I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was supposed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, the small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, "They'll laugh at me. They'll say, 'That's not the way a hip-rafter should look!' And I won't be around to defend myself."
Excerpt: pg. 67, The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, S. Azby Brown. 1989
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