Japanese Woodwork & Bamboo

About this book

A tool manual and a temple history — or two hundred living wood and bamboo crafts, forests and makers in one guide? Japanese Woodwork & Bamboo covers 200 entries in a single uniform format: every entry gives the Region & Materials, the Origins, How to Recognise it in a shop, and Buying & Experience — where to buy, what to check, and how the work lives in use.

Joinery split town by town — Kyoto's elegant sashimono, Edo's crisp work, Shizuoka's furniture city. Hakone yosegi built from a dozen woods with no dye at all, and the secret boxes it skins. Cedar bent and sewn with cherry bark into Odate's famous lunch boxes; bamboo split, woven and graded in Beppu, the basket capital. The forests themselves as entries — Yoshino's barrel cedar, Kiso's five great timbers, Yakushima's thousand-year yakusugi — and a final part of table objects, price ladders, care and workshop experiences.

A front chapter teaches the four checks that authenticate any piece — grain, joint, weave, finish — and an honest section covers veneer, printed grain, glued "joinery" and dyed bamboo sold as smoked susutake. No photographs: the recognition fields are written for the hand and eye instead, because weight, scent and undercutting are checks a photograph cannot make for you.

Companion to Japanese Traditional Crafts (the five-material survey): that book covered wood and bamboo in overview entries; this is the single-subject deep dive, every entry written fresh at joint, weave and forest depth.

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.