For most of my working life I have quoted a wood I never saw in place. Yellow cedar, clear, vertical grain, cut to lengths the buyer spelled out to the millimeter. The orders came through Patrick Lumber Export, and before that through the cedar yard I ran in Hayward in the nineties. We called it temple wood. The buyers knew exactly what they wanted. I knew the grade book. That was about as far as it went.
In October 2026 Jan and I spent the back half of a Japan trip in Hida, in the mountains of Gifu. Hida-Furukawa one day, then Takayama. The rain came mostly at night, so we were lucky.
The hillsides there are solid sugi, planted after the war. Some cypress, a little pine. Dark even-aged blocks run straight up the slopes and stop at a hard edge against the native broadleaf, which was in fall color. Tall stems, crowns at the top, most of it unthinned and all of it merchantable. There is more of it than Japan can use, and some is already moving to the United States. I made a note.
Hida-Furukawa is a small town and the village the Hida Takumi carpenters come from. Thirteen hundred years of woodworking. The town is built small and every piece of it is detailed. Each builder family has a signature it cuts into the beams. At the Takumi Culture Museum the staff walked us through the joinery puzzles and the joints that make them work, the corbels and the brackets under the eaves, the saws with wooden handles. We fumbled the puzzles. They were patient. I did not understand yet what they were showing us. It came clear later in the week, in every temple and shrine we walked into. That is how the whole country holds together, without a bracket or a nail.
Down the street at FabCafe Hida the coffee comes with a wood shop. Hidakuma runs it, in a house more than a hundred years old, and the city owns a piece of the company. They take small diameter mixed broadleaf that used to go to the chipper and make furniture out of it. In the storehouse the off-grade boards and burls sell by weight, one yen per gram, every species the same. We have been trying to keep bigleaf maple out of the chipper for twenty years. Somebody in Hida figured out how to price it.
The Japanese have a word for growing up around wood. Mokuiku. Wood education. You see it in the furniture shops in Takayama and in the way a clerk sets a piece down.
At Ankokuji the priest’s wife let us into the sutra library. The temple goes back to the 1300s and the rotating bookcase inside it dates to 1408. Eight sides, all wood, a National Treasure, the oldest of its kind in Japan. We put our hands on it and turned it one full turn. Smooth and steady after six hundred years. I have handled a lot of old wood. I had not handled anything like that.
Sakurayama Hachimangu is a shrine, not a temple, up the hill on the east side of Takayama. We got there at ten in the morning expecting a look. We got the whole ceremony. At a quarter past we washed our hands. At twenty past we were seated and the drums started. The priest came out. The room was all wood and all clear, vertical grain, light colored, hinoki I am fairly sure. Not a knot in it.
Somewhere around twenty-five to eleven it landed. I was sitting inside the order. Thirty years of quotes, lengths, moisture, grade. The buyer on the other end of the fax was building this. I had never once asked what the room would feel like. Now I was in it, and I knew why they wanted that wood and no other. It was not something I saw or heard. Every sense in the room was busy and none of them was doing it. It was a knowing with no name.
There is a book by a forester at the University of British Columbia about the fungus under a forest floor, the network that ties the roots together and moves water and sugar from tree to tree. You never see it. Dig and you tear it. It is the reason the forest stands as one thing and not as a crowd of trunks. Wood in Japan is like that. It is under everything. The station walls, the coffee shop, the bath, the shrine. Nobody points at it. It is what holds the culture up.
Here is the part I did not expect. The people who know it best are not relaxed about it. The museum staff teach the joints to tourists who cannot work the puzzles. The city puts money into a coffee shop so the small logs get a price. Somebody made up a word so children would learn to feel a board. The network under a forest tends itself. A culture does not. The ones in the know have to keep it up on purpose, every year, or it goes.
By five to eleven we were walking out and I was in a daze. I tried to tell Laura, our guide from Canada, what had just happened. I am not sure I got it across. At eleven Jan and I left the group and found a latte along the river in town. I had a clear head. Enlightened, if that is the word for it. I think it is.