Early this year I was privileged to attend a wood working class run by a Japanese craftsman at the ANU in Canberra.
Hiroshi Yamaguchi was wonderful at describing how to use Japanese hand tools and the methodology behind them.
I have been using Japanese hand tools for many years but I was still hanging off every word Hiroshi had to say. It is rare that a person could get this leave of experience outside of Japan and with out knowing the language.
To give you an idea of the detail, we spent a few hours in class on how to fit the iron whoop on top of the chisel which was fascinating.
The first part of the course was to set a chisel, fitting the iron whoop, flattening the back and sharpening. The chisel was then used in the class to make a Japanese plane (kanna).
Below you will see the two planes I made and the chisel (nomi) used to make them.
There are two 4 day intensive classes in early September, one is run by Hiroshi and the second is run by a visiting Japanese artist. See the link below for details.
http://www.anu.edu.au/cce/vaacourses/wood