“The Way We Build”: Craft, Innovation, and Sustainability in Japanese House-Carpentry

This article expands and complicates the literature on “craft” by examining the seeming anomaly of a craft community dominating a significant production sector within an advanced industrial economy, and despite the existence of cheaper high-tech and labor-saving alternatives. Japanese house-carpenters, organized into very small firms with very local markets, and producing “traditional” house-frames in small batches, have long held prefabrication and other alternatives at bay through a process of conservative innovation. The primary goal of their innovative process has been the protection and continuance of house-carpentry as a relevant and marketable skill, and of its practitioners as a self-sustaining community. This craft is not an exemplar of sustainability in other ways, however, despite its association with the traditional and organic. Its house-products have unnaturally short lives given Japanese methods of accounting for property value, and its raw material, foreign-sourced old-growth forests, are increasingly subject to global conservation efforts.