Who are Shokunin?

This episode describes what the ancient attitude towards the preservation of knowledge and skills encapsulated in Japanese society as Shokunin has to do with you developing life skills.

This episode looks at examples of submarine building, Samurai sword making, Emails and other examples of where we can learn from the past and how important knowledge is and how we should practice the skills of the Shokunin in our lives.

This is supporting a chapter in the book How to be a good hu(man) which you can buy at http://getbook.at/IAMSHOKUNIN

Jiro dreams of sushi

Shokunin

Ikagai



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Transcript

Podcast 16 December 2020 “Shokunin” from the book How to become an good Hu(man) By Andrew, IAMSHOKUNIN Wilson 

Hello and welcome to the podcast series that accompanies the book “How to become a good human”. I’m Andrew Wilson a.k.a IAMSHOKUNIN and its my please to talk to you today.

I wanted to do this podcast at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year, and you will see the significance of that in a moment. At a moment in modern history when everything in 2020 was seen as unprecedented and “new”, it is worth noting that we have historical records over 4,000 years old that prove that 2020 was not unprecedented at all and quite a normal year in the life fo the world. What is “unprecedented” is our collective ignorance. 

So today I want to talk about Japan and a Japanese concept called Shokunin.  Shokunin are commonly known as artisans, people who make crafts or art.  But there are very specific sort of artists and craftsmen In Japan, they are dedicated, totally. They dedicate their entire lives to the perfection of their art or their profession. In essence, they dedicate their whole being to the perfection of something. So, just let's have a think about that for one moment, because, in today's society, I think is very rare to find anyone who dedicates their entire life to the perfection of something. 

There are some people, you know, who might dedicate a large part of their lives to something, you know like an Olympic sportsman for example  - they dedicate most of their lives, right up to the point where they compete at the Olympics, and if they continue to be able to compete, they continue to perfect their form, their skill, their sport, if you like. But, you know, at the end of the day at some stage, their physical capability undermines their ability to perfect it anymore. Perhaps then they move on to trying to perfect and share all those those elements of perfection they have learned and made them so successful and pass it on to younger people, and to give them the benefit of that experience. So in a way, they're behaving like Shokunin.  And I'll explain why I use that as an example.  In Japan Shokunin regard themselves as a form of intergenerational continuity, so they will undertake a 10 year apprenticeship with someone that they want to learn from and that master will pass on all the knowledge he has accumulated from his lifetime of practising, whatever it is, it could be making ceramic bowls, woodwork, making paper. You think of it, any form of art form. and they will pass that information on to the next generation. 

It's then the responsibility of that next generation to perfect or improve in whatever way they can the art that they've been taught. Once they've mastered it and they're at a level where perhaps they get to a certain age where they're either no longer physically capable of doing the things that they needed to do to get any better - They then pass on that information to the next generation. 

So, in a sense, Shokunin is about continuously improving throughout the generations. It's about taking 1000s of years worth of knowledge and carrying it forward, but always trying to improve it. So it requires an extraordinary amount of dedication, single mindedness and focus, which really, if I'm honest, we just don't have in the West anymore. In the West we've decided that if we can do something quickly - It’s better, (I just read a Harvard Business review article which was saying that focussing on perfection led to paralysis and we shouldn’t do it. Just look at the mess Boeing have got themselves into by taking that approach - i will say no more)  We don't value our history, we don't value our skills, we don't, we don't have that same approach and as a result, I think in the West we suffer. We suffer because we don't have that continuity. You know some things that were invented 10,000 years ago are still valid today. They're still absolutely valid and valuable today. So for example, if you go back 10,000 years to people called Jainists. And if you haven't heard about the Jainists they're a very interesting group of people. Some might say they're religious and others might say that they're just, well, they have a belief system. But they were very strict vegans. They also had a remarkable appreciation of ecosystems. They understood Sustainability  and planetary sustainability. They also understood quantum physics and things that really, we're only just finding out now 10,000 years later. So, knowledge can be extremely, extremely valuable. The thing I appreciate and respect most about the Japanese is this deep regard, they have for traditional knowledge and improvement and ensuring that that knowledge gets passed on. A classic example in Japan, recently, which I know you'll all relate to, is the Japanese made remarkable swords they made the famous samurai swords and they were remarkable because they really mastered the folding of steel, the Damascus steel process, and this gave an incredible strength and flexibility to the steel and allowed razor sharp edges to be created. So, the samurai sword was an absolute work of art. But, you know, in this century the people that made them and the skills, were dying out. I mean sword making started to die out when the Samurai were banned from existing in Japanese history I mean this is historically, when the samurai were banned in Japan around 1876. That was probably the start of when the industry started to die slowly so over a period of a 150 years. So it got to the point where there were very few people left who could make a sword, and those skills were dying out. Then, in a place called Seki in Japan which used to be the heart of the knife and sword making industry in Japan for over 800 years, they decided to get together and revive the skills and as a result, now you don’t really have a have a sword making industry anymore but you have a knife, making industry, and they're now making knives to the same recipe or skills, if you like, that old samurai swords used to be made to so they are just creating fabulous bits of steel, fabulous knives, which you can go online and buy. I have some absolutely beautiful examples of Seki steel in my collection and I can tell you they are works of art. In contrast to the Japanese example we have Spain with a 2,500 year history of fine steel sword making in the city of Toledo, which had only one wordsmith left called Mariano and he cannot find anyone interested in learning the thousand year old techniques necessary for continuing the craft. Imagine that a city which was once famous throughout the world for its steel swords is about to lose 2,500 years of knowledge and skill. You might think I am getting a bit overly concerned about something like this, but the principle is important.

Take submarines for example, only 5 countries in the world know how to make them. Thats how specialised the information and knowledge is. The new submarine that the British navy has just taken into service is a 70 year old design. 70 years you say, is that how long it takes to build a submarine? No, it takes 70 years because submarines last a long time and also because the people that designed it have to pass on all their skills and knowledge to a completely new generation in order to keep the skills alive. So what they should do is make 5 submarines and then close for 40 years until we need some more, but they can’t do that, because they need to keep the skills alive, so they build submarines and then they spend the rest of their career designing the new submarines to come and training upon the younger generation. Then when they can they build some more so the new generation learn that skill.

So you see, sometimes skill and knowledge needs to be protected for really good reasons and we will do almost anything to protect it. 

We don’t know until it’s gone what we have lost. I bet builders never thought that building round buildings was a skill that needed preserving, so they didn’t pay much attention to it. Now we find that it was really difficult to do unless you knew the maths behind it and it took years of research to work out how to do it again. There are so many examples of knowledge that we take for granted and perhaps it’s because so many people know things that we think we don’t need to worry, but the reality is that we don’t know how difficult information is to relearn once we have lost it.

This is why the principle of Shokunin is so important, it preserves the knowledge that is valuable and allows it to be passed on.

So this is an example of  and all over the world we're seeing a revival of this kind of approach, you know when you go to Aboriginal communities in North America, Canada to Australia and New Zealand and lots of other places in the world. You're finding a desire to revive the history of those peoples and their knowledge and to pass it down the generations because there's a realisation - at the point of when you're just about to lose it completely -  there's a realisation, of just how much you're about to lose. And how valuable that information is. So the reason I call myself, or I brand myself online as IAMSHOKUNIN - is, I've always taken this approach to my life, but in a Westernised manner. I first came across this idea when I watched a film called Jiro dreams of sushi. This is a documentary about a man who has a sushi restaurant. I think it has about five seats in it at a bar in an underground station in Japan. And he has dedicated his entire life to the creation of sushi. Not just any sushi, but to the perfection of sushi. He wanted to make the very best sushi in existence, and as a result he has several Michelin stars. I think he’s probably the only sushi restaurant in the world that had Michelin stars. So, you know, he was exceptional at what he did. And this documentary -although not something I would normally watch, turned out to be a phenomenal influence on me. I realised, just how amazing this gentleman was and also what the concept of SHOKUNIN was. So, in a way, the reason it resonates with me is this -  I've always held myself up against the highest standards. I mean, impossible standards, I hold myself to impossible standards, and that causes me, all sorts of problems pain anguish and grief when I don't meet my own standards.  I also hold other people to very high standards too. And, you know, in many discussions when people say to me “well that's ridiculous you can't hold people to such high standards -  It doesn't make any sense - it just makes you unhappy and makes other people unhappy”. But one thing it does do is it creates a standard, a standard of behaviour a standard of thinking, a standard approach, a way of going about things. 

I think it is immensely important that in a time where we are going through massive change worldwide, where we haven't got those traditional things to hold on to anymore because the world's changing so fast. I think standards are a phenomenal idea. I think they are things that can be adapted for the modern world. And I think they are things that can be made to work in the modern world. I don't agree that there are things that should be abandoned because everything's new, and I think that's one of the things that frustrates me with modern society. It’s this desire to abandon. We think that because something's brand new and revolutionary we can just abandon everything that went before it, and just take up with the new, and I don't agree with that. I think there's always a role for the past and the new going forward. So, for example, this is a really simple example, and it's something that I fight with every day because you know, I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but, You know, emails for example, Okay bare with me, First off, I know they're old hat, they're not modern technology, but let's just take emails, for example, what have emails done for us. They've made it very easy for us to communicate. So we no longer have to write a letter. We don't have to wait for the post. In some ways you think that emails made us all a lot more efficient. But I disagree. You see the very act of sitting down and writing a letter with pen and paper meant that you had to know what you were going to say you had to have composed the letter. And you had to think very hard about what you're going to say and how you're going to say it because if you made a mistake. You couldn't just press the backspace button, you had to cross it out so letters just became masses of crossings out if you didn't know what you wanted to say and you hadn't thought about it. So, digital technology has allowed us to just dump stuff out of our heads onto a page, and edit. That’s if we do edit or backspace or cross out. But as part of that, what we've lost Is that conscious thinking, that thought process, that effort that was required up front, In order to compose and think of what you wanted to say. And that effort upfront meant that you probably spent more time reading what the other person had sent you in the first place and thinking about it. So automatically the quality of your email or your correspondence, went up. Now I've seen so many examples you know, I work with clients, and people all the time. So, I see hundreds of emails. And one of the things I've noticed in the last 15 years is that the average length of an email has shrunk to the point where by now if it's more than three or four lines long people won't read it because it's too much effort. There's too much information there and I haven't got enough time so I'm not going to read it. So, if you want to send an email to someone and you want to impart a lot of information - You can’t! -  because they either don't have the time, the will, or the desire to sit and read your email. 

And normally, if you get any long email it normally means that you'll have to go and do a load of work. So, you know, you don't want to read it either. 

So, I guess what I'm saying here at the moment is that we've, we've lost something. This is the point I'm trying to make we've lost something. We had it in the old days. But we've lost something in the modern way of doing it. And it's not such a simple thing to find out what it is that we've lost, we seem in some ways to have lost some common courtesy. 

You know, it's courteous to read, someone's correspondence if they write to you. We've lost some respect. Because we are in effect being disrespectful to the person who's spent the time writing that email. By not reading it. Okay, you know if that person has written a load of rubbish then he's been disrespectful to us sending it to us. And that's another aspect to it. You know, it's all too easy just to knock out a quick email and not really think about it and not think about punctuation and how to say things clearly.  The reality is that both sides of this email exchange are guilty of failing a number of basic courtesies. So, you know, this is an example of how we haven't taken something from the past, and carried it through into the modern world. And I think part of it is we keep thinking that we can invent something technologically that means that we don't need those things in the past. Email wasn't working so well so we invented slack -  slack is a complete nightmare!

In 2020 when we all started to work remotely slack and email and Dropbox weren’t  working, so we all jumped on zoom.

Zoom, I mean what is that?, you know, we all sit around, listening, in virtual meetings! I mean it was bad enough, when we were physically present in a building, and had to keep going to meetings. Now, we just get invited constantly to zoom meetings where we sit and people aren't prepared, people haven't thought about things. And it's just a talking shop. And again, disrespectful. 

We haven’t taken the lessons from our past and applied them to our future. You know, if you go back to what we call primitive societies, but what I like to call early civilization because I think that’s a less demeaning, and certainly more accurate way of describing them. When the village had a meeting, there were protocols, about who could speak when you could speak, who chaired the meeting, who made the decisions. And these were all simple rules that everyone followed. But we have forgotten virtually all of those nowadays -  we quite happily pitch up at meetings with our mobile phones and our computers we don't listen when people are talking, our phone go off we get up and walk out of the room. We don't prepare for meetings. Generally, we don't review, where we are against the actions that we had from the last meeting so, yeah, literally, we are going backwards, at this moment in time. And we're doing so because we haven't embraced something which I think Shokunin embraces.

So,there is an attitude is prevalent in a number of different cultures which is similar to the principles of Shokunin. So as far back as you can go inn either religion of just plain ancient texts of just stone carvings and painting you see that mankind has always sought ways to pass on knowledge from the past and they all have at their heart something ion common and that something is called “right thinking or correct thought or the correct view of the world”. And this is so important because what I've attempted to do in the book, how to become a good human is to try and bring out as many as I can have those elements of thought and practice and approach to life if you like - a view, how to look at things that allow you to increase the accuracy with which you see the world. Now this is another point. We think we see the world clearly. But the reality is we don't. Every day I find myself, catch myself when I realised I haven't heard something that I thought I'd heard or I'd heard it incorrectly, or I haven't heard it at all. I catch myself when I think I heard that, I thought I understood it, and a few days later I realised I didn't understand it at all. I catch myself when I see things I think I saw. but It turns out when I talked to a few other people. I didn't see that at all i got it completely wrong. So, the mind is is fallible your eyesight, all your senses are very fallible and they're not accurate. They're not always correct. And you cannot trust them.

So what all this ancient knowledge gives you is  the skills to be able to understand the world around you correctly, to be accurate in your assessment of the world. Now if you come back to Shokunin you can see that all of this ancient knowledges passed down through the generations. Take a simple wood carver in Japan  - they go out to the woods, they find a piece of wood. And they bring it back. and they carve it into something probably a dish or a piece of art or something. But the important thing here is that they're guided by nature. They're guided by the piece of wood, in terms of what the wood is capable of delivering, so they understand the medium so well that they can allow the medium itself to guide them in how they create something. No modern technology or app or university is going to be able to teach you these skills, these skills are past down from Master to apprentice over thousand of years. 

This is a phenomenal concept really if you think about it because if you take that idea and you apply it in life, it means that if you understand the world well enough and you understand how it works well enough, you will actually be allowing the world to create something with YOU so in effect you are the pice of wood being carved through the knowledge of centuries. YOU can work with the reality around you to create something beautiful. 

But we don't do that in the West what we tend to do is, we think, I will get a giant lathe and a chains saw and I will take this lump of wood and I will damn well make it into whatever shape I want and if it breaks, I'll epoxy it together. If it shatters, I'll glue it together. One way or another, that piece of wood is going to do what “I” want it to do. Now, that to me is an example of wrong thinking or Incorrect thought. And this is what Shokunin are all about and is so important because I think we are losing so much understanding about how to live in this world. And I don't think the future on-its-own provides us with all the answers. I think the future requires us to go back, to take what we know, to practice what we know and adapt it for the future, and to make sure that the future works with us. Because the only way, technology, and humankind in the future is going to work is if it's balanced and harmonious with us and the way that we work. If we don't do that. We will just end up with robots and miserable people, and some very dystopian form of society. 

Another aspect of Shokunin which I love is. I think it reflects something. Despite all the problems and you can probably tell, I'm giving the West, pretty hard time of it. But wherever you go there is an inherent recognition in the world that a dedication to perfection, a dedication to quality is actually something worthwhile and something to be striven for. You won't find many people that will argue against you and say that that's a bad thing. They might sort of throw the 80:20 rule and they might sort of say, it’s better to have some output quickly you know, rather than spend an extra two weeks doing something and trying to get it close to perfect, but you know the reality is, when you come across something of quality, you recognise it. We understand that it's quality, it has some form or some aspect to it that we understand and recognise. And we know that someone has spent time crafting it. And we respect that. And it's one of the reasons why quality tends to command a higher price. In a capitalist market, because there is that fundamental understanding. 

So I talked a little bit about Shokunin today and I hope it has piqued your interest in a very ancient idea that the Japanese have, -  something that's very deeply respected in their culture. 

So the idea behind the book was that rather than us, developing skills in terms of wood-work or paper-making or lacquer-work or some other craft, if we instead applied the Shokunin attitude to ourselves  - to the perfection of ourselves and the making of better human beings we could improve the quality of our lives and those around us. 

I think that becoming a good human is a lifelong journey. I don't think you're automatically born a good human. I don't think you're schooled to be a good human. I think you have to learn to be a good human and practice being a good human for all of your life.  Certainly if we practise a lot it gets easier, but life isn’t that easy so it gives us plenty of opportunities to learn along the way.

So what I've done really with this book is I've tried to distil me. In essence, this book is me. This is how I see the world. There's nothing in there that I don't practice on a daily or an hourly or a minute by minute basis every day of the year. It's how I run my life it's how I see the world. And I know, by doing all the things that I'm telling you in that book that I have been a happy person, most of my life. I've done more or less what I wanted to do. I've never really been particularly nasty to anyone, not on purpose, not to my knowledge anyway, and I think I'm a kind considerate respectful, brave, courageous person who has strong ideas and adds value to the world. I think that's where Shokunin and how to become a good human come together. 

Thank you for listening. It's been an absolute pleasure as always, please if you have comments or you'd like to just send an email. IAMSHOKUNIN@gmail.com. I really look forward to receiving your emails. They always generate some insights into the subjects that we talk about. And they will always find their way into future podcasts. So, Thank you for listening. Take care. Bye. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai