Beyond Tsuge

 

For decades, Tsuge was the only producer of Japanese pipes widely known to smokers outside Japan. But F. Sykes Wilford of Smokingpipes.com is convinced that the international pipe community should be looking at Japan a bit harder. In an interview offering detailed insights into the global pipe business, Sykes tell us what’s special about the Japanese.

You’re making an obvious effort to introduce Japanese pipes to the rest of the smoking world. What’s customer response been like?

FSW: Customer response has been extraordinary – far beyond what I would have imagined when we began working on the possibility of importing Japanese pipes almost two years ago. But before I talk about the makers, I do want to say that we’ve received enormous help from Barnabas Suzuki in making all of this possible. Suzuki-san is one of the truly great pipe historians in the world today and has a great love for pipes from all countries. To not mention his gracious and ongoing assistance in connecting with these pipe carvers would be a terrible oversight.

Currently, we represent three Japanese pipe carvers in the US aside from Tsuge.

Hiroyuki Tokutomi’s work is brilliantly designed and beautifully engineered. From the perspective of aesthetics and artistry, I’d put him up there with the top three to four pipe carvers in the world. He has a truly extraordinary ability to reinterpret traditional Danish, German or English shapes in very original and very Japanese ways. He’s been compared to the late George Nakashima, a celebrated Japanese-American furniture designer who came to typify Zen Moderne as an artistic movement.

Tokutomi-san spent a year in Denmark, studying with Sixten Ivarsson in the mid-1970s. Certainly, Tokutomi-san’s work is an outgrowth of Danish pipe styling, but he’s overlaid a clearly Japanese artistic and cultural tradition upon that framework. Without this becoming a treatise on Tokutomi-san’s place in the great Japanese artistic tradition, I’ll simply say that I think Tokutomi’s pipes have significant artistic merit, even outside of the pipe collecting community. We currently sell about 175 Tokutomi pipes a year at prices between $400 and $1700 per pipe; almost all are in the $550 to $1000 range. The collectors are delighted with the pipes, as evidenced both by their vocal enthusiasm and by the fact that we sell as many as Tokutomi-san can make. Tokutomi, for the first time in his thirty-year career as a pipe maker, is producing at capacity and making great money doing something he loves.

Of course, it’s been a great success for us also. Further, it’s been very personally rewarding for me – I feel very lucky to be able to handle Tokutomi pipes. Tokutomi is probably the only make of pipes that causes the whole company to stop what we’re doing when they arrive, and spend an hour gawking at and fondling fifteen pipes. Now I just have to figure out how to sell fewer so I have a shot at one, once in a while!