Machikoba no Techo 11 September 2026

Why are people so drawn to paintings and drawings? If all we wanted was an accurate record of reality, a photograph would do. A face, a landscape, light — a photograph captures them faster, and more accurately.

And yet we stop in front of a single painting in a museum. A single pencil line, a faint gradation of paint, holds our eyes. It is a curious thing.

Leonardo da Vinci is said to have kept the Mona Lisa with him for years, adding brushstrokes until late in life. If “painting it exactly as it is” were all there is to perfection, he might have finished it much sooner. What he was after, surely, was not accuracy alone.

The Mona Lisa can look as if she is smiling.
She can look a little lonely.
She can look calm, or uneasy.

Her impression shifts a little with the viewer’s age and experience — even with their mood that day. I think it is precisely because not everything is settled inside the painting that there is a place for the viewer to step in.

Our work in a small factory, however, is the exact opposite. In the world of machine tools, we sometimes chase units of a thousandth of a millimetre — 0.001 mm, one micron. It is a world the naked eye can barely make out.

We cut a mould.
We trace an outline by wire EDM.
We watch the needle of a dial gauge.
We suspect the tool of deflecting.
We even account for the thermal displacement of the machine itself.

When the temperature changes, metal and machine alike expand and contract, just slightly. If the drawing says 10.000 mm, we bring it as close to 10.000 mm as we can. In this world, ambiguity is the enemy. We measure the error, find the cause, correct it, and measure again.

Manufacturing is, you might say, “the work of shaving away everything that is not needed.”

The interesting thing, though, is that a product we make with that much precision does not necessarily have to look exactly like the real thing.

Take the egi. It is a lure made to imitate a shrimp — so will it catch the most if it comes as close as possible to a real shrimp? Should a lure made to imitate a fish get as close as possible to a real fish? It is probably not that simple.

Take our KensakiSP, Hard Foam Floating Sutte and VivinSutte. Each has a symmetrical shape, like a tube wrapped in cloth.

They do not look like shrimp.
They do not look like fish either.
And yet squid fishermen have kept using them for many years.

The Ukipla Hybrid Hook is simpler still: something like a single slender rod wrapped in cloth. It is not a faithful copy of any living thing. Yet in the sea, it begins to take on a kind of “sense of life.”

This is where making things gets interesting. In manufacturing, we erase error to the limit. In design, however, we sometimes break the balance on purpose.

We relieve a surface slightly.
We shift the centre of gravity, just a little.
We make places that catch the water hard, and places that let it slip past.
We choose a faint curve instead of a perfect straight line.

Perfect left–right symmetry, tracing exactly the same calculated path every single time — that does not always make the best egi.

I don’t think making things is “the work of making everything exact.”

How far do we build in precision, and from where do we leave things to nature?

Deciding that boundary is also part of design.

In our factory, we chase the micron. But the micron is not what we sell to our customers.

We push precision in order to remove chance from the product. We erase the errors we did not intend. And whatever remains in the end, we leave as the designer’s intent.

Where to cut.
Where to leave.
What to decide.
What to leave undecided.

It is the accumulation of those judgements that gives a product its “expression.”

However precisely we design an egi, we cannot control everything that happens in the sea.

There is the tide.
There is the water temperature.
There is line tension.
There is the person working the rod.
And beyond that, there is a living creature.

In the factory, we push precision as far as it will go. But the moment it goes out to sea, a world begins that our design alone cannot decide.

I think that is as it should be. In fact, it is because of that room that a tool becomes truly the user’s own.

The same egi moves differently depending on who uses it.
The same spot changes its expression with the tide.
And sometimes it moves in ways that we, who designed it, never imagined.

That, I think, is where the joy of making things lies.

We make it to the micron, and leave the last small margin to the sea.

We do not decide everything.
But what must be decided, we decide thoroughly.
Perhaps it is our work, as a small factory, to keep thinking about where that line lies.

What we are looking for is a place for those who use our egi and sutte to step in.