Japanese Architecture

About this book

The standard books on Japanese architecture are wonderful — and useless in a temple courtyard. One bestselling exploration runs 224 pages of essays at $29.95. The classic scholarly survey is 144 pages at $32. Neither gives you a single numbered thing you can look up while you are standing in front of it.

This guide gives you 200. Two hundred styles, parts and techniques — from shinmei-zukuri and the five-storey pagoda to the staggered shelf, the sea-cucumber wall and the rain chain — every one in the same three fields: how it came to be, how to recognise it with your own eyes in a few minutes, and the finest place to see it.

Inside: a four-pass method for reading any building (roof, structure, plan, details); fifteen centuries of Japanese building in ten minutes; eight sections covering styles and periods, shrine architecture, temples and pagodas, castles, palaces and villas, farmhouses and townhouses, parts and structure, and the crafts that finish and maintain it all — joinery without nails, cypress-bark roofs, communal rethatching, buildings designed to be dismantled and moved.

This is not another place guide. Our companion volumes tell you where to go — castles, gardens, 300 shrines and temples. This one tells you what you are looking at when you get there. Where a detail changes with the season — hours, fees, restoration scaffolding — this book teaches you to confirm it on the day instead of printing a number that would expire. What never changes is here in full.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.