Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)
openculture.com
openculture.com
So it’s a question of trade offs.
Take the buses: They have the most amazing automated machines for giving you change from banknotes and then collecting/calculating the correct fare payment in coins. Similar machines exist in some retailers. Try to pay by card and you won’t travel very far.
Much of the rest of the world moved to contactless card payments over a decade ago
I sort of sympathise on some levels - the investments they made in these ”refinements” are not trivial. I suspect Japan will stick to its legacy processes. IMHO It will succeed as a niche curiosity that outsiders find interesting as the world passes it by.
I have to wonder if such curiosity tourism will ever be enough to cover its economic needs.
The only example that I think makes sense is the Japanese intelligence services still using paper records. In this context it is advantageous since paper filing cabinets cannot be hacked remotely.
I mean, isn't it the same as the old saying "if it ain't broke..."?
Using your example and this is just a guess, at the time Japan implemented those automated machines there was probably a big push to make the switch as manual handling of change had become a source of stress.
The rest of the world didn't make that jump until cards were a thing, product of a similar experience.
But by that time in Japan, where the problem was already "solved", switching to cards was no longer that big of a jump and so there was no incentive (or at least not enough) to worth the effort in changing technologies.
It makes sense - landlines are on the way out and require a much bigger initial investment to lay lines. Cell networks only require building towers and their backhaul networks.
Countries invest in infrastreucture at differerent times. Time of the ages.
In London “oyster” contactless cards replaced cash/paper tickets for buses and the tube. It was then incremented to contactless bank payment cards as soon as the banks added such cards. This seemed largely to be an internal systems upgrade leveraging existing infrastructure.
Japanese suica/pasmo contactless payment cards are more like oyster and need topping up. Their bank payment cards are incompatible with international contactless systems. International contactless cards don’t work locally on many payment terminals.
Many retailers that support both local and international cards literally have mutiple contactless terminals. Some manage to take a contactless payment but then print a bit of paper for you to sign (total WTF moment!!).
But this post was originally about trees. And what I was getting at was the culture reveres preserving and optimising paths after those paths stop making sense or become obsolete. Some of that is very cool to see but I’m not sure if it’s going to be sustainable given their decline.
Likewise, there are many different competing payment systems in daily use (including Western-style contactless card payments and Chinese-style QR code mobile payment networks). There are so many options that cash registers normally have a little poster next to them informing you which of the payment networks are available (it’s often more than 20).
Cash is still more widely used than in day Sweden, China or Australia. But if I were to guess I’d say it’s because there are too many available alternatives (no single dominant network) rather than too few.
I travelled in Hokkaido, Rishiri, Okinawa, Ishigaki, Iriomote etc. They simply did not take cards at all. Also true on small private train lines such as Kanazawa to Uchinada.
For instance, Credit Cards are ubiquitous in the US. In India (and am guessing China too) credit cards were and even nor limited to a higher income niche while mobile payments via QR codes (UPI, Wechat) became more prevalent. And I think from an experience and convenience stand point they are better than Credit Cards.
Similarly in legacy banking, a large part of the tech infrastructure am guessing still runs on mainframes as banks were early adopters. Applications are still being written in COBOL.
Large Organizations / Governments benefit from tech adoption but are also slower and more difficult to migrate a new technology when it appears.
While I fully agree with your summary, I think there's an opportunity benefit as well as an opportunity cost, in that they are not turning the country into a digital panopticon for the citizenry. Considering the more collectivist social ethos (compared to many western countries), Japan is in many ways a privacy-maximizing society.
Daisugi could in theory be significantly older than 600 years, but it’s origins seems well documented.
That's the original comment's claim, and you seem to making that exact same claim here, but phrasing it as if you are right and the original commenter is wrong.
The Japanese equivalent of coppicing is coppicing because we are speaking English and we already have a word to describe the technique.
Also to correct your older post no it’s not “pollarding with the discovery of a particular tree that's really really good at it.” Daisugi uses Bonsai techniques making it labor intensive across a long period. Pollarding only takes labor when you’re actually harvesting the tree.
> Daisugi (台杉, where sugi refers to Japanese cedar), is a similar Japanese technique
in its intro
All 3 involve how trees grow back after you cut them but the methods are different. Daisugi involves a lot more effort after the initial cutting process, it’s roughly Bonsai + Pollarding. Though you keep a little more of the tree than with Pollarding.
The title suggests the latter, but the article doesn't go into details.
Daisugi, the 600-year-old Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26941631 - April 2021 (171 comments)
But coppicing, pollarding and daisugi have nothing to do with grafting. It's just that daisugi works with only one tree and its rooted cuttings, but no grafting is involved.
Are all cultures equally interesting to you?
Like, when they have traditional festivals, there's a pretty real effort at doing them right? It's not that the culture itself is "better" but they don't generally half-ass their public traditions and that makes it more fun to observe.
Like I don't want to be mean, but for example American Indian culture in a historical context is fascinating, but it's really hard to find groups that put effort into preserving cultural institutions at more than a "phone it in" level. And that makes it a lot less fun to go out of your way to see/learn.
There were Native American cities with the population of London, they had (ephemeral, regional) writing and counting systems, etc. But aside from anthropologists and a few survivors, all of that culture is dead and gone.
But it's disappointing in practice. My wife and kids are tribal members (technically, albeit at long distance) so we stop by Pow Wows sometimes and I feel like there's a lot of missed opportunity. Mostly ends up being a place to resell commercial trinkets (of course with some exceptions).
I’ve been in festivals for Brazilian culture, Taiwanese, etc and they can be just as fulfilling to experience.
The real thing to grapple with is that the tech industry in particular has an almost unhealthy exoticism focus on Japan and it colors and elevates any discussion about it beyond any other culture. Seriously - take a shot every time you see a new Japan-focused article hit the front page of this very site. You won’t be drunk but you’ll finish a bottle faster than you’d think.
Do it for California and you'd never stop drinking. Stuff gets posted here based on how relevant it is to the tech community, and Japan being the most developed nation that doesn't have European origins makes it different and interesting.
But still you see a lot of articles about different European countries, China, India etc, I don't think Japan is singled out here its just one of the focus points outside of the American coasts that gets the most attention.
So any nation with centuries of culture and tradition catches our eye as something we crave. Whether that's France or Mexico or Japan.
That isn't to say we don't have subcultures nestled around, we certainly do. Nor to say other cultures don't have serious negatives / fragmentation we ignore from afar, they certainly do. But a lot of people I know all express the same longing for a sense of belonging.
But a bias for Japanese culture does exist. It's better preserved, heavily juxtaposed to ours, has a close relationship with us, and they spend a lot of money to spread it.
Immigrants (like me) to the US adore US culture.
Some positive examples:
Americana is a good example, IMO. It's more a stereotype used in country songs idealizing a conservative, rural America; but it's not something actually practiced or related to by most Americans. Heck, it's often actively opposed!
Several positive aspects of US culture belong to non conservative areas: NYC, Hollywood, NASA, Silicon Valley, etc. Culture is not just ancient low tech practice.
American culture is so globally ubiquitous we don’t even recognize it when we do it.
E.g, despite animosity between China/US, Chinese citizens are fond of US culture (and vice-versa):
https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/04/world/asia/china-jackson-hole...
Japanese culture likewise has some negative aspects too: grope issue on trains, monoethnic culture where almost no other races can live as real equals, innovation and risk being actively discouraged, etc.
Regional cultures aren't national culture, I'd tuck this alongside subcultures in my original comment.
> NASA, Silicon Valley
Have internal business cultures, of which the vast majority of Americans have never participated in.
> Culture is not just ancient low tech practice.
I didn't say it was. I'm also not saying the US doesn't have ANY culture. I'm just meandering on the topic that cultural fetishism can be appealing to Americans because of how our own culture has grown to be and how immature it still is.
Japan and France have American cultural fetishists too.
> Japanese culture likewise has some negative aspects too
I acknowledged this in my original comment as well.
> I'm just meandering on the topic that cultural fetishism can be appealing to Americans because of how our own culture has grown to be and how immature it still is.
You’ve already been replied to that some from other cultures love American culture. Japan took Whisky, baseball, and jeans from the US and knocked them out of the park.
Are you trying to say that Americans fetishize cultures more than others? Or are you saying the American culture has no appeal? It’s not clear and I don’t see you really supporting either view well.
The root of what I'm getting at is just modern America has a diffuse and immature national culture. There's nothing like 1,000 years of dynasties, the legacy of Greece or Rome and their Gods, etc. The culture folk have is usually from a subculture or region, and even those may be ephemeral/inconsistent due to how often we move around cities for employment.
On top of that, as someone else mentioned, much of our culture gets immediately re-exported and blends into a worldwide "default" kind of state. Japanese baseball and whiskey and jeans. They no longer invoke a feeling of "being American". The parts that don't get exported are often things we don't want to actively associate with.
Combine all that with the lack of time a national identity has even had to foment. Compared to, say, the French, who will make signs like "Je suis circonflexe".
So many Americans are (in my opinion and experience) extra susceptible to seeing nations with a legacy and living traditions and national identity and feeling we are missing out.
Would love to hear your opinions!
By this standard, most of the cultural elements you mention aren't national culture either. I'll bet Mexican restaurants outnumber gun shops in the US.
We're a young country, by many standards -- just 250 years, by most standards, four centuries if your really push it, only a century or two for most of our cities.
We have always been in a state of change and development -- the Eerie Canal was less than fifty years old when the trans-continental railroad was completed. The Pony Express was put out of business by the telegraph within two years. The shopping mall era was maybe three decades. It's hard to find any techniques or traditions or enterprises which last more than a generation or two when everything changes so much.
We have always existed in the global context. Take pizza -- it's hard to find a more American cuisine than pizza. Our cities have their own rivalries and pride over their takes on it. But it started off as Italian pizza after WWII, and we of course immediately re-exported our takes on pizza through the globe, so you can hardly claim it's distinctly American.
We've always been a fragmented culture. The breaded pork tenderloin sandwich is on the menu at half of the restaurants in Indiana, but virtually unknown outside of it. Mardi gras is a huge thing in New Orleans, but not New York. There's barely anything besides fireworks on the fourth of July you can say is truly done throughout the US.
We have plenty of culture of course, from jazz clubs to Shaker furniture to apple orchards and county fairs and quilting bees and all the history and artisans you could ask for; it will just never be the same as the culture that develops over hundreds of years in stagnant isolation.
I love my country and appreciate my culture. In fact, America's melting pot is just lovely to me because I get to experience such a breadth of the world and people from within it. And don't get me started on breathy jazz in a repurposed southern home, eating pecan pie with the smell of magnolias and the chirping of the cicadas.
Just because I can recognize negatives and discuss the topic from an anthropological perspective doesn't mean I'm "demotivated"?
Though I do wish we brought back American Exceptionalism in the sense of building ornate mega structures and taking on huge infrastructure projects. Not that it's totally dead, but building wide and a resurrection of fiscal conservativism has severely crippled it.
Native american culture goes back thousands of years, and it would be commendable to develop an interest in it as a lot of people do with the Japanese.
It’s not clear to me one tribe that wiped out a bunch of others to become powerful enough to be dominant for a hundred years is any more deserving of interest over Spain. From a rarity perspective sure, but not because they have any more right to the title of “American culture”.
Just because something is identifiable to the US (your war example) does not make it culture. People spend very little time (most none) on any involvement with it so it’s not really an identifiable trait of the culture.
Gun culture is similar in that, apart from a small minority of people obsessed with guns, even the people who do own them spend very little time talking about or thinking about them. It’s like saying we have a “fork” culture because lots of people use them.
> Just because something is identifiable to the US (your war example) does not make it culture.
National identity is a part of culture and how someone perceives their own culture and that of others.
> People spend very little time (most none) on any involvement with it so it’s not really an identifiable trait of the culture.
Pretty much every single person I know has had a family member in the military. I know at least 3 Vietnam vets, and all of them still hold trauma from it. The military is one of the most brought up topics in American politics because of how much money we spend and shapes how the world thinks of us for 100 years. 9/11 redefined privacy, security, geopolitics, and travel. We have recruiting booths in every high school and university.
To say war is not a fundamental part of American culture seems absurd.
> Gun culture is similar in that, apart from a small minority of people obsessed with guns, even the people who do own them spend very little time talking about or thinking about them.
I won't disagree with you on that, that's fair. And it's heavily regional too.
But when we're talking about how Americans have a loose national identity, I think it's fair that gun culture is very much perceived as part of it. And given the prevalence of mass shootings, it's not a good thing to feel associated with, which causes Americans to distance themselves from the national identity.
Contrast this with the (to be fair, stereotyped and sanitized) identities of Japan being clean or France being cultured or Germany being industrious.
But this is just how I've come to understand the situation from talking to people I've met in my life. Culture is extremely complicated and I'm not an anthropologist by any means. I'd love to hear what you think!
Only because it’s in your social circle. Nobody in my family or my friends’ families has served since WW2. Voluntary military service is borderline genetic (kids serve because parent did) and service members tend to form social circles with other service members.
Being in the military is as much part of the culture as is being Jewish is. They have similar population counts.
You’re just fixating on your experiences and gripes and are assuming that equates to “American culture”.