Talk:Japanese carpentry

Do Japanese houses tend to be made from wood?
I removed a sentence:
 * Because there are many earthquakes in Japan, Japanese houses still tend to be made from wood, a flexible material, rather than brick or stone.

Maybe I was in a different Japan, but I didn't see many newly built wood houses there. I'd say Japan is rather suffering from a "love affair with concrete", as somebody said on his webpage. Maybe this will change in the future, but there is not much to be seen of a return to wooden houses as of 2005. --Mkill 15:34, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

The Japan is not different most buildings are made with concrete but all the buildings started with wood.I worked for a Japanese construction company and concrete is the last step in making a building. So if you were to walk around Japan and see people making a building you will see wood. Japanese houses are indeed made with wood but not from wood--Hitmanhitz (talk) 12:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)


 * What nonsense. I live in a juutakugai where there are new houses being put up all the time, and most of them are wood framed. One of my friends in the construction industry (she's a kenchikushi 2-kyu, if you know what that means) says she has never built anything but a wooden house. --DannyWilde 00:36, 14 November 2005 (UTC)


 * I added a reference, actually the first hit on Google with the words "wooden construction Japan". It wasn't exactly hard to verify this fact, so I wonder why we even needed to have this discussion. --DannyWilde 03:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)


 * 1) Well, you added the link of a wood construction company. Of course they claim it is the method that is used most often.
 * 2) But there is a difference between a "wooden post and beam construction system", and a "house made from wood". The difference is in what the walls are made of.
 * 3) In fact I know what a 建築士二級 is. Yes I know people who work in the Japanese construction industry. Yes it completely doesn't matter here.
 * 4) Check the third hit in Google, quote: "nonwood homes which comprised about 60 percent of all 1988 housing starts". So wooden homes have a larger share than I though, but looks like they are not the majority. -- Mkill 00:19, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Opening Paragraph/Article Layout Revision?
One subsection of the article is wholly devoted to Japanese tools, but one of the best tool references (the japanese saw that cuts on the pull) is given in the opening paragraph. Perhaps some more general statements about Japan's carpentry and its history (maybe some references to how it's being kept alive today, the two-temple construction at Ise, etc) would fill out of opening better, followed by tools (saw moved to that section) and unique Japanese techniques.

The vise currently listed in the tools section might be considered a technique, if no special tools or objects being used in it are made specifically for the purpose of being a vise. I'm not certain.

I think you are right. In the East people have many clever uses of cords, wedges, bamboo. But I think the vise shown is only there due to a drawing having being made of it, when there are probably hundreds or thousands of variations. In all our shops we routinely come up with dodge for holding things, they do not rise to any general principle.

I'm an armchair expert, and I don't have any friends in the Japanese building industry, so I won't make these edits unless there's a good reason -not- to, and if noone more knowledgeable steps in to handle it. I like Wikipedia, I don't want to be the one who breaks it.

Japanese Carpentry Tools or Japanese Carpentry
I agreee with the above comment something needs to be done with the article. The article begins with "Japanese carpentry is distinguished by its advanced joinery and its finely-planed wood surfaces." and yet the majority of the article discusses tools and does not describe the distinguishing characteristics mentioned in the lede. Should the article be renamed Japanese Carpentry Tools?

DouglasCalvert (talk) 19:12, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

On planes the typical Japanese plane was a single blade plane the sub-blade is a recent adaptation, and one can get an argument over it's utility. Not sure the entry is wrong, but it lacks balance. If you are going to talk about Yari, you are kinda skipping the majority of the period that planes existed and suggesting as typical post contact polluted planes. The reference to "the archaic type of European wooden plane" is OK, however the best European planes have been wooden. Metal plane manufacture occurs are a result of industrialization which destroyed the basis for fine woodwork in the west. There are some archaic metal planes that are good, but in the main, the best western planes were wood.

The section on vises and sawhorses and work methods is pretty much all wrong in that it compares Japanese and western styles of work, which is a western-centric approach, and then gets it mostly wrong. If you look at western carpentry they have many ways of getting a job done that don't involved vises and involve essentially similar approaches, like using a saw horse and trapping the wood with the knee. Morse wondered at the use of body parts, and so did many craft revival types from the 70s onward, but all that stuff was done in the past in western work also. It should be noted that the Japanese tools stand in contrast not just to the west, but pretty much everywhere else. So the less well equipped carpenter in Vietnam or China, might still be working in a style that in the US one might have to go back several hundred years to match.

Low saw horse are typical in any timber framing trade.

In general the article gets into the soup when it makes comparisons, because a lot of early assumptions from the influence of Mai or Odate have stuck despite being largely misleading. Mai was a timber framer and Odate a shoji screen maker. One gets roughly the effect if western cabinetmaking was interpreted through the lens of a guy who made window sashes.

It should be — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.14.112.120 (talk) 17:29, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

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Semi-protected edit request on 19 February 2020
I would like to edit, I am a Japanese Historian and this information is not correct. 2600:8800:2181:A400:F13F:DFDD:57F9:6447 (talk) 21:21, 19 February 2020 (UTC)


 * ❌. It's not clear what changes you want to make. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 21:33, 19 February 2020 (UTC)