What this file is

A lumber yard keeps a card file: one card per species, per joint, per supplier, with a shelf mark, a date, and a line about what the card does not know. This site works the same way. Each entry is a card: what the thing is, where it comes from, what it is good for, what it was checked against, and what the file does not claim.

Who keeps the file

The file is kept by a small editorial desk that reads public sources, trade literature and conservation documents, then writes one card at a time. Nothing here is sold, stocked or shipped; the desk does not take orders, cut timber or appraise houses. It keeps notes, and it corrects them when a reader shows a better source.

Why this domain

This address once belonged to Mori to Hito Jōhōkan, the information hall of Marutama Co., a building-materials dealer in Kodaira, Tokyo. The hall kept a craft gallery named Aorangi, after the Māori name of Mount Cook; it ran an old-farmhouse experience centre called Yuzan; and it published pages about natural woods, including the protected Nikko cedar and the paulownia chest. That company has closed this chapter. The Hinoki File is not Marutama and claims no continuity with it; it keeps the same subject, wood and the houses wood makes, under a new name and in English.

The file's opinion

A joint you can inspect beats a joint you have to trust. That is the whole editorial position: entries favour what can be seen, measured and verified over what must be taken on faith, and they say plainly where the record stops.