Machikoba no Techo 1 October 2026

October is here.

Autumn is the season for bigfin reef squid.

In the waters from the Genkai Sea to the San’in coast, the night squid season for swordtip squid is nearing its end, and from now into November we move on to the season for the squid known locally as budouika.

The seasons come round the same way every year, but the sea is different every year.

What was biting well until yesterday is not biting today.

The way that was right until yesterday no longer works today.

Perhaps this is true not only of fishing, but of the world of making things as well.

We are sincerely grateful for your continued support.

This month, let me tell a story from long ago, about “change” and “learning”.

It is the story of the late Genzo Kanagawa, the founder of KeyStone, and my father.

He lived alongside Japan’s postwar journey, a man of encyclopedic knowledge.

My father was born in the year the war ended. 1 October is his birthday.

As for so many people at the time, life was far from easy; I am told that simply getting enough to eat came first.

In the end, he left high school without finishing and had no choice but to go to work.

Later, as chance would have it, he came to work at a company that made fishing gear.

What my father came up against there was this question:

“How can we make things more accurately, and more efficiently?”

Then, at around the age of thirty, my father knocked on the door of a private cram school in Takeo.

In one hand, a big bottle of sake.

“I have no money, so please teach me for this.”

What he went to learn was high-school maths.

A man who had been forced to leave high school went back, more than ten years later and of his own accord, to relearn high-school maths.

It was not that he wanted to go to university, or to sit an exam.

He needed it for his work.

At the time there were many orders for sinkers for fishermen, such as dropper-rig sinkers and rock sinkers, and it seems that much of the mould-making still relied on the experience and intuition of craftsmen.

But that meant correcting the moulds again and again.

Working out the volume from the shape.

Working out the dimensions from the weight required.

Working out how to handle curves.

Try to raise productivity, and mathematics becomes unavoidable.

So my father went to learn high-school maths.

Starting with calculus, he studied the maths his work needed from the ground up, I am told.

The teacher at the school said to him:

“You are my first adult student.”

Or so I have heard.

The teacher was a graduate of the University of Tokyo and, my father told me, had been involved in designing ships during the war.

By all accounts he was a very strict teacher.

Children who made the same mistake twice got a little rap on the head with a name stamp, or so the story goes.

My father, being an adult, was spared that, but the teaching itself was apparently very demanding.

I never went to that school myself.

Looking back now, I feel a strange mix of relief and of wishing I had. (laughs)

Long afterwards, a book of mathematical formulas still sat on my father’s desk.

Studying maths was never the goal in itself.

Learn what you need, in order to make what you need.

For my father, I think, mathematics truly was a “tool”.

As the Showa era drew to a close, the age of the computer arrived.

My father threw himself into that too, without hesitation.

On a PC-9801 he wrote programs in N88-BASIC to handle three-dimensional shapes, and went on to CAD, CAM and NC machine tools.

For production control he used databases; to automate the factory he built relay sequence control.

Resin moulding, injection moulding, painting, wire forming, electrical discharge machining, automation with robots.

His interests spread from one thing to the next.

Even thinking back now, he was a rather unusual man.

Perhaps because he had to think about automating and controlling machines, my father also had a good grasp of control engineering — differential equations, Laplace transforms and the like.

One moment he would be talking about indexes in SQL statements; the next, he would have a Goto-type egi in his hands, an old-style lacquered “nuri” egi, and be painting it.

A man who had been looking at a computer screen would, the next instant, hold a painted surface up to the light and say:

“Look and see whether the clear coat has gone on here.”

New technology and old craftsmanship were not, I think, separate things in my father’s mind.

All of it came back to one question:

“How can we make something better?”

In my father’s day, there were books of formulas.

My generation saw Mathematica and MATLAB arrive.

And now there are Claude and ChatGPT.

Things that once meant searching through several books, AI can now explain in a few seconds.

It writes programs for you.

It does the calculations for you.

We live in frighteningly convenient times.

And yet one thing has not changed.

What do you want to know?

What do you want to make?

Is the answer that comes back really right?

And how will you use it on the floor?

In the end, it is still people who have to think about these things.

However clever AI becomes, it does not mean we no longer need to learn.

If anything, now that the tools are so much more powerful, those who use them may be asked, more than ever, to know “what to ask”.

I wonder what my father would be doing if he were still alive.

He would probably be playing with Claude or ChatGPT all day, saying,

“Look, it can even do this,”

and would have started building some strange machine again, I suspect.

This was a man who, at around thirty, knocked on the door of a cram school with a bottle of sake in one hand.

Not that he never finished high school,

but that when he needed to, he went back to learn once more.

That, to me, is what made him who he was.

Technology grows old.

Machines change.

Books of formulas became software, and software is turning into AI.

But:

If you don’t know, learn.
If you can’t do it, keep at it until you can.

That attitude alone, I think, will not grow old, however much the times change.

It is precisely as an adult that learning has meaning.

Every time I think of the story of the bottle of sake, that is what comes to mind.

Thank you, as always, for your support this month.