Daily Archives: November 23, 2019

とやまの和船 – Book on Traditional Japanese Boats of Toyama Prefecture

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The first treasure of my recent Japanese book buying binge arrived late last week. The book is in Japanese and is called Toyama no Wasen, which means Toyama’s traditional Japanese boats.

This is a beautiful book and it is loaded with drawings. I flipped through it and counted about 30 boats detailed in drawings, though some drawings offer more details than others. Also, some of the rice field boats are little more than floating wooden tubs that are pushed or pulled through the fields by the farmer.

This book appears to be a 2011 publication by the Himi City Museum. I found my copy through Yahoo! JAPAN Auctions. I haven’t seen it listed even on Amazon Japan. I suspect it normally purchased directly from the Himi City Museum and, as it’s a museum publication, isn’t going to be found anywhere else.

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Zutta Tenma in 1/10 scale – Himi Rice Field Boat – Part 2

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The Zutta Tenma is a small Tabune, or rice field boat, from Toyama prefecture. My model is based on a drawing that I got from Douglas Brooks, which is very similar to one he used when he built one in 2016.

Photo of the drawings used by Douglas Brooks to build a Zutta Tenma in Himi in 2016. Photo courtesy of Douglas Brooks.

This drawings varies only slightly from one I used, which I believe was published in a museum book on boats of Toyama prefecture. I managed to find a couple of these books on Yahoo! JAPAN Auctions and used my Buyee.com account to purchase it. This, by the way, is a very useful buying service, which allows you to view products in english and ship them to a Japanese address, where they handle the international shipping for you. It’s very easy to use and gives you access to lots of great stuff for sale in Japan.

One of two books on traditional Japanese boats of Toyama prefecture that I just purchased.

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