It's marvelous to meet people like Karl Carvalho, who gets excited about old Japanese carpenter tools. Chisels and planes and saws are to him as artistic as the "Mona Lisa" or, say, a samurai sword. He doesn't collect them — he holds them in trust and preserves their stories.

Carvalho is a woodworker who restores old houses. He said he kept finding ink line marks in old kama'aina houses that told him the houses were built by Japanese carpenters. But the Japanese carpenter in Hawai'i is dead. The sons of Japanese carpenters have become attorneys and insurance executives and school principals.

Carvalho asked around what happened to their fathers' tools. He began to get calls.

The children of a Japanese carpenter called because their father had a lot of old tools they didn't know what to do with. Carvalho said he went to the house and met a tiny old man who led him to a shed in back.

"There's always a shed in back," Carvalho said. "It's where the carpenter went after work to sharpen his precious tools and drink sake. But he didn't want his children to be carpenters. He wanted them to have a better life."

The dilemma of the old Japanese carpenter, he said, is that his tools were part of him, like limbs, but he didn't teach his children to use them because he didn't want them to struggle as he had.

Carvalho said he didn't see the tools at first, just stacks of boxes. Then the old man opened a box and took out a small plane. Carvalho couldn't believe he was holding this beautiful thing in his hand. It was stamped with the seal of one of the famous samurai sword-making families in Japan.

"After the Meiji Restoration, the samurai were out of work," Carvalho explained. "I think many of the old sword-making families turned to making tools."

The blade of the plane was made of samurai steel. There were boxes of elegant, unpretentious, hand-worn tools with flawless patina. The old man selected some and handed them over. Aghast, Carvalho said he couldn't take them. The old man answered, "You don't know how long I've waited for you."

The daughter of a Japanese carpenter called Carvalho and asked if he was the man who uses old Japanese carpenter tools. He said yes. She asked him to meet him in the parking lot at Ala Moana. They found each other and she opened a trunk. There was a box, a kit of Japanese carpenter tools.

The woman gave them to Carvalho. When he protested, she said, "I've been trying for a long time to find someone to take care of my father's tools."

And so Carvalho said he doesn't feel as if he owns the tools. "I'm a repository for antiquities," he said. He keeps the tools to use, not to look at, because hand tools give a finish to woodworking that power tools cannot.

Each day he decides which tools of the hundreds on his shelves to take to work. Then he sharpens them before setting out.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.