Kintaro YAZAWA was born in Tokyo in 1946. He majored in textile machinery at Shinshu University in Nagano. After six years as a sales engineer in Osaka, he searched for a creative and meaningful life as an apprentice to Monsieur Marc Garnier, a traditional organ builder in France. In 1977 he opened his own woodworking workshop in Miyazaki, Japan.

After coming back to Japan, Kintaro learned traditional Japanese woodworking on his own. After working very hard, he earned the honor of membership in the Japan Art Crafts Association, the highest standard in the traditional Japanese art crafts.

In the early 1980's, Kintaro read an article about the English Arts and Crafts Movement. The empathy he felt with the work of Ernest Gimson and the Barnsleys led him to make a pilgrimage to Britain in 1981, where he met Edward Barnsley and his best known pupil, Alan Peters.