The Revenge of the Cultivated Beauty

Here are some flooring samples. The sugi is on the right, matsu (pine) on the left. (You can see scratches where I was testing the softness of the wood.) Sugi, which we chose for its softness and color, is also called Japanese cedar, though it has no relationship to the cedars. It’s actually part of the cypress family, and has the Giant Sequoias as distant relations. So I’ll call it by its real name, Cryptomeria.

The good-looking tree, which grows straight and tall (over 200 feet), has been used for centuries in Japan, both ornamentally and for construction. After WWII, the government offered big subsidies to replenish the forests, and the easiest solution was with sugi and hinoki, another beautiful wood that also has strong historial ties. But the cultivation came at the expense of natural forest. Now, most of the Japanese forest you see in those hauntingly poetic pictures of nicely patterned Cryptomeria in a mountain mist is completely unnatural. Below that canopy, there is little undergrowth and few broadleaf trees, and the result has been a plague on the whole country. The pollen from these trees comes out of the forests in great swirling clouds and makes for the cities, where all the concrete leaves it with nowhere to settle. The only people who've profited from this are the medical mask makers, who sells millions of masks each year to growing ranks of hay fever sufferers. M gets it bad. The last few years I’ve started feeling it a bit--itchy eyes and runny nose. Since hay fever is something even politicians suffer from, they've pushed the Forestry Agency into culling the sugi forests and replacing them with broadleaf. But since 18% of Japan's land mass is covered in the trees, they've got a major job ahead of them. And lots of sneezes.

And we have a more than sustainable wood that is beautiful, hardy, lightweight and waterproof. We want to have the color of the wood match the colors of the old house, especially since we’re going to use some of the old doors, etc., but also because we like the darker color of wood to offset the white of the walls. Since the sugi takes a while to darken, we want to stain the wood with kakishibu, made from fermented unripe persimmons. We’re going to get more samples so we can test strength and coatings to get the right match.