But this does not totally explain the great resilience of Japanese pagodas. Is the answer that, like a tall pine tree, the Japanese pagoda - with its massive trunk-like central pillar known as shinbashira - simply flexes and sways during a typhoon or earthquake? For centuries, many thought so. But the answer is not so simple because the startling thing is that the shinbashira actually carries no load at all.
In fact, in some pagoda designs, it does not even rest on the ground, but is suspended from the top of the pagoda - hanging loosely down through the middle of the building. The weight of the building is supported entirely by twelve outer and four inner columns.
And what is the role of the shinbashira, the central pillar? The best way to understand the shinbashiras role is to watch a video made by Shuzo Ishida, a structural engineer at Kyoto Institute of Technology. Mr Ishida, known to his students as Professor Pagoda because of his passion to understand the pagoda, has built a series of models and tested them on a shake- table in his laboratory. In short, the shinbashira was acting like an enormous stationary pendulum. The ancient craftsmen, apparently without the assistance of very advanced mathematics, seemed to grasp the principles that were, more than a thousand years later, applied in the construction of Japans first skyscraper. What those early craftsmen had found by trial and error was that under pressure a pagodas loose stack of floors could be made to slither to and fro independent of one another. Viewed from the side, the pagoda seemed to be doing a snake dance - with each consecutive floor moving in the opposite direction to its neighbours above and below. The shinbashira, running up through a hole in the centre of the building, constrained individual storeys from moving too far because, after moving a certain distance, they banged into it, transmitting energy away along the column.
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