In 2016, Haruaki Saito quit his job as a violin repairman at a workshop in Tokyo and announced to his family that he was moving to Ireland. None of this information went down well. However, as Saito, now 34, explains — he had reached a breaking point.
"I had to change, because otherwise I would have died," he offers as a simple explanation.
In that time of personal struggle, Saito turned to an area that had provided comfort, strength and hope for him: traditional Irish music, and the making and repairing of fiddles, an essential instrument of the genre.