Daisugi, the 600-year-old Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees

It's not politically correct nor polite to say this, but Japan's problem is their education and cultural system ingrains subservience to the point that Japanese people are subservient even to injustice. It's not just inefficiency Japanese people put up with, they don't do anything about corrupt and ridiculous politicians having their way through generations. They call it a tradition, but they are just afraid of speaking out because of peer pressure. It's like a mafia system. I know that I sound very broad and generalizing, but those who have lived in Japan for long enough would probably agree with this.

I think it's the difference between an individualist and collectivist culture. I'd guess that especially the kind of people that would come to hackernews will have a hard time seeing the upside of collectivism and the downside of individualism (subservient having a strong negative connotation), but I think it's really mostly a tradeoff. Yes individualism is probably better for generating entrepreneurs. But you don't see things like people refusing to wear masks in Japan. There's lots of stories of things like Japanese people taking a long trip to return a lost wallet or picking up after each other at sports stadiums. I would say that in general there are more social obligations but also as a result more social trust. Probably if you grew up in a collectivist society then a lot of the things that you can see happening in the West will seem dysfunctional. Also I doubt more people are lonely in Japan than America, and some brief skimming the internet, research seems to support this.

Eh, every nation and culture has their problems. It is not a binary situation, everything has tradeoffs. Japan be Japan because they do the things that Japan does, and so Japan has Japan problems, not American or European problems. European do European way of doing things, that's why they have European problems. America does too.

I found something similar of the shockingly unnecessary politeness that Canadians have, to the point that a US citizen might find it slightly creepy. Beneath the surface it's an oppressive circumstance for many, in Canada.

The more crowded a place and the higher the population, the more formal the culture and the more you need mechanisms to protect your privacy and politely but effectively tell a zillion strangers to butt out.

The human mind is designed to work with a "tribe" of about 150 people. Above that and we have to layer culture and learned behaviors on top of innate traits to make the whole thing not implode.

I was looked upon a lot until I cut my hair. Glaring is a kind of bullying that goes around a lot there and it’s effective in making people conform. Only place in the world where I felt safe leaving my new MacBook in Starbucks while I go to the bathroom so I don’t think conformity is all bad.

I think it's more the limitless respect for age and seniority. It's kinda how Trump probably didn't start as horrible as he is now, but since people never told him to fuck off and he got away with it, it just kept getting worse.

In Chinese, boss is spelled lao-ban, teacher is lao-shi, wife is lao-po, and husband lao-gong. Lao means old. There are a lot more of these in the language. I wouldn't be surprised if its similar in japanese(at least considering the society itself)

The way I imagine it is, is that society is self-balancing in the sense that if you go out of line society reminds you that something isn't ok. But at some point in time when you're old the society just respects you for being old and gives you a pass whatever you do. In east asian societies being old might be one of those conditions. In the US it might be more related to how much money you have, and how successful you seem.

I have one of those washing machines! It’s so pleased with itself when it finishes and is an amusing contrast to the Miele dishwasher’s 4 stern German beeps

My LG washing machine does the same. Additionally, Korean convenience stores usually play something like a midi Für Elise when the front door opens as opposed to a bell. Even luggage cars in airports do the same.

I had a Samsung washing machine a few years ago. It had a button to toggle sounds on/off. Unfortunately, I still wanted some notification when the cycle finished so I just had to leave the sounds on. I kind of grew to like it but my occasional guests thought it was annoying.

I got a japanese rice cooker that would play cheerful songs once it finished. Cute the first time, but annoying after that. Fortunately they could be switched to simple beeps.

I have a water kettle that plays a song whenever it finishes boiling. You can turn it off... and it resets back on whenever you unplug it to fill it with water.

Sharp's appliances in Japan aggressively talks about notification, some tips. and so on.

> It’s very rare that you think “they should be doing it like this” when you’re in Japan.

Then you probably haven’t been living there for long. There are tons of things to change, one of my biggest pet peeve being the lack of house insulation and inefficient warming options (reverse air-con, petrol burner instead of central heating). Another is having to sort recyclable material into different categories which are collected at different days (and just once a week) instead of having a dedicated common bin for them. Speaking of that, lack of trash bin in public space is very annoying too.

> How did Germany get the efficiency stereotype and Japan didn’t?

Because it’s a deeply inefficient society. Good results is achieved by throwing more humans, usually doing almost jack-shit, to problems. 10 workers cleaning the same square meter, 16 people on a task for few hours, 4 secretaries at a very small clinic, salaryman staying at work bot producing anything just to keep a good image, etc. I witnessed dozens of such examples. European countries are way more efficient in general in part because they know when to stop, and can’t afford to pay too much people being idle.

So many things in Japan are terribly inefficient. They just get some things right that we don't out of sheer necessity. Those clearly marked subway stations are there because of the inhuman rush hour crush that is the Tokyo Metro at 5PM. No Western country would find that acceptable, there would be weekly demands to build more rail capacity.

> How did Germany get the efficiency stereotype and Japan didn’t?

Everything in Japan still mostly relies on widespread use of fax machines due to their stubborn continued usage of personal wooden seals ("Hanko stamps"). Everyone at every level of management and burocracy has his/her own personal seal which has to be stamped on paper documents, which are then either scanned or sent via fax.

This and a general stubborness on giving up certain deeply rooted but antiquated habits is one of the main reasons Japan is not famous for efficiency.

I think shame is a really useful thing in the context of society and something I feel a lot of Western cultures would benefit from. I've never understood the "don't X shame me" thing, there are a huge number of things that people should feel shame for that I think western societies have normalised.

I haven't lived in Japan but I've spent a considerable amount of time there. I accept that Japanese people are much more socially conformist, but it's interesting from a visitor's perspective as I've always felt the cities there feel a lot less homogenised in a lot of ways. Tokyo has always felt far more of a city of people doing interesting and creative things than London, to me at least.

I never lived in Japan, I know about a few issues (from hikkikomoris, suicide rates to good old mafia) but there's something fascinating about that country. Tell me if I'm wrong but their sense of aesthetics, minimalism, precision is special.

I argued with a colleague who worked for a japanese import/export company, he said they were crude, dumb and sleazy.. mostly succeeding by hiring hard working foreigners. That's one viewpoint, but I've also seen documentaries about early semiconductor industry in japan, and while they lifted a few patents, they did do their own share of hard work to turn them into workable devices (to the point where Japan became a reputable country in the field, from audio to computing).

Same goes for animation, Akira was a masterpiece of detail. The gaming industry was great. Ancestral toolsmith (famous katana blacksmith process).. samurai code.

More recently the manufacturing paradigm (toyota/lean).

There's a lot to love from there.

Define western nation? System? Culture?

HN people are filled with Westerners fascinated by Asian culture, and then get disappointed once they realized that Asia being Asia and do not want to have the West problems by introducing diversity and PC talk.

Most Western nations could use more social conformity and shame culture to reduce antisocial behavior. I mean, that's the main reason why Japanese cities are so clean and safe compared to most European cities.

It's a great place to retire in my opinion. They are happy to give you a retirement visa if you have half a million in the bank. Japan can be a cheap, high quality, and very respectful place to be if you're a senior.

I’m in the UK.

I’m not exactly a globe trotter but I was thinking of various South American countries, Thailand.

I don’t want to put any of those places down. I love visiting almost anywhere. Mexico is amazing too.

Japan just stands out as a bit different. Like they’re on a different trajectory somehow.

when ever Japan is mentioned on the internet the ethnostate advocates crawl out from under their rock

Frequently, the nail that sticks out sticks out because the Japanese person had the audacity to have a black or korean parent.

Why, whenever Japan is mentioned, invariably the phrase “the west” is dropped in a context that seems to make it synonymous with “the U.S.A.” or “Anglo-Saxons” at best.

You will find that there are few “western” countries that are similarly interested in “p.c. talk” as the U.S.A. is. — that is very much a condition commonly associated with the U.S.A. culture war.

The obvious problem with nationalism is that everyone is supposed to have their own nation that uniquely suits them, including the people that you are excluding from your own nation. This gets exceptionally contradictory when taken to the extreme.

E.g. Nazis trying to build an Aryan state, while simultaneously acquiring "Lebensraum", knowing that they are also acquiring people from other nationalities, which then have to be deported into another nation state whose nationalist people become angry. Of course this came with the twist that Jews are a nationless race and therefore should be incinerated.

It's the same thing with the refugee crisis. Nationalists in Lybia deport non-Lybians to Europe who end up as refugees there and then the local nationalists become angry and deport them somewhere else. It's a never ending shell game.

I don't dispute the point of trivia posts, I actually quite like them. What I have a problem with is the framing. I find cultural fetishism generally despicable, regardless of the culture that's being talked about. I get a minor aneurysm every time I see someone praising the "eternal robustness" of Roman roads, for example.

Pollarding, according to Wikipedia, was first mentioned by a Roman poet 2100 years ago.

You could claim sort of convergent evolution, but I find it hard to believe that a 1500 year old Roman cultivation technique was reinvented in Japan almost exactly at the apex of China's naval power. This smells of corporate espionage.

Can you point me towards anyone using pollarding or coppicing to produce lumber? That's not at all what I was taught those techniques are for. It's hard to imagine the resulting shoots getting big enough to make boards out of in a reasonable amount of time.

Once you see coppicing it's one of those things you'll notice everywhere that was cultivated for a long period of time. I'm surprised at how straight the shoots would grow, and farmers were pretty good at managing and multiplying timber using this method.

I just have never seen a pollarded tree that produced large enough shoots to be called a pole. A pole in my mind is 4-5" in diameter. Everything I can find says pollarded trees were used to produce fuel and small diameter wood for crafts.

Pollarded trees in Great Britain are in many cases several times older than the average life expectancy of those species. It very much depends on the species of tree of course.

I think I once heard that most trees that coppice or pollard well are adapted to beaver predation. We just make a cleaner cut than the beaver.

Why not?

Also (this is easy to miss) the technique is performed only on clones of one mutant Sugi tree (Japanese "cedar", actually more closely related to redwoods but it's its own genus).

The problem with that analogy is that the Kon-Tiki hypothesis was proven right last year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01983-5