Thanks for the googling for rabbit holes.

The joinery in traditional Japanese construction is remarkably impressive in its craftsmanship. I've heard it was born from a combination of expensive and poor quality iron for nails (although the same could be said in European construction - hence the phrase, "dead as a door nail") and the desire to be able to relocate Shinto shrines without damage (which required joints that could sustain serious loads without nails or glue). The ingenuity of design, and craftsmanship in their manufacture is something to behold. You can stare at a joint, chiseled by someone hundreds of years ago from fine hardwood and appreciate the care and expertise put into it.

I wonder sometimes what we build that people look back on and will see the same quality of work.

More important: earthquakes.

Large ancient style Nails are a poor choice for a building which over the next 50 years is will experience a 100+ earthquakes. Joined wood is a mechanical connection which would require a house to be disassembled from the top down. The wood would sooner rip than come loose.

Edit: also joinery is not dead. Even modern Japanese houses have most of their connections a joinery. Then reinforced up with nails, cross braces (wood and now metal), and metal pins. Every dozen or so years Japan adds a new method for further earthquake proofing wooden homes.

Stuff built now is expected to survive a Shindo 7 earthquake. Japan has only had 8 Shindo 7s in the past 100 years.

I thought ‘dead as a door nail’ was a reference to dead nailing. Dead nailing being the bending over of the nail to lock it in place. Is this practice somehow related to poor quality nails?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dead_as_a_doornail

For an excellent video about the use, history and ethymology of a dead door nails:

https://youtu.be/1JOwfKLdRt8

Iron was expensive in Europe, before mass production a nail had to be made individually by hand which took a long time. Which is why until around 200 years ago nails were used only when nothing else would do.

I imagine it would have been even more expensive and unobtainable in Japan -- they historically had no source of quality iron and most was laboriously refined from iron sands and was of poor quality. This is also what necessitated the development of advanced metallurgical techniques such as repeated folding and blending of different steels to compensate.

> Can you name a European family concern doing the same thing continuously since before 1600?

The oldest (family-held) one in Germany is "The Coatinc Company":

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coatinc_Company

The oldest non-family owned one is "Staffelter Hof", in operation since 862:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffelter_Hof

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies says by far the most (56%) are in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinise

The Japanese practice of adopting adults to continue a business blurs the line here. Is selling off the business to someone else enough to maintain continuity? How about operating at the same location?

Depending on how you draw the lines you end up with very different lists.

It’s worth remembering that adoption is much different to how we’d conceive of it in Europe. If a business wasn’t going to be continued by the offspring then a new business owner could be adopted, as an adult. That’s why there seems to be so many Japanese concerns with incredibly long lineage, but like so much else in Japan to a westerner’s eyes, it’s appearance only.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19505088

This was the first time reading about this, thanks for sharing. It's an alien concept to me so it was a fascinating read.

> but like so much else in Japan to a westerner’s eyes, it’s appearance only.

Eh. I'm not sure I'd call it appearance only. In some parts of "the West" (notably the Roman Republic and early Empire, but it went on a for a long time after that) adult adoption as a succession/continuity-of-business mechanism was commonplace.

Notable Roman examples include the _first two emperors_ (Augustus/Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar, Tiberius was adopted by Augustus. Tiberius also had both an adopted and natural son; given that the adopted one was adopted before the natural one was born, he was the heir, giving some indication of how seriously this was taken. (Ultimately they both died)

Even in medieval and early modern Europe, legally adopting apprentices etc wasn't uncommon.

My memory was that the emperor adoptions were more pragmatic than anything, either because the emperor didn't have a son or as insurance against a power struggle caused by a single son dying. It's been a while so I could be mistaken.

This is the same mechanism that business succession planning reduces risk. Failure to train and groom new talent for leadership roles is a good way to ensure a company dies with its current staff.

> My memory was that the emperor adoptions were more pragmatic than anything, either because the emperor didn't have a son or as insurance against a power struggle caused by a single son dying.

Yeah, generally, but they're just the most famous examples (because emperor); this was standard behaviour for the time if you had something to pass on and didn't have kids. Adopting adult men was really commonplace in Roman society; Roman infant mortality was _astronomical_. The Japanese adoptions mentioned above were pragmatic, too.

Arguably, it's unfortunate that the custom died out for European aristocracy (though it did continue to some extent for normal people). A _huge_ number of wars were caused by failure to produce an heir.

I meant modern eyes but point taken, that is indeed interesting.

We Americans have had "nepotism" drilled into our heads so much that we apply it to any small family-run business craft and encourage young people to move far away and try to "make it on their own" in cities they have no ties to in industries they don't belong in to avoid the shame of "having everything handed to you." Young Americans in general abhor the idea of doing the same thing their parents did. The problem is this is drilled into middle class kids who think that taking over the family shop/bakery/restaurant is the same as some politician or CEOs son getting easy admissions to harvard and a big 4 internship. The result is a wasted opportunity to build generational wealth, skill transfer, and artisanal mastery as your best decade is wasted trying to get to the same level your parents got to in 20.

The mom and pop shop only works when you have family members putting in all their time to keep it afloat for no pay.

That's why the kids aren't interested in taking it over. It's not a route to generational wealth for anyone who has regular middle-class opportunities, as much as it's a route to being busy all the time, and having nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

Businesses that actually have real prospects frequently get taken over by the kids. The family shop/bakery/restaurant is rarely one that has them.

Instinctively I thought of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry[1].

There's a few old surviving family businesses in the UK though[2].

If you want really old and still operating I would look at the Livery Companies of the City of London. They're not family businesses obviously but the oldest, Worshipful Company of Mercers[3] got its royal charter in 1394 but existed for long before that. How long ago? No body knows for sure but at least 12th century.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitechapel_Bell_Foundry

2. https://realbusiness.co.uk/the-oldest-family-businesses-in-b...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Mercers

After the Windsor Castle fire of 1992, they rebuilt the wooden roof of St. George's Hall without using a single nail, screw or drop of glue. They had a hard time finding people with the skills and knowledge to do it, as it's pretty much a dead art now.

There's quite a few in Germany. The most famous one is probably Merck (1668). There's a couple of really old banks (Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, 1590) and the industry with the most old companies is probably the glas industry. There's a couple of companies from the 15xx and 16xx. If you're into hiking, you probably heard about Meindl shoes (1683). There's also a lot of breweries, especially small ones in Frankonia. And if you count wineries and restaurants there's some really old ones. Staffelter Hof is usually mentioned as the oldest one (862).

Pretty sure it's the same in most European countries. My guess would be the oldest ones are located in Italy.

Wikipedia has a list (of course), it's pretty interesting to read:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

It’s somewhat sad to read that after 1430 years being family run the oldest company on this list went into liquidation in 2006 and was acquired

The continuity of family companies in Japan also comes from the practice of adult adoption, when the family line doesn't have a suitable successor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_adult_adoption

I read that this legal technique has also been used in Japan as a proxy for Gay Marriage.

Most of the oldest UK ones are pubs, which perhaps says something about British culture.

Or the durability of the value proposition and ability to keep a sufficient number of people interested in keeping the establishment open. Maybe something about the economics of commercial real estate and tax policy in England help survival during downturns.

A German friend phrased it this way for Americans: We have beers older than your country. The depth of history and culture in Europe never ceased to amaze me while I was travelling there, especially in Greece and Italy. I grew up on the prairies in Canada, there was pretty much nothing there 120 years ago.

At the same time, USA has the oldest constitution, and east coast cities for all intents and purposes are 250 years old. If Europe's imperial capitals are essentially 19th century inventions, so are America's (Paris, NYC, Barcelona, Philadelphia, ... all ballooned to their dominant feel during the same decades). The biggest difference is that the brand that the USA is not old or has little heritage, has been along for so long that Americans and Europeans alike have internalized it. But in 2022, America _is_ an old country, and does have a lineage that stretches way back, all the way to antiquity why not.

Just because the US happened to be founded in the Age of Enlightenment that doesn't magically grant us heritage back to antiquity.

And the argument isn't about the size of cities or political organization. But for reference, Philadelphia in 1790 had population 28k. That's on par with Paris around year 0 in the Roman era, or roughly year 1100 as the city recovered in the middle ages.

Would any of these have been the same people? Like is it conceivable the same family lineage in Paris 0-1100, or even 2k years to now or would the war, conquest, etc have changed the demographics considerably?

Lineage in terms of common ancestor and shared DNA? Of course. It’s pretty rare for invasions to result in the wholesale slaughter and replacement of a population.

Well, depends- it’s actually fairly common in earlier ages. In the last thousand years or so a bit less, and last 100 basically not at all.

It's not American exceptionalism to show the similarities to Europe, simply a note of likeness. No need to be hostile to the notion of identifying intersecting attributes.

We’re talking about the length of history, there’s no intersection.

Clearly there is, from the industrial revolution forward.

France tried to completely recreate itself several times during this period. By way of example, we no longer call it the Frankish lands nor the monarchy. Aggregate governance structures have changed tens of times, whereas the US really hasn't changed dramatically in the post Native American and post Revolution periods.

I think give the US is a collection of independent states the massive growth of states in the 1800’s might count as another transformative period for the political institution, which has been relatively stable since the 1900’s with 5 state governments being established (most front loaded the ~first decade).

The French national identity goes back to Charlemagne, not merely de Gaulle.

And the American national identity goes back primarily to the Anglo-Saxons.

We fought multiple wars to sever those ties. Then allowed generations of non-Anglo immigration, not to mention slavery.

There are far more Americans who claim German descent than English. Irish, too. And Blacks.

That’s one of the reasons I used the word “primarily”, which is a word that I would defend. Even if many Americans don’t personally have much English descent, the shared cultural narrative of the country starts there. The central complaint of the American Revolution was that the British were infringing on our traditional “rights of Englishmen”, which evolved over centuries. We’ve retained the English language and the English common law. Many of our cultural and regional variations to this day, even down to our regional dialects, can be traced to those that existed in different parts of England.

Also, please find a reliable citation that says that more Americans have African than English heritage. That strikes me as a very surprising claim.

The US Census, self-identified ancestry.

1 German 46,403,053

2 Black/African-American (non-Hispanic) 38,785,726

3 Mexican (of any race) 34,640,287

4 Irish 33,526,444

5 English 24,787,018

One consequence of American, especially historical, racism (including things like the one-drop rule) is that the experience, and over time the identity, of people (and thus their descendants) who were Black and something else tend to be heavily weighted on the Black side.

Napoleon, in case you studied the subject. The history of Franks and France is certainly not one of direct descendence, nor was there such a thing as a nation or national identity at the time of Charlemagne. Did you know the only surviving Franconian language is Dutch?

There are ancient indigenous civilizations that continue to this day in America, or do we deny their history is part of the history of America? The history of the political Germany is very short if we are talking about established political institutions.

Yes, we worked very deliberately to eradicate those indigenous civilizations, and finally isolate what remained of them from white America.

I’m not sure why people keep bringing up political institutions when the conversation is clearly about cultural institutions.

As the numerous other commentators have identified, people are bringing up politicl institutions because your key point proposing differentiation is defined by political institutions, such as the American revolution, but fails to account for continuity and evolution of cultural institutions that persist beyond those changes. Like continuity of the tossed salad blend of Americans.

But, my original comment to you is that noting continuity and shared evolution of cultural institutions between America and Europe during the industrial revolution is not American Exceptionalism, and isn't really something to have umbrage regarding when others note it.

Well the revolution was ostensibly the founding of America so that seemed the place to start the discussion of American identity. But it’s a fair point that the actual beginnings were was earlier, somewhere between 1607 and 1776.

I always found these statements interesting. Heritage follows a cultural lineage that doesn’t attach necessarily to political institutions. Much of Europe’s political structure post dates the US. The heritage of the US is extraordinarily rich and inherits the heritage of the entire planet as cultures have immigrated and integrated. We have very clear direct heritages to England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, China, India, Japan, Russia, Greece, to name a few. Every American city has a “town” for these cultures. Are they not our heritage? How can they possibly not be?

Japan has a very clear monoculture heritage for a very long time. But part of British heritage is Roman occupied England is it not? Germany shares a heritage with Prussia. Much of the world has some Mongolian heritage, don’t they? You can see the influence not just in genetics but in art and culture. How is that not their heritage?

If this is true, then perhaps the issue isn’t that America has no heritage, but that it is so comprehensive that it’s impossible to pin it down to something as distinct as a monoculture?

> Much of Europe’s political structure post dates the US.

I do not think that one can make such a claim objectively. There is a whole lot of prejudice hidden behind the word "much". Political structure simply cannot be quantified. There are elements that were earlier in the US. There are elements that were earlier in Europe. Some elements were earlier in Europe, but given up inbetween and readopted later. Some elements are unique to the US, some to Europe. Some elements have changed so much during their history that you may either claim that they represent a very old system or a very new one. (For the latter: Is present day Vatican the oldest political institution in Europe, because it can trace its origins to Antiquity, or is it one of the youngest, because it was formed with the help of Mussolini?) -- One needs to tell stories of origin, not impose inappropriate metrics.

As a European it just seems weird that sometimes the heritage that is a few generations old is pulled out of thin air in order to give some meaning in the modern day. If your family migrated to the US in the 1800s, you ain’t German, Irish or French no more. Yes, we have the same heritage, but the fork happened so long ago, that you cannot relate to the experience of something that happened later in Europe or elsewhere. Similarly how I cannot go to some German-heritage community in the US and relate to everything they lived through.

I've spoken to people from some parts of the world where they have talked about a "recent" govt or king and then found out they were talking about 300 years ago, which was wild. Their collective sense of history goes back thousands of years. I would really recommend the chance to speak with people from Rome, Cairo, Damascus or Beijing (amongst many others, these are the first that come to mind) who love their local history, and you will get a sense of history that goes back a long way than a lot of people (myself included) can comprehend.

Only Americans think 250 years is old. My home town is closer to 600 years old, and the nearby castle started construction about 750 years ago.

The local history can be traced straight to the stone age.

There are buildings in the United States that are older than the United States, but this does not somehow make the United States less valuable than a building

There was a lot there 120 years ago. However the natives didn't have access to the types of materials that would last in that climate, and of course Europeans destroyed their culture.

I think we disagree on the definition of "a lot". Were there even any permanent settlements on the Canadian prairies? Most of the natives were nomadic.

The Prairies are there because of the First Nations.

Grasslands like Head-Smashed-In were maintained to attract buffalo, and timed to attract them in prime harvest season.

Burning was done to improve productivity of berry patches, etc.

It just doesn't match the European idea of agriculture / settlements.

> Most of the natives were nomadic.

Prior to the horse they were not nomadic, the prairies don't support a nomadic way of life without some animal you can ride, and the prairies didn't have one that can be tamed, so it is clear they were not nomads. The natives didn't have access to the types of building materials that would result in permanent structures, which means there is limited evidence for archeologists to work with, but there is enough about what life was like before the horse to know it wasn't nomadic.

Once the horse came many became nomadic as the horse allowed a nomadic lifestyle that wasn't possible. It wasn't long after the horse those that Europeans wiped the natives out (small pox and the like also wipes out a lot of natives and their culture). There is reason to believe that if the Europeans had brought the horse and then left the nomadic way of life was on the verge of causing a collapse of the Bison population, which would have force major changes (most like a return to farming settlements, but massive starvation followed by some form of culture population control - or something else on these lines that you can think up)

The switch to a nomadic way of life (which was directly caused by the arrival of Europeans) cause the loss of knowledge about the older ways of life. We have to make a lot of guesses, but if you know what to look for some things become clear.

Note that we talk about natives as if they are one culture, but that is not true. There were many different cultures with different ways of life. Some adopted nomadic ways of life more than others. The horse allowed the nomads to out compete those who tried to retain the old ways, so those who didn't adopt the horse either died out (starved, assimilated) or had to move to areas that horse didn't do as well in.

The nomadic way of live also turned to same way it does on the Eurasion steppe, all of a sudden you can have large scale raiding and proto-empires. Those tribes that could buy weapons from Europe and have horses could basically exploit the others. This likely transformed the societies in lots of ways but its hard to know because we do not have good records of those times.

You should probably head to the cradles of civilization if you are looking for ancient civ.

Pithy german comment sounds like your friend has a bit of an inferiority thing going on.

The largest city in the "middle ages" was in the US. Europeans trot that "no history" story out because saying "... and then Europeans engaged in the largest genocide in human history" doesn't feel as good, I guess? There was definitely an interruption and a regime change — Europe's got a lot more of those a lot more recently than the US — but the history is there, if you care to look.

That's just factually incorrect. The largest pre-colonization city in the US was a piddling 20,000. Even Uruk in ancient Mesopatmia, was more than twice that size over 5000 years ago.

Presumably you're referring to Tenochtitlan where Mexico City is today, which is neither in the US, nor was it larger than European cities at the time (although it was up there with Paris and Naples!)

> That's just factually incorrect. The largest pre-colonization city in the US was a piddling 20,000

FYI, Cahokia was thought to have had a population up to 40,000 around the (IIRC) 11th around Illionis.

For reference, Cahokia was roughly sited at present-day St. Louis.

That's the city I was referring to. The estimates I saw said 20k, so it depends what estimates you look at. It's still very small compared to other major cities of the time.

The largest city in the Middle Ages was either Baghdad or Hangzhou, with neither European cities nor Tenochtitlan reaching half their size.

EDIT: I can’t modify this to narrow the assertion to “… the US had a city (Cahokia) larger than its European contemporaries…”

Also, all of the Americas gets historical short shrift from the old world: my point still stands: there was a concerted effort 500 years ago to exterminate the natives, and the results of that plan continues to this day when people say “X doesn’t have any history”.

So, on one hand you acknowledge the concerted effort to exterminate the natives, and on the other hand you still want to ascribe the credit for the largest city on that soil to the USA? Isn't that just a little bit callous?

Europeans have no awareness of aboriginal history since they simply didn't have anything like it, so of course their version of history and culture is assumed to be the standard.

surely you aren't saying that current euro cultures are "original". perhaps you're saying that previous cultures were more/more-often absorbed and incorporated?

I think the lack of awareness is more due to the lack of written records.

I'm not so sure that I would say that there is no "awareness", and if there is a lack of awareness- it seems more likely that the lack of awareness is due to the fact that everyone is self centric, Europeans are going to be more aware of European history, in the same way that having grown up in a very specific region of the US, I am more well versed in the local native history than someone that wouldn't be. For instance, in elementary school, we went to visit native burial mounds and were educated on the local native history. All the native names for roads, towns, etc, they were local tribes that we learned about.

Which definition of "aboriginal" are you using here? If you're simply referring to the indigenous people of Australia, it seems a tautology that they didn't exist in Europe. And if you're using aboriginal as an umbrella term for all indigenous people, it seems foolish to me to think that there never were indigenous people in Europe.

Also, you might want to look up the etymology of the word you're using: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aborigines_(mythology)

> The Aborigines in Roman mythology are the oldest inhabitants of central Italy, connected in legendary history with Aeneas, Latinus and Evander.

Apparently, ancient Greek tourists vandalised pyramids in ancient Egypt. There also exist some text on walls with phrases one would expect to find in schools, it’s just that it’s in Ancient Greek.

It’s odd to think that not only time before you existed, but it was packed with people who had more or less the same issues and concerns as you do.

They were ruling Egypt at the time as an upper caste

I think the ruling class of "newer" Egypt was greek.

Pyramid Egypt is "older" Egypt, whose civilization had already died out a long time before that.

Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org /wiki/Ancient_Egypt "Old Kingdom" is pyramid Egypt "New Kingdom" is greek Egypt

There was a weak Middle Kingdom, too

> A German friend phrased it this way for Americans: We have beers older than your country.

To be fair, Anheuser-Busch is older than several iterations of Germany.

We have citizens older than the Federal Republic of Germany.

I don't know about your corner in Canada, but that "there was nothing here 150 years ago" is a dangerous lie told by people in many parts of the USA and Canada that minimized the indigenous people and occupied their land.

Your part of Canada might truly be somewhere with no indigenous presence

There was not much in the way of civilization there 150 years ago. There were indigenous, sure.

How is a self sufficient society with its own language not a civilization?

Maybe you meant to say "We didn't leave much of that civilization"

I mean they didn't have much in the way of writing, architecture, science, or organization. They were thousands of years behind the more advanced civilizations.

Native Americans wrote in an alphabet of their design, organized societies (sometimes at a large scale e.g. Cahokia), they clearly built structures of their own architected design, and they had science depending on your strictness in evaluating its definition.

I am disheartened by your comment.

All of that is pretty cool, but it's nothing compared to what the Greeks accomplished over 2000 years earlier. Or the Romans, or the Chinese, or the Egyptians, or the Incas, etc. The Native Americans were downright primitive by comparison with other civilizations. Especially on the prairies of Canada where they were basically hunter-gatherers living in small bands. I am likewise disheartened by your wilful ignorance of the truth.

"the Egyptians did it bigger" is a far cry from your original claim that there was "not much in the way of civilization" there at all.

I see it the same way. Semi nomadic bands of a couple hundred people without permanent structures is "not much in the way of civilization".

This is the fundamental difference in our views. I believe that the permanence of cultural output is arbitrary to the value of the culture, especially to those who participate in that culture.

Culture != Civilization. Culture is a term used to denote the manifestation of the manner in which we think, behave and act. Civilization refers to the process through which a region or society, outstretches an advanced stage of human development and organization.

I think we've been having disjoint discussions.

In that sense there's always a bigger fish. My Chinese last name is older than the idea of Germany.

> There are probably more continuous family heritage firms in Japan practising some art (brewing, soy sauce, woodwork, coppicing) than anywhere else. Can you name a European family concern doing the same thing continuously since before 1600? I can't name any Japanese ones but I wouldn't be surprised if there were many. Institutional enterprises like Oxford university press exist since deep time, but in Japan it would be a continuous lineage of printers continuing to use woodblock printing (maybe alongside hot type or photo typesetting)

That's a bit exagerated. There are a lot of fields in Europe which keep traditions since the Middle Ages. Sure, the difference is the amount of people doing it, but it is still there.

Centuries old breweries in Germany, Czech Republic and Poland. Traditional tweed weaving in Scotland. Stone cutting and stained glass apprenticeship through "brotherhoods" in France. That is just on the top of my head. The only difference with Japan is that those markets have already shrunk to modern needs and those markets already went through centuries of heavy modernization. So one really traditional european company serves the market like tens would in Japan.

But the traditional know how is still there.

Espaliering fruit trees is popular even today. Obviously in this case people are just picking fruit off the water sprouts that shoot up each year rather than using the wood for other purposes, but the general idea is the same. The shoots just get trimmed back every year rather than every other year.

E.g. if you look at this pic of a fig tree, you can see that it looks almost identical to the Japanese technique:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/10/10/realestate/06gard...