Outside, the air reeks of traffic fumes and it's the usual hurly-burly of inner-city Tokyo. But inside, in a small workshop abutting the Koto Ward Office in Toyo, the sweet scent of cedar fills the room. Two men work together, planing, sawing and chiseling golden-brown timbers into the elegant lines of a wasen, or a traditional Japanese wooden boat.

Since mid-September, these two men -- master Kazuyoshi Fujiwara and Douglas Brooks -- have been working on a type of wasen called a tenmasen, a 6-meter-long river cargo boat whose name derives from tenma (an Edo Period pack horse) and sen (boat). And though Fujiwara, 74, speaks only Japanese, in which 41-year-old Brooks is far from fluent, language is no barrier to their shared love of transforming a sugi selected by the master from an Ibaraki forest into this thing of beauty and utility.

"Learning a craft is mostly about seeing how something is done and then practicing it," says Brooks. As an experienced boat builder for U.S. museums, he says a lot of his master's techniques make sense to him. Brooks closely observes how Fujiwara applies these boat-building techniques and uses his tools, then attempts to emulate him in the same way Fujiwara emulated his father, who, in turn, learned from his father before him.