A Comparative Research On Chinese And Japanese Traditional Furniture Structure Form

Chinese and Japanese traditional furniture, which located in the same East Asia culture have developed into two different furniture styles. At the same time, Chinese furniture and Japanese furniture have much things in common for the special geographical position and the frequently communication between this two nations in the past generations. Based on the difference of Sino-Japan traditional furniture, a comparative study of structure forms on Sino-Japan traditional furniture is carried out in terms of their materials, structures, wood techniques and relations to architectures. The methodologies of this study are use parallel comparison and influence comparison. The objectives of this paper were that, on the one hand, to find out the main reasons to result in the difference between the structure forms, on the other, to get a new way to compare the relations between Sino-Japan traditional furniture.This paper is base on the communication of Sino-Japan traditional architecture culture. By analyzing the impact of traditional architecture to furniture structure in the two nations proved that their furniture structures have much relations to their ancient architecture structures and much of them evolved from the architecture structures, but the wood techniques of architecture are assimilated much less in Japanese furniture. The development and transition of wood techniques as a background to research the structure form of Sino-Japan traditional furniture in this paper, and then to analyze the impact of Chinese furniture wood techniques to Japanese furniture that the development and evolution of wood techniques and wood tools are the directly impetus to the appearance of a new furniture style. After exploiting the structure forms and material between Sino-Japan traditional furniture, some results are found out as follows:The materials used in Chinese traditional furniture are usually hardwood, and then, it needs precise dimensions when they jointed together. Japanese usually use softwood in its traditional furniture, this give the chance to make nail joint, glue joint and hardware joint much advanced in its traditional furniture than Chinese. The main type of Chinese traditional furniture structure is framed type, but the Japanese is mainly box-like structure type. They have not disassembled structure in Japanese traditional furniture. The motise and tenon joint in Chinese traditional furniture is more complex than Japanese, but the glue, nail and hardware joint used in Japanese traditional furniture are more universal than Chinese. Japanese traditional furniture are mainly in box-liked structure and very simple in joint type. The analysis of the main influence factors in the structure forms of Sino-Japan traditional furniture prove that the life style, architecture technicue, woodworking and material are the main reasons to form the structure's differentia between Sino-Japan traditional furniture. At the same time, the author proposes that not only the Chinese furniture and woodwork affect Japanese traditional furniture, but also the technology of traditional Chinese architecture.