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Comment by hasmanean | Hacker News Reader

“Those who work with their minds must rest with their hands.”

Japanese woodworkers would spend the first half of the day sharpening their tools. The secret of Japanese woodworking is the steel they used…and their insistence on air dried straight grained softwoods. It helps make their precision joinery possible. It was also a technique designed for longevity so you could remove a piece from a hundreds year old temple, exactly replicate it and put a new one in. No metal fasteners meant no hidden weak spots due to rust which would fail in an earthquake.

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I sometimes think about how good software quality would be if we all wrote test cases in the morning and coded in the afternoon. Motorola used to have a processes something like this…write and review tests at the same time as requirements are being approved, well before any coding starts. The number of defects we’d find in final system test was very small.

I mean test driven development is a the practice used by many organizations and individuals.

I’m so bored and tired by the afternoon and ready to go outside or do something stimulating that I’d never get anything down

They did use metal fasteners, just sparingly, because iron was expensive and often of poor quality. Later on even when quality and availability improved, laws were introduced to limit the use of metal fasteners, largely for political and economic reasons.

One of the big factors in wood selection in Japan is rot and insect resistance. Japan has very high humidity and buildings were open much of the time, demanding resistance to mold, termites, etc.

Another big factor was time. Fast growing species allowed quicker processing, which was helpful considering Japanese buildings have historically not been built to last. Some do last a long time, but most famous Japanese buildings have actually burned down many times, sometimes dozens. Edo (Tokyo) was well known for basically the whole city catching on fire fairly often.

They did use hardwoods, too, but where hard wood was necessary or useful, like in certain beams or components that needed hard wearing.

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