The Masters
Nambu Hakuun III
三代 南部白雲
Master Inami Woodcarver
Nambu Hakuun III is the third generation of a woodcarving workshop in Inami with more than a century of history. For more than fifty years he has carved for temples, shrines, homes and private patrons, carrying forward the workshop’s inheritance of drawings and techniques.
Biography
Three Generations of Carving
Nambu Hakuun III, born Nambu Shuso, is the third generation to lead the workshop his grandfather founded in Inami. Across those three generations it has carved Buddhist statues, ranma, temple decoration and commemorative works, for temples and shrines throughout Japan and for private clients.
His grandfather, Nambu Hakuun I, trained under Goun Oshima, the carver who brought the ranma out of the temple and into the home. Temple ranma were large and heavy; Goun made them lighter and more delicate, sized for ordinary rooms. Hakuun I took the idea further, in a style built on the beauty of empty space, and the ranma boom that followed helped make Inami the town of carvers it still is. His grandson calls him a pioneer who was never afraid of anything new.
His father, Nambu Hakuun II, carried the workshop through the hard years after the war, carving for temples and making ranma for private homes. He spoke little and let the work speak, and clients who came to him once often stayed for years. “Make a living sculpture,” he would say: wood is alive, and a felled tree is given a second life in carving. When Hakuun III carved Semui, the plaque for the main hall of Senso-ji in Tokyo, he thought of it as a work made together with his father.
More than 3,000 drawings and designs by the three generations are kept in the workshop’s storehouse, which Hakuun has renovated as a small gallery and named Tsuchigura, written with the character for a carver’s mallet. In 2025, the workshop’s 130th year, twenty-six carvers trained there gathered from across Japan. “The history of our workshop,” he said afterwards, “is the history of human connections.”
“Some people say old things are useless. I believe the old holds the most hints for what is new.”
The Lineage
Free Style and Compulsory Routines
Looking through the drawings in the storehouse, Hakuun describes his grandfather and his father the way one might describe two gymnasts.
His father’s gift, he says, was fitting any design to its frame. Asked by a philosophy teacher to set a tall composition of lions tumbling down a valley into a long, low ranma, he made it fit beautifully. Hakuun counts himself closer to his grandfather, and believes his own times ask what his grandfather’s did: to try new things, knowing that some will succeed and others will not.
Details: the torii and shrine of Miyajima, and pines along the shore.
Early Years
From Son to Apprentice
“I had chosen this path myself. My father did not force me.”
Hakuun grew up as a son of the house, not yet a carver. In his second year of junior high school he wanted to go to sea: shipping was prospering, and a seaman could see the world. His eyesight ruled it out. His class teacher, who had once been a monk, suggested he take up his father’s work instead, and the advice settled the question without a moment’s wavering.
By eighteen he was at a leading high school, and his teachers pressed him to go on to university. He chose the workshop. In Japan the eldest son is expected to carry on the family trade, and Hakuun was the younger; his older brother became a clay artist in Takaoka. When Hakuun told his father, the answer was only, “Of course.” He suspects his father cried.
10
years
“Steal the skill.”
Apprenticeship
Ten Years Under a Master
Hakuun trained for ten years under his father, Nambu Hakuun II, and on the day he began he stopped being a son of the house and became an apprentice. He served his father as his master, set his rice bowl at the table, and deferred to the senior apprentices. The first months were spent sharpening chisels and cleaning; serving tea to guests was the nearest thing to rest. The apprentices slept together in one large room and worked every day from seven in the morning until ten at night. The only holidays were New Year and the August festival, and Sunday evenings were free of work. Hakuun spent them learning calligraphy, which taught him the brush and the Japanese paper on which he would later draw his designs.
His father answered only yes or no; the skill was there to be stolen. Hakuun’s finishing on a lion’s head came back six times without a word, and he began to dream of lion heads. On the seventh, his father showed him. He wondered then why no one had told him the first time. He understands now: his father wanted him to think, and to keep trying.
In his sixth year, just as he began to feel he could truly do this, his mother asked whether he was sure he wanted to do it for the rest of his life. He calls it the strongest thing she ever said to him, and he has never forgotten it.
He wanted to outdo the senior apprentices, and the friction cost him their teaching until he learned to be gentler; today they laugh about it. Then his rival became his father, always somewhere ahead and out of sight, like a runner in a marathon. Unable to catch him on his own ground, Hakuun went looking elsewhere: he taught himself the architecture of temples and shrines by drawing it, and learned from other craftsmen.
“Looking back, I think that was the greatest gift from my father. It made me who I am today.”
How He Works
Drawing First
He has always drawn his own designs rather than repeating patterns. A commission begins with research and then a visit: he goes to the client’s home, talks through ideas, and takes in the landscape and light around it. Before he draws, he settles on a single word to work from. For a pickle shop he once carved a ranma of vegetables; for clients abroad he studies their religion and culture, then works in his own way. Clients follow the piece through to its completion, which he counts as part of the pleasure on both sides. Most of his commissions come by word of mouth, from returning clients and the people they send.
“At the beginning I draw very rough sketches, to see the images in my head. They are not drawings for others. They are just for myself.”
Ideas
A Leaf with an Insect on It
Ideas, Hakuun says, do not come to someone sitting at a desk. They arrive suddenly, sometimes several at once, and they begin with curiosity: noticing a leaf with an insect on it, and asking what the insect is doing. His one rule is to discard fixed ideas. He finds hints everywhere, in newspapers and conversation, in clouds that look like rabbits or turtles, and in the Buddhist stories he has carved all his life, which he calls a wellspring of imagination.
In a ranma, he says, the rough carving matters most. It decides the structure of the space, and whether the same thickness of wood will look flat or deep. Carving is subtraction, and when a chisel takes away what should have stayed, he changes the composition rather than starting again.
“Without curiosity, ideas cannot be born.”
“Rough carving is the creation of space itself.”
The Craftsman
One More Step
Hakuun takes pride in the word craftsman. Art, he says, is born of personal talent; craftsmanship means climbing the staircase that earlier generations built, adding one more step, and handing it on. Each day, when he puts his hands together before the family altar, he feels the first generation asking whether he is thinking only of himself.
He calls tradition continuous reform. Inami survived by moving from temple carving to the ranma, and with the ranma now in decline, he believes it is his generation’s duty to make the next thing. When he took his name, his theme was onko chishin, learning the new by honouring the old.
“Tradition is often seen as endlessly repeating the same thing. I believe tradition is continuous reform.”
The Hyottoko Mask
When he was young, a client asked him for a hyottoko mask with a straight mouth, taking away the comic figure’s crooked, fire-blowing mouth. Hakuun kept the character by changing the eyes instead. Ten or twenty years later he saw the mask at a festival, on a dancer, and no one in the crowd knew he had made it. That, he says, is what attachment to a work means.
Selected Works
Architecture, Temples and Shrines
- 01Mangan Kokuzo HallKanazawaCosmic-themed altar
- 02Daisho-ji TempleIbarakiNarrative architectural carvings
- 03Akiha ShrineShizuokaThe Guardian Four Gods
- 04Sankarado — Tenryusan ShogojiMiyazakiArchitectural carving
- 05Fukurin-ji (福林寺)Kakogawa, HyōgoRepresentative work
- 06Senso-ji TempleTokyoSemui, “giving freedom from fear”: the plaque of the Main Hall, 1.6 × 6.3 m, installed 2020
In Temple Halls
From Gates to Altars
Photographs of his work in temples and a shrine, taken in 2025.
A Work for the United States
The Bridge Between Japan and the United States
For the 2025 roadshow, Poiesis commissioned a work from Hakuun that would hold the two countries in one composition: Mount Fuji and cherry blossom beside the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House and an eagle. He drew it at full size on washi before carving it in his workshop in Inami.
A Work for Fujii-gumi
The Wisteria Hall
When Fujii-gumi, a construction company rooted in the Inami area, built its new headquarters, its president asked Hakuun for a work for the building. The company’s name begins with 藤, the character for wisteria. Hakuun and his workshop carved a cluster of it to hang at the centre of the entrance hall: more than a thousand petals in Japanese wingnut among some 180 handmade glass beads, falling from a crown of zelkova.
Teaching
Passing It On
He says he has two jobs: to make new things, and to pass the skill on. His is one of the last workshops, he believes the only one in Inami, where apprentices still live as members of the family, and he is taking in two more. He sees carved nameplates as a new field that could reach clients abroad, and he is clear about what is at stake: without new demand, pictures and videos of Inami may remain, but the skill itself will be gone.
In his workshop chisels are still sharpened only by hand, as his father insisted: the basics, he says, are everything. But he does not ask his apprentices to make what he makes. He tries to draw out each one’s individuality, and when one of them breaks something, he does not scold. A mistake can become a new composition.
“Craftsmanship is climbing the staircase built by those who came before, adding one more step, and passing it on.”
