[soft orchestral music]
[birds chirping]
- George Nakashima: There's a spirit in trees that's very deep.
And in order to produce a fine piece of furniture
the spirit of a tree lives on.
And I can give it a second life.
Because I can make an object that lives,
and can live forever possibly.
- Dad really believed that there are spirits in the wood
that enhance people's lives.
And not everybody can live in the woods,
but they can live with wood,
and stay connected to nature and to the divine in that way.
- Robert Aibel: George Nakashima is one of the formative designers
of the 20th century.
He was influenced by traditional Japanese design,
by American Shaker design, and country design.
So there are influences.
But he took these things and combined them in a way
that nobody had ever done before.
[wood clatters]
- Mira Nakashima: Well, I guess my dad was my primary mentor,
although, when I grew up with him,
I didn't think he was anything but Dad,
or that he was doing anything unusual that dads didn't do.
[laughs]
- George Nakashima: I was born in Spokane, Washington.
I've lived almost every place else,
such as France and Japan, then India.
- Mira: His first training at University of Washington
was in forestry, and after two years,
he switched to architecture.
In 1940, my father made up his mind
that he would do furniture,
because he could control the process
from the beginning to the end.
To this day, it's probably a little more control
than we need to have, because we actually
go out and look at trees.
These are all ours?
- Yeah, these are all your trees.
I'm looking forward to cutting them, sort of.
[Mira laughs]
[saw grinds]
- We actually decide right on site
how we're going to cut them.
It's amazing because you never know
what's going to be inside there till you get there.
Dad used to take me along to the lumberyard
and he'd say, "Well, when you cut a tree
"It's like cutting diamonds.
"And we'll cut it this way
because the grain's more beautiful that way."
Mira: Wow!
- Lumber Worker: Wow, look at that.
- Beautiful!
[Japanese music]
- George: I was in Tokyo, and I met a young lady there.
And we returned to this country, and we became married.
And then, war broke out, Pearl Harbor.
And one of the results was that
we were put into concentration camps,
about which most Americans didn't know anything.
- Mira: In that camp, Dad would teach
this fellow woodworker how to design things,
and the fellow would teach him how to make things.
So, they developed inventive ways
of using the old army cots and scrap materials.
I still have a toy box that he made for me
when I was in camp.
[water babbles]
- Coming down. - Worker: Go for it.
- Mira: Art has to be beautiful.
Craft implies, in my father's definition,
that it should be something
that's practical and useful in life.
When dad first had his show
at the American Craft Museum, it was the first time
it was exhibited as if it were works of art.
Up until then, it had just been furniture.
- Robert Aibel: George is really identified
with the concept of the naturalistic top,
laid on top of a very architectural base.
It's both natural and man-made simultaneously.
- I worked with George for 17 years or so.
One of the approaches that George took
was looking for the soul of the tree.
It means that the woodworker has to
not impose his own thoughts on the tree.
The tree is given a chance to come forth with its story.
And then, that dialogue conveys something to the woodworker.
- I was pretty much the understudy.
He never told me the way to do things.
He would just change a line,
and he wouldn't tell me why he changed the line.
And I can't count the number of times
I was fired [laughs] while Dad was alive.
It was very good discipline.
[laughs]
[chainsaw rumbles]
In 1984, he came across an enormous fallen log
and he had this dream to make peace altars
for each of the continents of the world.
[orchestral music]
- That's good. - Pretty flat.
- No twist. - No twist.
- He thought if people had an altar
where they could resolve their differences
that we would be that much closer to world peace.
He made the first altar, which was installed
at the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine in 1986.
He was trying to negotiate sending a peace altar to Russia
when he passed away in 1990.
I hope we can find something else that matches...
The reason we build the shed
is that when dad passed away, there was a huge stack of lumber
sitting out in the rain, and we had nowhere to put it.
- Nice smaller board...
- Mira: So, I thought, momentarily,
of maybe selling it at that point.
It's pretty.
And then we thought, "Well, you know,
that's dad's last legacy."
- After the log is cut, it has to air dry
for at least a year to two years just to stabilize itself.
- Mira: Once they're dried, I'll select them
for each particular job that we do.
And it's a long process.
- Mira Nakashima is really
the only true heir to the Nakashima legacy.
Mira is now functioning
in exactly the same way that George did.
Making decisions about how to cut the board.
- Get rid of those corners a little bit.
- Robert Aibel: Where to put the legs,
where to put the butterflies.
She's the only person who is designing
in the Nakashima style.
Her work is somewhat different that her father's work.
What that means really is the pieces
that are coming out of the studio today
are Mira Nakashima pieces.
- I just sort of picked up the pieces
where dad let them fall, and have tried
to continue his tradition,
and explore it a little further.
In India, they believe that beauty
is man's connection to the divine.
[birds chirping]
Dad's whole operation here has been,
he called it his "karma yoga,"
his way of being, which is a form of meditation.
Some people get it, some people don't.
But I hope that that tradition can continue somehow,
because it's very meaningful, it's very important
in our world today.
- George Nakashima: And if we end up with something
that pleases us, and pleases others,
we feel that the destiny
of a piece of wood has been fulfilled.