uguisu no tani watari

In response to my article, "Maybe Even Build A Boat" in the Hedgehog Review, Douglas Brooks, builder of Japanese boats, sent me this article about a boat he and students built at Harvard.

 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/first-lesson-in-japanese-boatbuilding-dont-speak/

Brooks describes a feature that sets apart Japanese boatbuilding: edge nailing. In the West, “we tend to send the plank of the fastening through the planking into a frame or rib. There are no frames or ribs in Japanese boats. We’re ‘edge nailing’ the skin of the boat to itself.”

The percussive hammering method “has a very evocative name,” said Brooks. “It is called uguisu no tani watari, which means ‘the bush warbler flits back and forth across the valley.’ There’s a great risk of splitting the plank. It’s a really frightening way to drive a nail into a plank … It injects a kind of playfulness into the workshop.”

The article is well worth sharing.