Name: Building Without Nails: The Genius of Japanese Carpentry | China Uncensored
Uploaded: 2020-04-02T18:28:42.000Z
Duration: 25 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I worked as a script writer for a show called "Journey to the East".

A TV documentary series about traditional Asian culture

Unfortunately, the show was scrapped before making it on air.

Not long ago I posted one of the never-aired episodes

"The Truth Behind Traditional Chinese Kungfu"

This one is about traditional Japanese carpentry.

Without the use of any nails, thay can build temples that last for hundreds of years.

It's a fastinating look at the not-quite-lost art.

Traditional Japanese carpenters built furnitures, houses and temples

without the aid of screws, nails or bolts.

In Japan there are temple towers, after 1,000 years

So, we do the more natural side, the real craftsmanship side.

The finished pieces reflect the ancient philosophy of Japanese carpentery

[Zui Hanafusa] My father actually grew up doing woodcut prints.

This is something that they did in an old country.

They always learn a trade. So some people were farmers. Some people were electricians.

[Mr. Hisao Hanafusa] When I graduated, I had to start setting up my life

So I said: "Oh, this is very easy. I want to get homesick

If you stay where you are, you don't know too much, because you have blind spots.

So, I decided to leave Japan, to go somewhere else.

Hisao Hanafusa has been working with Japanese carpentery for over 50 years.

a traditional Japanese carpentery workshop in New York.

[Laura Fisher] One day I was walking on 17th Street

and I saw the beautiful tables inside. And I went in to look.

I met Mr. Hanafusa and I said "One day, I'm going to own one of your tables"

and of course being a quick sales man he said "Why not now?"

And when I met Ken, my husband, and we decided we would start another life together,

we both wanted to change the way we were living.

I wanted to simplify, you know. I just wanted to simplify my life.

All the pieces in Hanafusa's showroom have been handcrafted using traditional japanese techniques.

The pieces of lumber have also been individually selected by Hanafusa and his son.

Every morning, Hanafusa's team of carpenters begins by sharpening the blades of their hand-forged planes and chisels

00:05:31,308 --> 00:05:36,178 Caring for these hand-tools, takes almost as much time as using them.

But in the right hand, the Japanese hand plane

produces a smoother cut then a machine plane.

As the blade passes through these Shoji screen beams, it clearly slices off thin ribbons of wood.

The process of using and caring for these traditional tools reflects Hanafusa's philosophy

of working with nature, not against nature.

[Mr. Hisao Hanafusa] We have two things in our human history:

When I was a kid I studied Industrial Revolution.

Fantastic stuff, but it killed all the craftsmen.

All the personal, individual talent they killed.

So, we do more the natural side, the real craftsmanship side.

[Ken Woodlock] I knew of Mr. Hanafusa. So I would go by the place with my children.

We'd look in the windows and there were plenty of screens, and the furniture was all there.

So we started talking about how we're gonna decorate this apartment after we bought it.

All we did initially was go to Master Hanafusa's workshop and we chose the piece of lumber we wanted for the table.

[Zui Hanafusa] The wood carpentery in the past, the wood within the area would actually dictate what the actual carpenter can make.

We actually practice the same thing here.

would dictate what the actual clients can have.

[Joe Kleinberg] Well we're taking down an alm tree and giving it a second life.

We're gonna slab these branches and the big trunk and some day it'll become furniture.

It's with a disease known as Dutch-Elm disease, which devastates Elm trees.

It survived the first batch of dutch elm which came here over 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, we've been hit with dutch elm disease once again and the tree didn't survive.

This tree is approximately 300 years old. It's a shame to see it go.

This is real specialty work. it takes a lot of wherewithal

to tackle a tree like this, not to mention the equipment to be able to manufacture it into slabs of wood.

Although you know, this tree is dead, it's always living.

In the spring and summer, it breaths, it picks up moisture and in the winter it loses moisture

so just think of it as something that's always living.

"Here's your table". take it to museum, right?

After the tree has being milled into slabs,

it has to go through a drying process for many years

before it is ready to be made into furniture.

A fresh tree's water content is like a 100%, right?

"ready to use it", means that you have to remove the water content.

That's why 10, 15, 20 years, you air-dry it.

By the time the wood first hits the cutting bench

it is already nearing the end of its journey.

At this stage, the carpenter begins to craft the joints

that will hold the finished piece together

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Building Without Nails: The Genius of Japanese Carpentry | China Uncensored

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