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® System during my childhood (~5yo), when my mom saw my interest handling blocks and building things, it was my favorite toy ever, luckly my parents were capable to bought me two sets each year at least, one on my birthday, another for Christmas, and tiny cheap ones ocasionally, year after year…
Modus-operandi: Every day I tried to build something, saw something interesting? Grab my atention for some reason? I’ll try to copy it, a spaceshuttle from a movie or cartoon, a ship from a book, I always tried to transpose each detail with LEGO parts. Got a new set? After build and play for while I was able to disassembly and mix with the others bricks. Never put a side, I never was a collector, does not make sense for me.
No one telling me “use this part”, “will be better on this way”, I had to figure it out, aim for the best design with the parts I had at moment mixing all the sets, I love to build things from my mind, no building instructions, the joy come from bricks caos, the flow building it for hours, the creativity associated, another motivation of course is finishing and playing with the object as I thought, how close it looks like as I imagined, the perfection is the realization of a possibility. It’s funny, because is like Jiro dealing with the tuna available at market. For me, more years, more sets, more experiencied I became, more design options, new possibilities. I never thought “I wish be out with others” or “I wish have other toys”, I’m just happy, I only dream about what I can achieve with other LEGO sets LOL…
As you can see it was never discipline, but pure joy, basically had only one toy, but the best one, 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, webpages on notepad and make some money selling parts…
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.
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… 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, for me 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.
…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
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 if it was by necessity, influences or inherited trauma, once you found joy and it became a habit you can achieve something for yourself and others, work which represents you, meaning.
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.
legacy
Linus Torvalds created Linux, Git and still rolling…
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)
