Shokunin Tamashī
The craftman spirit.
9 minutes to read
I’m back, blogging again, after so many years. First of all, about the japanese kanjis 職人魂, it means shokunin tamashī, or the spirit of craftmanship. I’ll explain below the term, how and why it inspires me.
I always been interested in japanese culture, besides all influence during my childhood, sansei friends and neighboohood stores, animes etc, I really start dive into with Zen to Done method after so many influences in programing, read books about Zen, even tried zazen, it was pretty natural for me as introspective self-taught techinician and programmer attracted by simplicity, simple things and simplify… Finally watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi movie and was presented to the shokunin term and how the “philosophy” relates with me.
definition
I wouldn’t say he is eccentric.
He just works relentlessly every day.
That’s how shokunin are.
The way of the shokunin is to repeat the same thing every day.
They just want to work.
They aren’t trying to be special.
Mizutani, former Jiro apprentice
The Japanese word shokunin is defined by both Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries as craftsman or artisan but such a literal description does not full express the deeper meaning.
The Japanese apprentice is taught that shokunin means not only having technical skills, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness. The shokunin has a social obligation to work his/her best for the general welfare of the people. This obligation is both spiritual and material, in that no matter what it is, the shokunin’s responsibility is to fulfil the requirement.
— Tasio Orate
Another aspect of shokunin philosophy is ikigai often translates as a reason for being.
practice and perfeccionism
As many programmers I started with LEGO during my childhood when my mom saw my interest handling blocks and building things, it was my favorite toy ever, luckly my parents and family was capable to bouth me two kits by year at least, one on my birthday and another one on christmas, and tiny cheap ones ocasionally, year after year…
Modus-operandi: Got new kit, build it play for while then disassembly and mix with the others bricks, so I saw something interesting I’ll try to copy it, spaceshuttle from a movie, ship from a book, I always tried to transpose each detail with LEGO parts.
No one tell me “use this part” “will be better on this alway”, I always aim for the best design with the parts I had at moment mixing all the kits, most of the joy come from bricks caos, the flow building it for hours, the creativity associated, another part offcourse is finish and playing with the object as I thought, how close it looks like I imagined, the perfection is the realization of possibility for me, is enough. More years, more kits, more design options, new possibilities.
As you can see it was never discipline, but pure joy, the same happen years later when my neighboor donated an old Compaq Presario CDS 524 (i486DX4, 16MB RAM, HDD 512MB) finally something else grab my attention like LEGO and soon started to figure how it works and to code some batch scripts and webpages on notepad…
We need some practice to learn anything in life, master something can require 10k hours deliberatly,you must build Minimum Viable Product first they say, what about what matter for you? What you proud about? How you’ll manage the possibilities? Practice wisely.
Now parents are using OpenCV+LLMs (aka “A.I”) to “help” their kids build LEGO and supress any frustration…
I don’t know what is the worst part, “…without any guilty”?, “…never stress”?, “…without any help”? I never played LEGO with my mom, she always been working… What’s wrong with the kid imagination? Deal with their emotions? What’s the motivation for a kid using this? Joy of follow “secure” steps to achieve “desired” thing suggested by the app like a chinese factory worker? We know what happend on Foxconn… I have a better #momhack for you, what you think about replace your kid with rubik-robot-solver adapted for LEGO parts, it can build anything from the app much faster than your kid, no stress guaranteed, ironically your kid will be “obsolete” and “dismissed” and you will finally have all the time.
Technology is not magic, not an end, we must know how it works, when it is useful for us, control it, otherwise someone will.
craft and matter
Programming is a creative art form based in logic. Every programmer is different and will code differently. It’s the output that matters.
— John Romero id Software co-founder and Doom co-creator
I don’t feel like I’m writing poetry. I don’t want to feel like I’m writing poetry. I’m happy to be making information machines, because that’s the honest truth of the craft. The poetry lies in what those machines do; the art is in the output. To me, writing a boring program whose code is very clever is like writing a boring poem in beautiful calligraphy and arguing that the beauty of the calligraphy makes the poem better.
— Jordan Orelli about Golang
Different from a sculpture, a drawing or music album, software is never finished, software decay, has entropy is a different matter… But soon I realized that is just way not end byself, like my LEGO, so you must enjoy about what you’re building, not the technology itself, software is not a destination; it’s a way of life.
I’m not a programmer or senior software enginer, I’m just building LEGO for other people to live.
drive
It comes from a good conscience, from honorable purposes, from right actions, from contempt of the gifts of chance, from an even and calm way of living which treads but one path…There are only a few who control themselves and their affairs by a guiding purpose; the rest do not proceed; they are merely swept along, like objects afloat in a river. And of these objects, some are held back by sluggish waters and are transported gently; others are torn along by a more violent current; some, which are nearest the bank, are left there as the current slackens; and others are carried out to sea by the onrush of the stream. Therefore, we should decide what we wish, and abide by the decision.
— Seneca (Moral letters to Lucilius)
We are not bleessed with skills, we are a consequence of our circunstances (Ortega y Gasset), does not matter it was by necessity, influences or inherited trauma, once you found joy and it became habit you can achieve something for yourself and others, work which represents you, enough significancy in life.
The natural movement is live doing this, living by your art, the tricky part is how turn it useful or valuable for other people at time. Finding that will take time, you will work in the dark, giving what you have, is the madness of art (Henry James). But it’s there, find it, and you’ll have joy maybe forever.
…the essence of being an artisan is that it’s deeply personal: It has to speak to you. You must be willing to put your soul into the game. This means everyone will go about the Art of Focus in their own way.
Focusing is an art not science
legacy
Some day we will die like anything else in this universe, my code once written will run at some machine for while, will be deprecated, merged, deleted, the remain compiled lines still around moving bits, a trace of my forgotten existence, so I like to remember…
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…
As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly…
After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854)
