Kyoichiro Tsuge passed away on November 2. He was 99.
Tsuge was born in 1910. In his youth, he became an apprentice at a cigarette holder manufacturer where he learned to craft ivory cigarette holders. When Tsuge turned twenty-six, he started his own cigarette holder business. After the war, he started to make pipes.
Tsuge has two factories that produce machine-made pipes and a workshop that produces the “Ikebana” line of very fine hand-crafted pipes which retails for anything from US$200/- to US$8,400/-.
The picture above shows a Tsuge pipe and tamper I own.