Developing an interest in creating objects of art from timber and other materials since he was a young child, Hiroyuki Tokutomi grew up carving from pieces of wood that he found or purchased and, over decades of practice, he developed and honed his inborn talents.

Having studied under Sixten Ivarsson in 1976-77, he is one of a few carvers who trained directly with the man primarily responsible for the change in mindset that yielded the Danish Revolution in pipe making during the 1960s and 1970s. Tokutomi's creations have captured the imagination of astute collectors in the United State, Europe, China, and his home country of Japan. Though his pipes are often beautifully grained, the engineering perfect and the smoking qualities superb, that is not what has ignited the passion of those that collect and love Tokutomi's pipes. Quite simply, Tokutomi's sense of design and shaping aesthtic is uniquely his own — that of an artist whose medium happens to be briar, and whose self-imposed constraints are the limitations imposed by the necessary functions of a smoking instrument.