You become heir to the hands that carved Toshogu. The Nikko Toshogu shrine, with its dazzling sculptures—the sleeping cat, the three wise monkeys, gates encrusted with carved beasts and flowers—was the work of master craftsmen, and the craft they made in their spare hours became Nikko-bori, the carving tradition that still lives in the town below. You take up the hikkaki-to, the distinctive curved knife unique to this craft, and cut peonies and arabesques into the wood. Three centuries of technique gather in the blade as you work, the patterns that decorated a shogun's mausoleum now taking shape, however roughly, under your own hand. Think of the artisan who carved the famous sleeping cat above the shrine gate, and then think of the generations who followed, passing the knives and the patterns down through three hundred years to this workshop, to this afternoon, to you. Your hand sets the blade to the same wood, in the same motions. To carve here is to touch the very end of a long chain of skill—the handwork that produced a World Heritage site, reaching all the way down to a beginner cutting a flower into a panel of pale wood.