On that Japanese woodworking is done with softwoods thing
It’s often said that Japanese tools were designed for use with softwoods, which is why they don’t work well with hardwoods. This is a common misperception.
Japanese woodworkers had to use their tools in hardwoods as well as softwoods. There are a variety of hardwoods used in Japanese furniture, including Japanese species of elm, chestnut, ash, and mulberry. This tansu (photo from www.shibuihome.com) is made with chestnut drawer fronts, with cedar used for the drawer interiors, much like what is often done in western furniture making: hardwood drawer fronts with softwood used for the drawer interior.
Yew, although a softwood, was pretty hard to work with, and was used in Japanese furniture. Japanese woodworkers imported tropical rosewoods for furniture making. In buildings, doors were often made from the same hardwood species that were used in furniture. In addition, Japanese white and red oak are uniformly used to make Japanese plane bodies and Japanese chisel handles.
It’s true that Japanese woodworking used a number of softwood species, such as cedar, and softer species of hardwoods, such as paulownia, and that these species are often prized for their appearance. Certainly the most visible element of a traditional Japanese home is the exposed timber framing that often uses beams from softwood species. But given the other hardwood species that were used in Japanese woodworking, it’s no more true to say that Japanese woodworkers used softwoods than it is to characterize western woodworkers as using softwoods because there’s a lot of pine furniture that was made in the U.S., or because our 2x4’s aren’t made from cherry.
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