This necessarily brief description is not to be regarded in any way as a catalogue of Japanese carpenters' tools, but is intended simply to describe those more commonly seen as one watches them at their work. The chief merit of many of these tools is that they can easily be made by the users; indeed, with the exception of the iron part, every Japanese carpenter can and often does make his own tools.
Fig. 32.—Ancient Carpenter (copied from an old painting).
By an examination of old books and pictures one gets an idea of the antiquity of many objects still in use in Japan. I was shown, at the house of a Japanese antiquary, a copy of a very old maki-mono (a long scroll of paper rolled up like a roll of wall-paper, on which continuous stories or historical events are written or painted). This maki-mono in question was painted by Takakana, of Kioto, five hundred and seventy years ago, and represented the building of a temple, from the preliminary exercises to its completion. One sketch showed the carpenters at work hewing out the wood and making the frame. There were many men at work; a few were eating and drinking; tools were lying about. In all the tools represented in the picture,—of which there were chisels, mallets, hatchets, adzes, squares, and saws,—there was no plane or long saw. A piece of timber was being cut longitudinally with a chisel. The square was the same as that in use to-day. The tool which seemed to take the place of a [pg 44] plane was similar to a tool still used by coopers, but I believe by no other class of workmen, though I remember to have seen a man and a boy engaged in stripping bark from a long pole with a tool similar to the one seen in the sketch ([fig. 32]).
The sumi-tsubo was much more simple and primitive in form in those times, judging from the sketch given on page 42 ([fig. 30], C). A carpenter's tool-box is shown quite as small and light as similar boxes in use to-day. To the cover of this box (fig. 32) is attached a curious hand-saw with a curved edge. Large saws with curved edges, having handles at both ends, to be worked by two men, are in common use; but I have never seen a hand-saw of this shape. All the saws represented in the picture had the same curved edge.
Nothing is more to be commended than the strong, durable, and sensible way in which the Japanese carpenter erects his staging. The various parts of a staging are never nailed together, as this would not only weaken the pieces through which spikes and nails have been driven, but gradually impair its integrity. All the pieces, upright and transverse, are firmly tied together with tough, strong rope. The rope is wound about, again and again, in the tightest possible manner. Buddhist temples of lofty proportions are reared and finished, and yet one never hears of the frightful accidents that so often occur at home as the results of stagings giving way in the erection of similar lofty structures. How exceedingly dull and stupid it must appear to a Japanese carpenter when he learns that his Christian brother constructs a staging that is liable, sooner or later, to precipitate him to the ground.