Abstract
Carpenters are liminal figures in the history of technology, and in studies of architecture, labor, masculinity, and any other commonly recognized disciplinary cluster which might claim their story. The Anglo-American word “technology” and its Japanese translation gijutsu, both coined in the mid-nineteenth century to describe a new regime of continually reengineered devices and systems, were set more or less above (if not against) the existing world of wood and hand-tools.1 Few figures seemed more outside this new rubric than carpenters, who by definition were tied to an age-old organic material, and assigned by necessity to small, widely dispersed work-groups difficult to subject to industrial management or discipline. In both Japan and the West, the image of the carpenter surrounded by shavings still immediately evokes for most people the world of the pre-“technology” past, even if he (and it is still typically a “he”) now carries a union card, the hand-tool is electrified, and the lumber was ripped out of a rain forest by giant skidders.2
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Notes
Technology and gijutsu are not actually identical in usage. The English word lends itself to drawing sharper distinctions between “modern” and “premodern” or “sophisticated” and “unsophisticated” skills, objects, and infrastructures than the Japanese one. Gijutsu is easier to use interchangeably with technique. There is, on the other hand, an arguably closer fit between gi-jutsu and gi-shi, the Japanese word for engineer, than there is between engineereer and technology in English. For an introduction to the history of the English word technology see Leo Marx “The Idea of Technology and Post-Modern Pessimism,” in Does Technology Drive History?, ed. M.R. Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
For a reflection on this paradox from the standpoint of American history, see the introductory essay, “The Experience of Early American Technology” in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith McGaw (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Two scholars, one American and one Japanese, who have argued for a fuller consideration of carpentry in accounts of technology and architecture are Brooke Hindle, America’s Wooden Age (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1985) (reprint)
and Muramatsu Teijiro especially his Waga kuni daiku no kōsaku gijutsu ni kansuru kenkyū (Tokyo: Rōdō Kagaku Kenkyūjo Shuppanbu, 1984).
One of the few English-language accounts of Japanese technological change to acknowledge the important role of carpenters is Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), e.g., pp. 51, 90.
Among Japanese surveys see Nakaoka Testurō, Kindai Nihon no gijutsu to gijutsu seisaku (Tokyo: Kokusai Rengō Daigaku/Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1986).
Zenkensōren, the largest federation of construction workers’ unions in Japan, is made up largely of carpenters and plasterers who construct wooden houses. Its membership stood at 300,000 in 1990 (Sidney Levy, Japanese Construction: An American Perspective [New York: Van Norstrand Rheinhold, 1990]). The figure for the trade as a whole is certainly larger, as not all carpenters work in housebuilding. An informal estimate made in a trade publication of 1960, a period when wooden framing still accounted for the majority of new floor space created annually in Japan, suggested there were then more than half a million building tradesmen in the country who called themselves daiku (Daiku kyōshitsu, January 1960, 52).
For discussion of the various building trades in this period see Hatsuda Tōru, Shokunin-tachi no seiyō kenchiku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997).
For daiku, see [in English] William H. Coaldrake, The Way of the Carpenter (New York: Weatherhill, 1990);
and Kiyoshi Seike, The Art of Japanese Joinery (New York: Weatherhill, 1977),
with a good introduction by translators Yuriko Yobuko and Rebecca M. Davis; and [in Japanese], Endō Motoo, Nihon shokunin-shi no kenkyū V: kenchiku, kinkō shokunin shi wa (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1961);
Endō, Shokunintachi no rekishi (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1965),
which covers a range of urban artisans, especially prior to Meiji; Muramatsu Teijiro, Daiku dōgu no rekishi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1973), the most detailed discussion in Japanese of daiku tools; and idem, Waga kuni daiku no kosaku gijutsu ni kansuru kenkyū (Tokyo: Rōdō Kagaku Kenkyūjo Shuppanbu, 1984).
For a discussion of how central forestry resources were to the Edo period, see Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989).
Sunami Takashi, “Architecture of Shinto Shrines” in Architectural Japan, ed. Japan Times and Mail (Tokyo, 1936), p. 13.
Suzuki Hiroyuki and Yamaguchi Hiroshi, Kindai, gendai kenchiku shi (Shin kenchiku gaku taikei 5) (Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 1993), pp. 244–245;
Nihon Kenchiku Gakkai, ed., Kindai Nihon kenchikugaku hattatsu shi (Tokyo: Maruzen Kabushiki Gaisha, 1972), pp. 676–677.
For the early history of these firms see Kikuoka Tomoya, Kensetsugyō o okoshita hitobito (Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 1993). The quotation from Takenaka is on p. 79.
For a contemporary account of these firms in English, see Sidney M. Levy, Japan’s Big Six: Inside Japan’s Construction Industry (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993). The sixth of Levy’s “Big Six” is Kumagai-gumi; the other five have been collectively grouped in this manner since at least since the 1960s, so I’ve privileged the more historic and better-known “Big Five” in my own account.
Kikuoka; Muramatsu Teijirō, “History of the Building Design Dept. of Takenaka Kömuten” in Takenaka Komuten Sekkeibu, ed. Building Design Dept. of Takenaka Kōmuten (Tokyo: Shinkenchiku-sha, 1987); idem., “The Japanese Construction Industry IV,” The Japan Architect, January–February 1968 (318): 139–146;
Takenaka Kōmuten Shichijūnenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Takenaka Kömuten shichijūnen-shi (Tokyo: Takenaka Kōmuten, 1969).
Ibid.; Hazama notes that many Meiji-period “capitalist” firms, and not just the construction companies, made use of existing artisanal structures through subcontracting. There was also an appropriation of the term (and some aspects of the role) of oyakata (master) in new factory-based industries, as they made the transition toward foremen and wage-workers. Hazama Hiroshi, The History of Labor Management in Japan (London: Macmillan, 1997), especially chapters 2 and 3.
David B. Stewart. The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo, New York: Kodansha, 1987), p. 31; Hatsuda, Shokunin tachi no seiyō kenchiku, pp. 206–208.
Endō Akihisa, Hokkaido jūtaku shi wa (Tokyo: Sumai no Toshokan Shuppan Kyoku, 1994); idem., “Kaitakushi eizenjigyō no kenkyū,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 1961;
Koshino Takeshi, Hokkaidō ni okeru shoki yōfu kenchiku no kenkyū (Sapporo: Hokkaido Daigaku Tosho Kankakai, 1993).
For an overview of the use of American experts in the colonization of Hokkaido see Fujita Fumiko, Hokkaidō o kaitakushi Amerikajin (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993).
Cherie Wendelken, “The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period” in Art Journal Fall, 1996, 55 (3): 28–37.
There is a relatively large and growing literature, in English as well as Japanese, about the phenomenon of wayō setchū much of it illustrated with photographs and floorplans. The discussion below draws particularly on Fujimori Terunobu, Nihon kindai kenchiku shi, Vol. I; Suzuki Hiroyuki and Hatsuda Tōru, Zumen de miru: Toshi kenchiku no Meiji (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobō, 1990); Hatsuda, Shokunintachi no seiyō kenchiku; Muramatsu, Nihon kindai kenchiku no rekishi, Chapters 1 and 2;
Uchida Seizō, Nippon no kindai jutaku (Tokyo: Kashima Shuppankai, 1992), Chapter 1; Stewart, The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture;
and Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited (New York: Weatherhill, 1995). The term “wayō,” combining the characters for Japanese and Western, was common in the Japanese architectural world by the late Meiji period, judging from the number of style books that incorporate it into their titles. I use the term here in preference to a common synonym, gi-yōfū (imitation Western-style), which denigrates daiku efforts as derivative.
Gregory Clancey, Meiji Gakuin senkyōshi-kan (Imbry-kan) no kōzō: Kenchiku chōsa hōkoku (Tokyo: Meiji Gakuin, 1996).
In applying the linguistic concept of “pidgin” to the world of artifacts, I follow the discussion in Peter Galison, Image and Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 48–51, 831–837.
For a nuanced discussion of collecting see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
For the construction of The Ginza see Muramatsu, Nihon kindai kenchiku no rekishi (Tokyo: Nihon Hōso Shuppan Kyōkai, 1977), Chapter 3;
Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji no Tōkyō keikaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), Chapter 1; and idem., Nihon no kindai kenchiku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), Vol. 1, Chapters 1 and 3; Stewart, Chapter 1; and Finn, Chapter 2.
For the Meiji debate over earthquakes and their effect on architecture and modern change, see Gregory Clancey, “Foreign Knowledge: Cultures of Western Science-Making in Meiji Japan,” Historia Scientiarum March 2002, 11 (3): 245–260.
Meiji-period secondary education of building artisans and architectural “technicians” is dealt with at length in Shimizu Keiichi, Meiji-ki ni okeru shotō chūtō kenchiku kyōiku no shiteki kenkyū, unpublished Ph.D. diss., Nihon University, 1982; and Suzuki and Yamaguchi, Kindai, gendai kenchiku shi, pp. 271–279.
Monbushō [Ministry of Education], Futsū mokkō jutsu (Tokyo, 1899).
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© 2005 Gregory Clancey
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Clancey, G. (2005). Modernity and Carpenters: Daiku Technique and Meiji Technocracy. In: Low, M. (eds) Building a Modern Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981110_9
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