Skip to main content

Japanese Carpenters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joineries While Taking Apart a Traditional House

According to myth, the first Japanese poet, Susano-o, the storm god, named the activity of building as equal to the works of nature. Travel blog Kansai Odyssey writes, “Susano-o felt rather inspired” while at Suga Shrine in Shimane Prefecture, “and recited the first poem in Japanese literature.” Roughly translated, it reads: “In Izumo, where the clouds form, / I see a fence of clouds. / To protect my wife, I too, built a fence. / These clouds are as my fence.”

An embrace of the natural world intermingles in Japanese culture with a craft tradition renowned the world over, not least in the building arts. “Since the 12th Century,” Grace Ebert writes at Colossal, “Japanese artisans have been employing a construction technique that uses just one simple material: wood. Rather than utilize glue, nails, and other fasteners, the tradition of Japanese wood joinery notches slabs of timber so that the grooves lock together and form a sturdy structure.”

Although mostly practiced in the repair and preservation of historic buildings these days, Japanese joinery still inspires modern woodworkers, engineers, and architects for its incredible precision and endurance. Traditional Japanese buildings are “structures built from natural materials and the knowledge and skills passed down generations,” writes Yamanashi-based carpenter Dylan Iwakuni. “Through the fine skills and knowledge, Japanese Wooden Architecture has been standing for (thousands of) years.”

In the video at the top, you can see Iwakuni and his team’s excitement as they discover traditional joinery while disassembling a 100-year-old Japanese house. The video shows each joint in close-up, adding a title that names its particular type. “As it became a tradition in Japan,” wrote Colin Marshall in a previous post on Iwakuni’s craft, “this carpentry developed a canon of joining methods.” All of the joints, from the very simple to the mind-bogglingly puzzle-like, were of course cut by hand. No power tools in medieval Japan.

Just above, see Iwakuni introduce the art of joinery, and see several more of his demonstrations here. Those interested in going further should see our previous posts at the links below. Find even more hands-on resources at the Japan Woodcraft Association.

via Twisted Sifter

Related Content: 

The Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery: A Kyoto Woodworker Shows How Japanese Carpenters Created Wood Structures Without Nails or Glue

Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite

See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws

Mesmerizing GIFs Illustrate the Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery — All Done Without Screws, Nails, or Glue

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Japanese Carpenters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joineries While Taking Apart a Traditional House is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2PW0lYv
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album  Love and Theft , he lifted the title from a  book of the same name by Eric Lott , who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their...
Post a Comment
Read more