Daisugi, the 600-year-old Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees

It's not politically correct nor polite to say this, but Japan's problem is their education and cultural system ingrains subservience to the point that Japanese people are subservient even to injustice. It's not just inefficiency Japanese people put up with, they don't do anything about corrupt and ridiculous politicians having their way through generations. They call it a tradition, but they are just afraid of speaking out because of peer pressure. It's like a mafia system. I know that I sound very broad and generalizing, but those who have lived in Japan for long enough would probably agree with this.

I think it's the difference between an individualist and collectivist culture. I'd guess that especially the kind of people that would come to hackernews will have a hard time seeing the upside of collectivism and the downside of individualism (subservient having a strong negative connotation), but I think it's really mostly a tradeoff. Yes individualism is probably better for generating entrepreneurs. But you don't see things like people refusing to wear masks in Japan. There's lots of stories of things like Japanese people taking a long trip to return a lost wallet or picking up after each other at sports stadiums. I would say that in general there are more social obligations but also as a result more social trust. Probably if you grew up in a collectivist society then a lot of the things that you can see happening in the West will seem dysfunctional. Also I doubt more people are lonely in Japan than America, and some brief skimming the internet, research seems to support this.

Eh, every nation and culture has their problems. It is not a binary situation, everything has tradeoffs. Japan be Japan because they do the things that Japan does, and so Japan has Japan problems, not American or European problems. European do European way of doing things, that's why they have European problems. America does too.

I found something similar of the shockingly unnecessary politeness that Canadians have, to the point that a US citizen might find it slightly creepy. Beneath the surface it's an oppressive circumstance for many, in Canada.

I was looked upon a lot until I cut my hair. Glaring is a kind of bullying that goes around a lot there and it’s effective in making people conform. Only place in the world where I felt safe leaving my new MacBook in Starbucks while I go to the bathroom so I don’t think conformity is all bad.

I think it's more the limitless respect for age and seniority. It's kinda how Trump probably didn't start as horrible as he is now, but since people never told him to fuck off and he got away with it, it just kept getting worse.

In Chinese, boss is spelled lao-ban, teacher is lao-shi, wife is lao-po, and husband lao-gong. Lao means old. There are a lot more of these in the language. I wouldn't be surprised if its similar in japanese(at least considering the society itself)

The way I imagine it is, is that society is self-balancing in the sense that if you go out of line society reminds you that something isn't ok. But at some point in time when you're old the society just respects you for being old and gives you a pass whatever you do. In east asian societies being old might be one of those conditions. In the US it might be more related to how much money you have, and how successful you seem.

I have one of those washing machines! It’s so pleased with itself when it finishes and is an amusing contrast to the Miele dishwasher’s 4 stern German beeps

My LG washing machine does the same. Additionally, Korean convenience stores usually play something like a midi Für Elise when the front door opens as opposed to a bell. Even luggage cars in airports do the same.

I had a Samsung washing machine a few years ago. It had a button to toggle sounds on/off. Unfortunately, I still wanted some notification when the cycle finished so I just had to leave the sounds on. I kind of grew to like it but my occasional guests thought it was annoying.

I got a japanese rice cooker that would play cheerful songs once it finished. Cute the first time, but annoying after that. Fortunately they could be switched to simple beeps.

The obvious problem with nationalism is that everyone is supposed to have their own nation that uniquely suits them, including the people that you are excluding from your own nation. This gets exceptionally contradictory when taken to the extreme.

E.g. Nazis trying to build an Aryan state, while simultaneously acquiring "Lebensraum", knowing that they are also acquiring people from other nationalities, which then have to be deported into another nation state whose nationalist people become angry. Of course this came with the twist that Jews are a nationless race and therefore should be incinerated.

It's the same thing with the refugee crisis. Nationalists in Lybia deport non-Lybians to Europe who end up as refugees there and then the local nationalists become angry and deport them somewhere else. It's a never ending shell game.

I don't dispute the point of trivia posts, I actually quite like them. What I have a problem with is the framing. I find cultural fetishism generally despicable, regardless of the culture that's being talked about. I get a minor aneurysm every time I see someone praising the "eternal robustness" of Roman roads, for example.

Pollarding, according to Wikipedia, was first mentioned by a Roman poet 2100 years ago.

You could claim sort of convergent evolution, but I find it hard to believe that a 1500 year old Roman cultivation technique was reinvented in Japan almost exactly at the apex of China's naval power. This smells of corporate espionage.

Can you point me towards anyone using pollarding or coppicing to produce lumber? That's not at all what I was taught those techniques are for. It's hard to imagine the resulting shoots getting big enough to make boards out of in a reasonable amount of time.

Once you see coppicing it's one of those things you'll notice everywhere that was cultivated for a long period of time. I'm surprised at how straight the shoots would grow, and farmers were pretty good at managing and multiplying timber using this method.

I just have never seen a pollarded tree that produced large enough shoots to be called a pole. A pole in my mind is 4-5" in diameter. Everything I can find says pollarded trees were used to produce fuel and small diameter wood for crafts.

Pollarded trees in Great Britain are in many cases several times older than the average life expectancy of those species. It very much depends on the species of tree of course.

I think I once heard that most trees that coppice or pollard well are adapted to beaver predation. We just make a cleaner cut than the beaver.

Why not?

Also (this is easy to miss) the technique is performed only on clones of one mutant Sugi tree (Japanese "cedar", actually more closely related to redwoods but it's its own genus).

The problem with that analogy is that the Kon-Tiki hypothesis was proven right last year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01983-5