Wood Has to Be Carved. Bamboo Is Already a Cup.

“Process wood and you can make a container out of it” ← sure, that tracks

“Cut bamboo and it’s already a container” ← this is overdoing it

I could accept it just being hollow. The fact that it also has nodes is where it goes too far.

And the nodes basically tell you where to cut. Nice touch.

“No poisonous varieties” ← excellent

“The young ones are edible” ← full service, honestly

And on top of everything, run electricity through the fiber and it glows. (Early light bulbs used carbonized bamboo filament, and the best-performing bamboo for it came from a grove near Kyoto.)

Barely touch it and it’s a spear. Bend it and tie it and it’s a bow. Line it up and it’s a wall. Young ones you can eat.

Fresh green ones don’t catch fire right away, so you can stand one next to a campfire and cook rice in it.

Plus it grows fast, it’s easy to work with, and it’s strong.

And the thin ones are ideal for fishing rods. It’s just running up the score at this point.

Sometimes there’s even booze in there that made itself.

Well-known fact: the word “bamboo” comes from the ban in bannō, meaning all-purpose.

…Instead of planting cedar everywhere with a “please use it for construction!” attitude, if they’d just put bamboo on all those hillsides, would hay fever even be a thing here…? (Japan replanted its mountains with cedar for timber after the war, the timber market then collapsed, the trees stayed, and the pollen now drives a national allergy season every spring.)

Bamboo kind of feels like a plant that was designed to come out that way.

It’s sturdy enough to use as scaffolding too. It’s just too much of a god-given cheat plant.

A growth rate that only makes sense if you assumed people would burn through a lot of it, plus the fact that it’s all connected underground by rhizomes so you can’t accidentally use it up. Way too artificial.

Flip it around: maybe containers settled into their current shape because people were already using cut bamboo as containers.

Also, speaking of natural containers, there’s the gourd. (Dried bottle gourds have served as sake and water flasks in Japan for centuries.) That waist practically says “carry me.” Pretty good in its own right.

If you’re somewhere warm and wet and you’re trying to push up a disposable stem as fast as a tree grows, going hollow is the rational move. So you could also say it went hollow and that just happened to be extremely handy for humans.

Only problem is it’s Asia-server exclusive.

Well, the Japan server does cover subarctic through subtropical, so, fair enough.

If the Asia server is the favorite, then what’s going on with Japan running a permanent clearance sale on natural disasters… feels like god is asking something different of Japan specifically…?

I wonder if the settlers who went up to Hokkaido were horrified to discover there’s no bamboo there. (Hokkaido, the northern island, was only settled systematically from the late 1800s.)

No cheat plant to fall back on, winters are brutal, bears are brutal, peat bogs are brutal, kumazasa is brutal (a knee-high dwarf bamboo that carpets the forest floor — all of the spreading, none of the useful hollow stems), old-growth forest is brutal, can’t grow rice, cold-damage crop failure is brutal……

The gourd is looking over here like it has something to say.

The gourd’s design is a little too born-to-be-a-canteen.

“Just pick the gourd and it’s a container” ← way too easy. Humanity’s ride-or-die. Been growing you since we walked out of Africa and we’re not stopping.

“The fruit itself is a container” <- ?????

Processing them is a massive pain though, and if you don’t do it right the smell sticks around・・

There’s a technique where you soak the inside with beeswax, which had me going, it smells that bad…?

Bamboo, cotton and gourds are genuinely just industrial products growing straight out of the ground.

Huh, bamboo really is something. And it grows fast so you can just keep harvesting・・・

Grows fast, spreads easily, tough and light, and still easy to work with.

On top of that: building material, tableware, baskets, safe drinking water, doubles as a filter, and you can make a whole range of different weapons and traps out of it. Roofing, sun shade, keeps things cool, works as a preservative, makes rafts. The shoots are food and keep as preserved food. Even dead it’s fuel.

Sounds handy. Gonna plant some in the yard.

If you only look at the many uses, the edible young ones and the easy spreading, bamboo is basically “the strongest plant I came up with.” Although the part where it’s been left alone and is now overrunning everything feels like the ending of a short-short. (A very compact Japanese story genre, built around a final twist.)