Japanese swordsmith apprenticeship under scrutiny

The working conditions for swordsmith apprentices have come under severe criticism: a Japanese master swordsmith advertised an apprenticeship which requires candidates to work five days or more a week for at least five years with no pay.

Disclaimer: it's a Daily Mail article.

The swordsmith, whose social media profiles bear the name Masanari or Yoshihiro Kudo, makes traditional Japanese swords known as katanas in Kiryu City, Gunma prefecture. Kudo last week tweeted a link for candidates interested in joining his shop as an apprentice to learn the ancient art, but his post quickly went viral when jobseekers discovered the startling terms of the position. 'Training from 8:30 to 18:30 - this is voluntary training by the disciple himself, not employment, so it is unpaid,' the advert read. 'Please prepare breakfast and dinner, work clothes, etc, by yourself... Originally, I wanted to provide a ''live-in'' training environment like the one I experienced, but due to housing issues, I regrettably have to commute.'

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Sounds like it might make the art die out and lead to more cheap fakes being made. Sounds more like "slave labor" than an apprenticeship. I guess if a person wants it bad enough , they will do it.

The only people who can afford to work unpaid... more than full time... for 5 years... have no interest in learning a dying art.

At least the antique values will go up I guess. What a travesty.

This is doing some heavy rounds on Twitter and in the sword world. The swordsmith's position is that he's offering tuition, and that's its not an Employee/Employer relationship. He's saying, "come learn from me for five years and at the end of that five year tuition, you will be able to become a licensed swordsmith. But you have to feed and house yourself." Basically he's offering a 5-year master class in swordsmithing. But the Twittersphere has exploded on him, and he is getting shouted out by people who see this as a 5-year unpaid internship.

If there is any good to have come from this, its that the extra attention has apparently brought some candidates to this swordsmith's forge, so hopefully he can find an apprentice who works out well.

But yeah, the whole thing indicates how precarious these traditional arts are. Similar thing happening with kimono manufacturers, I think. The current generation can't spend 3,000,000 yen on a kimono they will wear maybe twice in their life. So the kimono weavers and dyers and related crafts just wither away.