Cellists unwilling to settle for any but the finest instrument must, sooner or later, make a pilgrimage to Cremona — or rather, to the Cremonas. One is, of course, the city in Lombardy that was home to numerous pioneering master luthiers, up to and including Antonio Stradivari. The other, lesser known Cremona is a workshop in Hirakata, an exurb of Osaka. There, a master luthier named Takao Iwai plies his trade, which you can see on detailed display in the ProcessX video above. In just under half an hour, it compresses his painstaking six-month process of making a cello wholly by hand.
The name of Iwai’s shop evokes a rich history of stringed instrument-making, but it also pays tribute to the place where he honed his own skills. He did so under the luthier Gio Batta Morassi, described in a tribute after his death in 2018 as having “made a significant contribution to the revival of Cremona’s modern violin-making,” and indeed having become “the godfather of the modern Italian Cremona school.”
He seemed to have welcomed students no matter their land of origin — France, China, Russia, and of course Japan — and through them “introduced the art of Italian violin making to the world and raised the level of international violin making.”
Iwai is hardly the first dedicated Japanese craftsman we’ve featured here on Open Culture, nor even the first dedicated to a European art form: take the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, whose decades of work on Sagrada Família has earned him a reputation in his homeland as “the Japanese Gaudí.” After his time in Italy, Iwai chose to return to Japan, bringing his mastery of a foreign craft into a native culture highly conducive to its practice, where traditional Japanese instruments have long been made with the very same sense of detail and technique. If you’d like to witness that as well while you’re in Osaka, do pay a visit to Tsuruya Gakki in the port town of Sakai; maybe you’ll even get to see a shamisen being made.
Related content:
Watch the Making of a Hand-Crafted Violin, from Start to Finish, in a Beautifully Shot Documentary
20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating Traditional Handicrafts
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
