"nope"

Almost the entire old house was done in the clapboard siding known as shitami-ita (lit. "downward looking boards"), and we were insistent that the style be included in the design of the new place. When used to cover the entire facade or a large expanse of wall, it can tend to get rather dark, but I think the way it has been used in some older houses--in combination with a lighter plaster--can result in some beautiful, simple lines.
But it's not easy to do, we learned. There's so little call for this type of siding that the technique is sliding into oblivion (at least in our neck of the woods). Luckily, our carpenter is the kind of person who has to get things right, and that meant stopping in the middle of putting this up and rethinking it. He and the foreman didn't like the width of the wood the first time round; the boards were too wide, and made the house look fat instead of sleek. So they took it off and redid it.

When we stopped by last weekend, the apprentice carpenter was just finishing cutting all the vertical pieces that interrupt the horizontal lines of the siding. He'd been doing the same thing when I visited ten days earlier, but now once again, each of the vertical pieces had to be cut to fit the varying zig-zag of the facade of the horizontal boards. The conversation went like this:

Me: "Wow. You're still working on this."
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "Finishing up."
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "That was a lot of work."
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "You had to measure and cut each one differently?"
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "It looks beautiful. Keep up the good work."
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "Is this the first time you've done this?"
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "Well, at least you've got it under your belt.
Sato: "Yep."
Me: "You ever think you'll do it again?"
Sato: "Nope."