Bent by the Sun →
Japan’s tradition of sustainability.
Tsunekazu Nishioka, considered the last of the great Japanese temple carpenters, at whose workshop I studied for three years, was telling me how dismantling a 1300-year-old temple provided him the opportunity to study the ring structure of the old columns, which he estimated had been cut when they were 1000 years old. “So,” I observed, “the tree was 1000 years old when the temple was built, and the temple is 1300 years old now, so in all we’re talking about a time span of 2300 years.…” “Yes,” he replied. “And compared to that, a human lifespan is next to nothing.
