Looks like a more labor intensive refinement of the much older techniques of copping and pollarding.
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.
The title suggests the latter, but the article doesn't go into details.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it’s a question of trade offs.