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Set my goal in life while I was in USAI come from a farming family but felt agriculture did not have a promising future due to the acreage-reduction policy just then. Therefore I decided not to take over farming and found employment at the brewery which started to break into the Hokkaido market at that time. It had an architectural division to build their own factories, where I long for be of architecture. I entered a night school of the junior college to learn architecture. Right after graduating, the company let me go to USA for training.Abundant life there at that time was quite surprising to me. On the other hand, there was an incident as follows; when I visited a construction company by a host family’s guide, an American president showed me a picture of Goju-no-to (five-story pagoda) and asked me which one it was. Later I learned it was the one at Horyu-ji Temple, but I did not know of it then as I am from Hokkaido. He was very impressed with Japan’s construction method for wooden buildings.Such experience there let me set my goal in life; ‘To realize prosperous living environments in Japan like those in USA, making use of Japanese traditional architecture.’To realize my dream, after returning to Japan, I went to work in a builder’s office of shrine carpenter which was engaged in construction of Japanese tea room, becoming a site foreman and learning Japanese traditional architecture. I went around and looked at Japanese tea room of architectural masterpieces in Kyoto and even had lessons of tea ceremony as I was charged with design of a Japanese tea room.Learned the importance of craftsmanby meeting Mr. Tsunekazu NishiokaGeneral public might think designers and architects take the lead in building houses. But in fact, craftsmen are highly important.In time of supremacy of economy in the postwar period, efficiency was prioritized. As a result, also in architecture, Traditional methods Japanese craftsmen preserved began to fade out. However, some people stood against such trend and kept pleading importance of craftsmen. One of them was the late Mr. Tsunekazu Nishioka, a master carpenter of temple and shrine, who was engaged in reconstruction of Horyu-ji Temple and Yakushi-ji Temple.I was so impressed with his book that I visited him at Yakushi-ji Temple on impulse one day when he was there for reconstruction. He welcomed me willingly and told me, ‘We need to build beautiful buildings that remain even to futurity by using genuine materials. Using not only drawings but also skill of craftsmen is very important.’ Japanese craftsmen have fine techniques to make use of characteristics of natural materials. For example, when there is lumber with a natural crack or scratch, a top craftsman tries to utilize that as is while a person who only makes drawings thinks of cutting down the part. That is a Japanese traditional sense of beauty. Keeping this spirit in mind, I will build things with skillful craftsmen using fine domestic materials.What I try to do in building good houses is to seek for anything more than what a client wants. We need to build a better-than-expected one as a house of life. It cannot be a success until a client says, ‘this is beyond my expectations.’ Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to build a better house surpassing the first one. Houses become tasteful and elegant as time passes. New houses are nice but cannot really be superior to old ones. I explain this by ‘does not become old and rather adds to attraction’. ‘Preserve it even after 100 years,’ a house built with this kind of thought is a genuine one.The genuine article ‘does not become old and rather adds to attraction’Ishide Kazuhiro229