Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 February 23

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February 23

Name for Japanese (cypress?) bark cladding/walls

Bark cladding

Bark walls at Kanazawa Yuwaku Edomura.

The last item in List of partitions of traditional Japanese architecture is bark walls or cladding. The source does not give a Japanese name. I've tried to find it, but the only hint I have is that it's probably cypress (sugi) bark. Does anyone have the name, and ideally a citable source? Reportedly more common in the south of Japan, and, by the 1880s, only used as a sole wall material by the poor. HLHJ (talk) 04:57, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Difficult. If this helps anyone, the photo is of a building named Kangien (which might be written as Kangi-en; anyway, 咸宜園). Great, I thought: it's going to be a registered national cultural whatsit, and each of these has its own web page, in which the architecture is described in (to me, pretty inscrutable) detail. Alas no: here's the page, but the building was so designated back in 1932. The citation is terse indeed. (It's also written in the stiff bureaucratese of the time, which doesn't help.) Here's the Official Web Page of the building, which conveniently says that Kangien Kyōiku Kenkyū Sentā (咸宜園教育研究センター , i.e. Kangien Education Research Centre) can be mailed via this form. Just in case nobody can tell you the answer. -- Hoary (talk) 07:50, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Locher, Mira (2015). Traditional Japanese Architecture: An Exploration of Elements and Forms. Turtle Publishing. ISBN 978-4805313282. says: "Even the bark of certain trees is used in construction, such as the layers of cypress bark used for roofing (hiwada-buki)…". From Chapter 7; it's an e-book, but the URL suggests p. 203. Alansplodge (talk) 10:26, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

A common term for "siding" in the sense of "cladding" in Japanese is the loan word サイディング (saidingu). That would make "bark cladding" 樹皮サイディング (juhi saidingu). However, this does not seem used much except for alibaba ads. In most cases I can find of bark-cladded house walls, they are described by circumlocations such as "bark applied to the outer wall (外壁)". I see references to ヒバ (hiba), which can also mean "cypress". Elsewhere there were references to cedar bark.  --Lambiam 11:01, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Hiba is Thujopsis dolabrata according to our article. Other Japanese cypresses used in construction are Hinoki which is Chamaecyparis obtuse, sawara is Chamaecyparis pisifera and sugi is Cryptomeria japonica. Alansplodge (talk) 12:14, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

My source, the 1885 book Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings: "In the southern provinces a rough house-wall is made of wide slabs of bark, placed vertically, and held in place by thin strips of bamboo nailed cross-wise. This style is common among the poorer houses in Japan; and, indeed, in the better class of houses it is often used as an ornamental feature, placed at the height of a few feet from the ground."

I dug through Commons and collected a number of images: Commons:Category:Bark cladding, a second one of which is now shown here. Three are from the Kanazawa Yuwaku Edomura, an open-air museum which has some English materials online, but I have not been able to find a description of the walls on its English site. It is of course possible that there is not a standard Japanese name. JAANUS, which is usually an excellent source for Japanese architecture (if dense to the point of being rather inscrutable), has entries on bark roofing, but none on bark walling. I should really have added more of this info initially.

Thank you all for the useful links. I love archaic bureaucratese; so many of its faults are universal (and fun to lampoon). From the information provided by Alansplodge, it seems quite possible that the bark may be cypress, but not sugi. I don't have a reliable source that says it's even cypress, and Lambiam may be right that it's cedar (it looks like cedar, fibrous and flexible). I think an inquiry to the people who maintain such properties might be a good next step, but I'll leave it a couple more days as this has only just been posted. HLHJ (talk) 16:32, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Just be careful with your cedars; the American red cedar, used for all kinds of outdoor woodwork, isn't a cedar at all, it's a cypress. Alansplodge (talk) 22:06, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

You're quite right, Alansplodge, I was thinking of fiber products made from Thuja plicata bark. HLHJ (talk) 06:16, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

References

True cedars are not much used in construction, except in the Bible. Alansplodge (talk) 18:10, 27 February 2020 (UTC)