What a lovely book. It's been sitting quietly alongside me on my shelves for years and only because of a re-arrangement of furniture, I noticed it and read it. It's mainly photographic but what a selection of photos. Magnificent. (I think they are mainly of Japanese work). Confession, I skilmmed the text but from what I read. It's helpful and authoritative and i learned some new things like India is actually the largest producer of bamboo and almost half of it goes into making pulp. This proportion is much higher for india than the other big producers: China followed by Burma then Japan. Japan used a much higher proportion for manufactured goods than the other countries. I noticed one oddity in the way some of the scientific diagrams were presented. A simple graph showing the effect on yield of fertiliser. The normal way of presenting this data is control (no fertiliser) on the left and fertiliser response of the right. But here they are reversed. ....a contribution by the Japanese author, perhaps? But a nit-picking point. Overall, I loved the book ...especially the detailed sections where they demonstrate the making of a shakuhachi flute or a bamboo whisk. An easy five stars from me. ( )