The Maine Japanese Woodworking Festival: Part 2

Part 2 of this two-part article is Phil Evans’s interview with Jason Fox. Part 1 gives an overview of the festival and is available here.

Talk me through your background and the path that led you here. 

With anything, the path is circuitous. I’ve always liked building stuff, from an early age—my parents let me have the run of the garage, then woodshop in high school. And I always had an affinity for Japan, whether from video games or anime, then sushi. The paths start to connect. But I grew up a suburban, middle-class kid, and the track was to go to college. Engineers build stuff, so I went to school for engineering, got disillusioned halfway through, and finished with a finance degree. I ended up in forensic accounting, looking for inconsistencies in financial statements for buy-side equity firms. I’d always been into computers, so I started writing code to automate our reports, fell in with the developers, and did more and more software. But I was getting real tired of the whole finance scene, even at 23 or 24. I remember sitting in a meeting in New York—nice suit, the young analyst—and all the partners around the table comparing notes on their Christmas shopping. My eyes were glazing over. What is this life? It’s nice to have money, but this is not a way to live.

What broke the pattern? 

Later, deeply engaged in running a technical consulting business, I was in my studio at a shared makerspace, on the computer, and everyone around me was making furniture, welding, doing all this work with their hands. I thought, “I’ve just got to use my hands again.” I found a timber-framing course—the description said to get this Japanese chisel, we’ll set it up and do timber framing. I was stoked. That was the turning point. 

I started taking furniture commissions and sunsetted the consulting. I paid for the first workshop, then the next one was free in exchange for me working 12-hour days. Believe it or not, that’s a pay increase: Going from paying to work, to working for free. I went to Yann’s woodworking meetups in Brooklyn, the mini-Kez’s, and that started the apprenticeship arc. I met my teachers in Japan through those meetups, went over for an apprenticeship, came back, and started taking bigger projects. Then we moved to Maine and 12 days later held the first festival. 

What made you decide to start a festival? 

I can tell you the day. I was in Colorado, in my shop’s parking lot. Yann called me. He was moving back to Ashland, Maine, and I asked what would happen to his event. He said maybe someone would throw their hat in the ring. And I said, well, guess what, we just bought this property. Let’s host it here, let’s collaborate. That first year, I just wanted it to be a continuation of what Yann was doing. I figured if 20 or 30 people showed up, that’s a success, because we’re in the middle of nowhere. It was 80—triple what I expected. 

What do you think people are looking for when they come? 

Often it’s a specific skill that draws people in, such as getting better at sharpening, but the intangible ones come up a lot too: to work with their hands more, to learn to slow down and focus. The more I teach, the more I realize I could be teaching any technical thing, but what I’m really teaching is for people to slow down and focus. A hundred percent of the time, the thing that needs to transfer is for people to take a deep breath, don’t overthink it. Follow the procedure, and pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. A lot of people are shifting careers like I did. Humans are the tool-making animal. It’s our nature to build. A beaver builds his hut, a bird builds a nest. To ignore that and punch the clock all day is against our intrinsic nature. You see the joy people have when they’re totally engaged in building. 

What did your own time in Japan most teach you? 

When I went to Japan I thought my biggest takeaways were going to be the technical skills, but what I came back with was something much more: Learning the deeper ways of being and working enabled feelings of clarity that I really notice in real time today. 

People describe watching a really good Japanese carpenter as watching someone dance, as there’s not a single wasted bit of motion, along with the handplane-centric approach to finishing. Once you learn to hand-plane to a finished surface, you’ll never sand again. A well-planed surface sheds water and glows, all with no chemicals. The other side is the reverence for nature and the collective mindset. Everybody knows their place in the crew. Everyone helps each other.  

To you, what makes Japanese tools superior?  

At the highest level, when you work wood you’re only doing two things: severing fibers and removing fibers. To do clean, tight work, you want the chisel very sharp and you want that edge to last. Preindustrial revolution Western chisels were made much like Japanese ones: an extremely hard steel laminated to a softer, cheaper iron, so the structure comes to an extremely fine point with a shock-absorbing backing. When chisels moved to industrial manufacture, that lamination got expensive, so they engineered compromise steels. 

And the proof is in the pudding as that sharpness translates to the ability of the tool, and therefore the maker. Andrew Ren has pulled three-micron plane shavings. A human blood cell is 17. To get a shaving that thin, the edge has to be finer than that. 

You’re here to dispel some myths too. For example, you’re a hollow-grind evangelist. 

I hollow-grind on a CBN wheel and use diamond resin stones. With practice it’s a three-minute thing, so there’s no excuse for not staying exceptionally sharp. Your work improves. Everyone says you can’t hollow-grind a Japanese blade. That’s a myth. My teachers were like: “What are you doing? Hollow-grind it, get back to work.” There’s so much pragmatism there that is undiscussed. Sharpening is a means to an end. 

What made you start the Wabi Sabi School when you already had the festival? 

There was so much momentum from the first few festivals that I thought we’ve just got to do something bigger with this. People were asking, “Are you going to run courses? What are you doing with the property?”

We began offering a variety of courses and timber frame workshops to see what resonated, and the “Japanese Woodworking Bootcamp” was consistently the most popular. Then after about two years I started noticing there were consistently three buckets of students: The software-engineer crowd who buy the entire tool set in class without hesitation; retired hobbyists; and extremely young, eager people who were full of passion but low on funds. The most fun people to teach are the young, eager ones, as they’re the ones who’ll truly carry this forward. I wanted a model where I could offer more scholarships, funded between class tickets and donations. That’s what spawned the nonprofit. 

Every line of work has hard days. What keeps you coming back? 

Seeing the vision unfold. The idea’s in my head and I want it to exist. It starts small, and then you have to pinch yourself—that thing I thought about exists now in reality, and all these people benefit from it. For people who like to create, that’s deeply rewarding. 

I tell people in class that the hardest thing to do is make something exist. Think of all the resistance along the way—the self-critique, the ways out, the lack of time. But making it exist is the hardest thing, which makes it one of the most rewarding, because once it exists, you can improve from there. 

We had a toolbox-making class once. One student was fixated on making it perfect out of the gate, and he still made mistakes and took forever. In the same time, one of my apprentices made two, and the second was much better than the first. Just make the thing, then make another. The first will never be perfect, and the 10,000th will never be perfect either. 

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You can learn more about the Wabi Sabi School for Japanese Craft here. 

This is part 2 in a two-part series. Read part 1 here.