Isn't this just Pollarding and/or Coppicing, which have been practiced for at least 2000 years in Europe (and probably many other cultures as well), with a healthy dose of orientalism added on top?
Also known as 'Thing, Japan'. HN eats up articles like this every single week.
Your comment feels somewhat reductive as well, you could basically replace "Japan" with a lot of things that are appreciated by some sizable subset of HN readers.
But, for some reason Japan does seem to inspire a certain fervor in both the otakus and weeaboos and their inverses. I think it's because it's the closest thing to an alien civilization for Westerners.
In LA those are either French or Italian women, selfishly hoarding all the good skin cream. I then wondered who the French and Italian women think are the beauty-secret-holders...
And invariably the top comment is a "Thing Also in Europe/US" smugly citing that the commenter knows about something that's vaguely similar which happens to be in their neck of woods rather than Japan; and therefore makes the article irrelevant (this part is never adequately explained).
The most recent one I remember was reacting to something about konbinis by saying "So what, Poland also has lots of convenience stores".
“It is a little different, more like pollarding, and it doesn't work with any other conifers than saplings from one specific mutant cedar in a shrine near Kyoto.”
If you do, I have got a great new travel destination. If you don't then everyone else (and hopefully you too) will understand why people think this is special enough to link beyond the fact that it happens to be in Japan.
> Necessity being the mother of invention, this led to the creation of an ingenious solution: daisugi, the growing of additional trees, in effect, out of existing trees — creating, in other words, a kind of giant bonsai.
It tries to sell something as completely unique. It’s not. For example this sentence should emphasize what’s unique with daisugi, because there is a very good English word with this exact same meaning as written in this sentence: grafting.
Grafting is joining cuttings from one tree to a rootstock of another. That is not what's going on here at all, it's limited to a single tree.
Something like "selective pollarding", maybe, but that's very far from being a common English word. And as I said, most pollarding I have seen is nowhere as straight and tall as this.
With a few narrow exceptions most timber crops in the the UK are monocultures or very limited mixes of pines/spruces/firs which outside of nesting season support very limited ecosystem. Even then the management plan for the site would have to account for species present and respond accordingly. Badgers? 20m no go zone from their sett and it may involve another license from Natural England.
I tend to operate at the border of woodland management and forestry. Coppicing typically tends to fall into the woodland management category due to the smaller scale nature of it, especially for when it is for "green woodworking" or craft use. The larger scale biomass coppice sites are very firmly in the forestry size, but still retain the ecological benefits to an extent.
[0]: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/research/continuous-cover-...