The umbrella maker who spends decades perfecting something this simple

Down a narrow street in Kyoto, across from the quiet grounds of a temple, sits one of the last shops in Japan that still makes wagasa, the traditional Japanese umbrella. Garr Reynolds visited Hiyoshiya, a family business that has been making these umbrellas for more than a hundred and fifty years, and met its fifth-generation owner, a young master craftsman named Kotaro Nishibori.

A finished wagasa looks like the simplest object imaginable: a handle, some ribs, a canopy of paper. But making one requires the specialized skill of several different master craftspeople, one for the bamboo, one for the woodwork, one for the washi paper, one for the final adjustments, working through dozens of difficult, time-consuming steps using only natural materials such as bamboo, paper, linseed oil, lacquer, and tapioca glue.

That contrast is the lesson Reynolds draws from wagasa. What looks effortlessly simple to the person holding the umbrella is, for the person who made it, the product of years of study and painstaking work. Simplicity is not simple. It is, in his words, actually hard to achieve, whether you are a wagasa craftsman or a presenter trying to boil a complicated idea down to a single clear slide.

He connects this to a broader idea from the Zen arts: that form, meaning rules or structure, is necessary for freedom to exist. Practices like sumi-e ink painting, ikebana flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony all look beautifully simple on the surface, but that simplicity is achieved only through years of study and a deep understanding of underlying principles. Without the structure, you don't get freedom, you get chaos, because everything and anything goes.

The lesson isn't that you should aim for something easy. It's the opposite. You should expect the plain, clear version of your idea to take more work than the cluttered one, not less, because someone has to do the pruning that the audience never sees. As the designer John Maeda puts it, simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. The obvious part, the reduction, is where the real labor happens, long before anyone appreciates how effortless the result looks.

Next time you sit down to simplify something, whether it's a slide, a report, or an explanation you give at work, resist the urge to call it finished after the first clean pass. Set aside a separate round of time whose only job is cutting, the way a craftsperson would spend years learning a form before earning the right to simplify it. Study the basic rules of whatever you're working on before you try to strip it down, because you can't responsibly remove what you don't understand. Then judge the result by how easy it is for someone else to follow, not by how satisfied you feel making it. Subtract everything obvious first, and only afterward add back the one or two things that actually carry meaning. What looks effortless at the end rarely was.