Japanese master shoemaker takes English art and makes it his own

Chihiro Yamaguchi, founder of luxury Japanese shoe label Guild of Crafts, is busy hand-stitching his next creation. He pauses for a moment, holding up his left hand to reveal a calloused and hardened thumb, the product of decades of making shoes the traditional English way - albeit with a Japanese twist.

With up to a six-month wait for a pair, Guild of Crafts shoes have gained an almost cult-like following and not only for their curious blend of East and West, evidenced, for example, in the way bamboo is used.

"There's not much difference between my shoes and English shoes. But my character, the Asian character, comes through," says the 53-year-old.

"Asian people care very much about small things, tiny things. So I've tried to make the stitching tiny, for example," he says, showing a shoe with incredible micro-stitching.

The Japanese master shoemaker visited Hong Kong recently to promote his work at the Independence Gallery in the Pedder Building, where he recounted his journey to becoming a master of English shoemaking.

"I came from a country where shoes were made by machines," says the craftsman, who first worked in a tyre factory that also made sneakers. "I realised that every piece of shoemaking could still be done by hand. So I decided to study shoemaking from the beginning, but there was no school in Japan."