” My 20-something self would be shocked to hear it.

What Is Happiness

Paul: “The wisdom of man is foolishness before God.” When we discard the small self, we can live in the great self of nature.

The vow in Buddhism. We should not try to save ourselves; we must entrust our whole being to the Buddha who vows, no matter what, to save us. Let us abandon the fallible self and entrust ourselves to nature. There is no lapse, no error, in the will of the Buddha.

We should not try to guarantee happiness by shortening labor; instead we must change the circumstances so that labor itself feels meaningful. Labor sometimes brings joy, sometimes pain. But this should not be taken as its meaning. Perfect labor entails a forgetting of both pleasure and pain. “A day without work is a day without food” — oneness with life. Labor is the duty imposed on human beings. Happiness is its gift.

Religion is cautious with the words “I” and “mine.”

There is no path forward through the denial of self. Denial of self is foolish, and having a self is wise. But only in self-forgetting does one become holy.

True wealth can only lie in noble poverty. The law of religion is also the law of craft.

It even feels as though we, today, have long since leapt over the chasm that Sōetsu lamented, and come to a place from which there’s no returning. At the outset I mentioned that, being an engineer, I read this substituting “making things” for “craft.” But on top of that, since this is a text from 100 years ago, if you reread what’s written in the context of “machines” in the context of “AI,” it surely hits even harder. And this chasm, too, we will probably leap over just as lightly, heading once more toward some depth from which there’s no turning back.

The Madman Ruskin

Among the figures Sōetsu drew on while also directly criticizing is Ruskin, a medieval-era thinker (Victorian, in fact). Objectively speaking, it should be fine to regard them as belonging to a kind of shared lineage. But Ruskin’s moral demands regarding beauty were high and strict, and unfortunately, remarkably unrealistic.

Still, as Sōetsu points out, what sets Ruskin apart from the countless other faceless dreamers, and what deserves high praise, is that he actually put his seemingly unrealistic ideal into practice.

Regarding the utopia that the “Guild of St George,” which he actually founded, tried to put into practice:

• No steam engines, no railways
• All living creatures are protected
• There may be the sick, but there is no misery
• Death cannot be escaped, but idleness can
• There is no freedom; there is clear law, or submission to a fixed person
• There is no equality; the good is acknowledged, the bad is denied
• Even the poorest farm is given sugar
• Nothing is wasted, not orange peel, not eggs
• No feast whose cooking method one doesn’t understand is set upon the table
• Everyone is well versed in natural history, Latin, and history

In this way, Ruskin came to demand an extremely strict ethical order of society. But it was clearly too lofty, and reality, in the end, could not keep pace. Ruskin, the madman, tried to elevate the world to an abnormal height. But that could also be read the opposite way, as the unfortunate outcome of someone who gave up on the effort to elevate society in accordance with reality.

Bonus: The Points Summarized in a Few Lines

Summarizing what Sōetsu argued in a few concise lines:

• Fine art and craft differ greatly in their spirit and in the beauty they pursue. We should take more interest in the beauty of craft.
• The beauty of craft is a familiar, everyday beauty, close at hand.
• The fusion of a spirit of service with selflessness gives rise to beauty.
• Individuality should be put to use not for competition but for the harmony of the collective.
• A living, vivid spirit dwells within moderate constraint and responsibility.
• Mechanization is an inevitable trend of the age, but we must never forget that machines are, ultimately, an assistant with human beings as the master.
• Capitalism has done nothing but generate inequality and insecurity; it has not made people happy.
• Only an ordered association can resolve this situation.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/385/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.