Takenaka

"There are many things that can be learnt from [master carpenter's] skills and spirit to be applied to contemporary organizations and the making of things."

The last time we were here I raved about The Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum.  It was a central stop last time and was so again this time.  This time around they are in a new building, one that has been constructed using ancient techniques but applied to a lovely and thoughtful contemporary building.  There are more exhibits, there is a workshop where you can take classes, all the furniture is by local craftspeople, it is crazy.

I won't go back through what I wrote last time, that does not seem to make sense.  And I do want this blog to be more than a travelogue, so just posting some photos does not seem to be the right thing either.  Why bring a group of architecture and design students to a craft museum at all?  None of them want to go into woodworking, so why bother even if it is a stunningly thoughtful and well-designed space?

Well, one answer to that might have been raised by Howard Risatti in his book "Theory of Craft."  It's a good book and one that has particular relevance in much of my work.  He writes:

When we look at craft objects from different societies...it is clear they all share common functional traits, what we would identify as functional form.  It is also clear they have formal differences, these we would identify as their different stylistic forms or styles.  Style, or stylistic form in craft objects, always exists along with functional form; but unlike functional form, stylistic form springs from the realm of culture and the intention to meaning, to signification.  Moreover, because craft objects are an embodiment of both functional form and stylistic form, they must be understood as having a life as both physical objects and as social objects.

So a historic hand plane has an existence as an object, a tool, a component in a carpenter's tool kit.  But it also has relevance in a conversation about resources and resource usage, and about what a style of work or a style of workmanship communicates about a particular culture.  And my hope is that by exposing our students to the style of making in another culture that it will underline for them the stylistic and functional choices and assumptions that they are making in their own work.

Japanese traditional carpentry, like Western carpentry, dictated (in part) the æsthetic that we think of as "Japanese."  The mix of wood and clay and stone, the intentional asymmetry, the floor plans dictated by tatami mats, these have their root in how the spaces were made and used. 

As we walked around the museum yesterday and I talked about tools and methods, about materials and the way we treat them (they still have the bins full of shavings from different woods so that you can smell the difference between hinoki and oak, for example.  IT'S SMELL-O-VISION!  WITH WOOD.  OMG.)  I am hopeful that some of this resonated with the students.  I am hopeful that as they move forward in their own design practices some gossamer memory of attention to not just materiality but also the ways that materials are used will have clung tot heir perceptions.  Here are some photos and drawings from my favorite museum on the planet.

The workshop.  We did not have a chance to use it, but next time for sure.

A huge plane and the shaving that came from it.

Looks like a simple joint, right?

Here's how that joint goes together.

A really amazing display that is sort of a 3D exploded view of a timber framed structure showing all of the joints.

A shouldered sliding dovetail bridle (kyorogumi) joint.

 

Konnichiwa (Coming/Coming Back)

It is 6.27 am on day three of my return visit to Japan, and I have been trying to think about how to write about this and what to write about it.  Coming back, it turns out, is different from coming here.  Sort of like a second date, you know you will be exhilarated and excited, but you also know how you will be exhilarated and excited.  Which does not lessen the experience at all but it does give it a different flavor.

The difference in flavor is one that I have been trying to parse over the last couple of days as I settle into our routine here.  The first trip of course everything was a learning experience, everything was new, everything was exploration.  This time I knew exactly how to get to the good ramen shop, which streets lead to the knife store.  I know what to expect when I walk into the Imperial Palace to get our permits to visit Katsura Villa.  I am not just now finding out about propped-up trees, I am re-visiting old friends.

This has been true for a lot of things, and I have to admit to being a bit crestfallen as this process was revealed to me.  Like a lot of people I wanted the continued first flush of newness that I felt last time.  Of course that is childish, but the only other time I have been to Japan everything was so very new, so very alien, that the excitement of discovery actually started to wear me out by then end.

So I am taking stock and recalibrating.  We walked the students to Kiyomizu-dera, and I got to re-visit it, which, it turns out, was quite lovely.  Although familiar, it is no less stunning.  The massive beams and columns, the hand cut joints, the views of the city and the Western mountains beyond it, none of this is at all less enthralling.  But because I already have the photos of these views and these things, I felt released from the need to obsessively document, and was able to sit in the gloom of the temple and just smell the incense and feel the worn wood under me and listen to the big bell ring and the people swirling outside and just sink in to the experience itself.  How lovely.

I did do a little sketching, which I have decided I need to do more of in my time here, which reminded me how little I draw these days.  I hope to get better at it by the time we leave here.  And I did take a couple of photos.  But mostly what I did was sit and listen and smell and feel the place, and sit with my students, cajoling them to do the same.

Seems like that may be the flavor of this trip:  That instead of experiencing it through a little black plastic box I experience it the way that people have for centuries, and then relate it back through stories, which will have a different flavor this time.  Here are some sketches and photos:

Some sketches from today.

I love these baby Buddhas with bibs.

I took a photo of this last time, fun to draw it.

This is the big gong the sound of which reverberates throughout the temple.

Every temple has calligraphers, who will do calligraphy specific to the temple.  The three characters down the left hand side of this page are "kiyo,' "mizu," and "dera."

Just a dad waiting for his kiddos to come out of the temple.  Some things are familiar across cultures.

Just because you are in a stunning kimono doesn't mean you don't like a good selfie.

Some really nice CNC-cut planters for the side of a steep hill.

I love the way the curve of this maple tree accentuates the three dimensional grid of the columns and beams.

Warning: Extreme Tree Geekery!

 

 Ok, the time has come.  I have to write about the "propped up trees" phenomenon.  It might be my favorite thing about being here.

In every garden we visited, and in other places as well, we saw evidence that some trees are revered enough that arborists and gardeners will go to great lengths to save and protect them.  Which of course I love.  The trees in these gardens are not allowed to grow in a way that Americans might say is "natural."  They are pruned and trained into picturesque shapes that are as much living sculpture as anything else, often twisted shapes that look as though they have survived hundreds of years of buffering by the wind on some cliff face somewhere.

The thing is, this makes them really beautiful.  I always am struck by the ways that tree trunks can twist and hold that twist, or can grow horizontally and then vertically to reach the sun.  They really are sculptural objects in their own right, and they are everywhere already.  So lucky are we.

But in a Japanese garden or on temple or palace grounds, they are sculpted more deliberately, often to the limit of what the tree can endure.  This is where propping them up comes in.  Then there are the trees that obviously have some historic or religious significance (sometimes there is even a plaque describing it, but of course I can't read any of the plaques here).  These trees are propped up to keep them alive, and again, great lengths are gone to to keep them going. 

The props themselves are sometimes beautiful examples of woodworking.  They are often round poles (occasionally a foot in diameter, see below) with perfect mortice and tenon joints.  They are tied to the tree with a biodegradable twine, and often the tree is wrapped with bark or a grass mat to protect it.  It really is quite lovely to see, and the reverence that is accorded the trees is so lovely and so touching.  These are venerable beings, after all, much older, in many cases, than the gardeners who tend them.  They should be accorded the respect and gratitude we accord our elders, don't you think?  I love that there is such ubiquitous evidence that many people here feel as I do about trees.

Last thing before we move on to some photos:  I started this post with a piece of kanji that a student taught me.  It means (depending on how it is used) either "tree" or "wood"  Two of them next to each other means "small forest" and three of them means "forest."  I am digging the pictogram thing.  Intensely hard to parse, but my students have been teaching me a few characters and it is fun.  So three down, about 5,000 to go, and then I can start in on the pronunciation.  How hard can it be?

Ok, on to the photos of propped up trees:

 We'll start with a pretty run-of-the-mill propped up tree.  This is a lovely little pine on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.  There are two perfectly fitted mortices in the cross-piece.  Lovely piece of work.

 A slightly more elaborate propping up.  Also at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

 I wish I had some idea about this tree.  It is right at the corner of the castle building, and there was a huge plaque detailing its significance, but of course I could read none of it.  There was a date from the early 19th century, but that was the best I could figure out.  The trunk is about four feet in diameter, and the poles holding up the branches are each a foot thick.  You can get a sense of the scale from the police car there next to the tree.  This was one of the first things I saw in Japan and it won me over immediately.

 A close up of the whole process:  Wrap the branch in bark, then lash it with twine to the support pole.  This way as the tree grows it won't hurt the tree.  In a couple of places we even saw examples of the tree growing to support its own weight and growing off of the support.  Pretty triumphant to see that.

 

 A really nice example of the tree and the prop becoming a threshold into a space.  There is another photo of a similar thing later on, but this is a lovely one.  Many of these trees are bred to grow very slowly, so there is no guarantee that this tree is as callow as it seems, it could be quite old.  Again, this practice is so normative here that there is no comment on it, no way to know anything other than what we see.

 Maybe my second-favorite propped up tree.  So lovely.  This is in Katsura Villa, I think, so of course some of the top arborists in the nation are caring for this one.  I just love the horizontal and the tow verticals set up by this particular tree.

 The base of the supports for this tree land in a gravel garden, as this is in a Zen garden.  I love that the monks rake around the posts, acknowledging them as important objects and incorporating them into the raked pattern.

 A really tall propped up tree here.  Those supports are about thirty feet tall.  Still made the same way, with a perfect mortice at the top and lovingly lashed to the branches.  This  one is so tall that at first you are not aware of them as branch supports, but then you look up and realise that they are not a light post or something, that they are a part of the support system for the tree.

Sometimes support is in tension not compression.  Here is a little tree that is being trained to hang out over a path in a beautiful way.  Callow youth, this one.

I love it when the tree twists around like this.  Looks like the muscles in an arm, don't you think?  Here is an example of a tree that has been so tortuously trained that it could never stand on its own.  But it lives on.  The will to live is tenacious, even in (maybe especially in) trees, and they cling to life with great force of will.

 And here is my all-time, hands-down, favorite propped up tree.  At the entrance to Katsura villa.  Truly lovely, not least because all of the heartwood has been eaten by rot or mold or something, but the sapwood is still keeping the tree alive, twisted though it is.  The supports here are bigger than a foot in diameter.

 Here is another shot of this one.  You can see clear through it.  It is so beautiful, I just sat and stared at it for a long time.  The students were making fun of me after a while, but I did not care, it is just lovely.  I am so thankful that i have seen this old lady, when ever I start feeling like I have reached my limit I will remember her and remind myself to avail myself of support systems and lean on things that I need to lean on.  So much wisdom to learn from trees, and from those who take care of them.

 A nice example from inside Katsura Villa.  The ma created by the supports, the way they are there and not-there as the tree reaches out over the water is pretty amazing.

 From Tneryu-ji Zen temple in Arashiyama.  I love that the one branch has been trained so completely horizontally so that a real threshold has been made.  This is a very typical type, see below.

 From Bizen somewhere on the walk to the sword museum.  Using a tree as a lintel for entry into the house is a very common sight here, and one that I really dig.  What nicer way to delineate space than with trees?

And this poor lady gets the prize for most punk rock tree.  Holy crap.  There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and this is one propped up tree that really shocked me.  I don't know if some terrible thing happened in its past, or if the gardeners are just over zealous, or what, but this is just crazy.  Nice one to end on, I think.