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taxi business and devoted full time to being a stone dealer and a stone carver. Sakurai worked primarily with stones from the Abegawa, Ibigawa, and Sagigawa Rivers, all located in the same general region of Japan. He told us that there were twenty professional stone cutters working in this region in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the raw material was abundant and inexpensive. Today, Sakurai is the last of the major professional stone cutters. ere is another smaller carving operation on the Ibi River which specializes in making waterfall stones, and one other dealer who hand makes a few mainly landscape type stones for his retail sales table.
Sakurai told us that he has a sales booth each year at the Kokufu-ten’s Green Club in Tokyo in February and then at the Taikan-ten in Kyoto in November. ese are his primary venues for retail sales to individual collectors. He maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding his stones. He doesn’t talk about working the stones he has for sale unless someone speci cally asks. He also has some completely natural stones for sale at his booth.
To learn how he enhances stones, we walked across to the other parallel building to begin our lessons. e rst area was enclosed on three sides and held a large sink, cabinets full of tools and stones, and a large electric grinding machine on the oor. e large sink was used to determine where to cut stones. is was accomplished by placing a stone where it could rest on other stones that were slightly below the waterline. Sakurai adjusted the stone up or down to obtain the desired line to cut to have a good hut stone. e cut line was then marked on the stone and it was taken to the next room for cutting. Sakurai sits on a chair in this rst room and uses a series of hand chisels to rough out a hut stone.
Small stones, mainly from the Ibi River, are suitable for making hut stones with a layer of white stone alternating with darker layers. A er obtaining the shape with cold chisels, he uses an electric grinding tool to re ne the shape. A little polishing and further re nement, if needed, yields an attractive hut stone in een to twenty minutes. Because small hut-shaped stones are easily recognized, attractive, and not too expensive, they have been popular with foreign visitors or with Japanese who are new to the art of stone appreciation.
We took a medium-sized black rock into the next room where Sakurai had a fairly sophisticated large circular bladed electric saw for cutting even large boulders. e blade is diamond coated and running water cools the blade and stone during the cutting process. He showed us how his equipment can cut through a medium-sized rock in a few minutes, a bit longer for larger stones. O en, he just makes a bottom cut, but sometimes he makes a series of shallow to deep cuts as his rst steps in making nice single-peak or multiple-peak mountain stones. A er the initial cut, he further works the stone with hand-held cutting and shaping tools. He had a sizeable pile of rocks that
had already been cut in preparation for turning them into landscape stones. We examined these “landscape stones in progress” and brought one back with us as a souvenir.
Sakurai’s sand blasting equipment sat nearby at the other end of the same room. is consisted of a large air compressor with thick rubber tubing connected to a large box shaped structure. A large metal tubular bin, which held the etching sand, sat above the compressor on a heavy metal stand. e actual sandblasting oc- curs inside the box. An exhaust and recycling system protects the user from ne sand, rock and dust. e box is also equipped with lights and blocks to hold a stone in a particular position while it is being sand blasted. e sequence it this: Sakurai places a stone inside the box in the correct position, closes the side door, then sits in front of the box and looks inside the box through a strong exible plastic window. A hole in the plastic window allows him to insert the heavy tubing through which high volume compressed air and sand make contact with the stone. He can move the hose and nozzle to any position he wants. A se- ries of di erent-sized nozzles allow him to select the
Above; Sakurai’s showroom with various types of stones he sells. He has partially, and in many cases totally enhanced the stones. He is a major supplier of suiseki to several dealers who in turn supply stone collectors in Japan and internationally.
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