An Australian importer is taking Japan’s sugi cedar and hinoki cypress up the value chain, with profiled and finished timber for interiors and exteriors joining a range built on rough-sawn boards. Speaking exclusively to Wood Central’s Jason Ross, Simon Love, director of Japanese Timber Australia, called the two species “some of the most beautiful decorative timbers on the planet”.
“Traditionally we have supplied kiln-dried rough sawn timber into Australia,” Love said ahead of Wood Central’s Japanese seminar on Monday, where four of Japan’s top suppliers will present to Australian importers, builders, and architects. “More recently, with our supply group, we are expanding the range of products to include profiled and finished products for architectural and decorative finishes.”
It comes as Australia bought 96 million yen of the record 59.6 billion yen Japan earned from wood exports last year, eighteenth among its buyers, with China taking 53 per cent. Japan sold 1.912 million cubic metres of logs abroad for 29.8 billion yen in the same year, whilst paying 65 billion yen for a smaller 1.71 million cubic metres imported.
Japan’s Agriculture Ministry wants exporters to move from logs to higher-value lumber and plywood, with a Cabinet target of 166 billion yen in forest-product exports by 2030, up from 73.5 billion last year. Lumber alone is targeted to climb from 7.4 billion yen in 2024 to 85 billion yen, with the Forestry Agency reporting that 1.3 per cent of Japan’s lumber production is sold abroad, compared with Canada’s 62.9 per cent.
“As with any species of timber, getting the grade right for the application is key,” Love said, with the company and its Japanese mills and wholesalers making sure the timber reaching Australia and Europe suits the job it is bought for.
Sugi alone covers 4.4 million hectares of Japan’s planted forest and hinoki another 2.6 million, with sugi making up 88 per cent of the logs Japan shipped to China last year. Japan has managed those forests for 300 years, Love told Wood Central last year, under a system he said was in place “centuries before PEFC and FSC certification”.
Since 2020 the company has run professional development sessions for architects across the country, and next year Love plans to take 15 to 20 architects from Australia and New Zealand to Japan. Last year he worked with Andrew Dunn, chief executive of the Timber Development Association, to take 15 structural engineers inside a Japanese housing factory and Japan’s National Stadium.
“We have not done a lot to directly promote ourselves but have supported our mills, wholesalers, and timber specialists who look after the customers directly,” said Love, who believes the company has been “at the forefront of promoting the species in Australia”.
Love came to the two species through what he describes as one of Japan’s oldest timber auction houses, which made him a director overseeing Australia within four months. He achieved CodeMark certification for the group’s building system in Australia and New Zealand, a 12-month job he said the company did not think was possible.
The group then built two display homes at Cameron Park in Lake Macquarie, on the New South Wales coast, where Love invited local builders and developers and said “no one had seen frames and construction go up that quickly”. Two more went up at Kota Deltamas, outside Jakarta, for a proposed 10,000-home joint venture, steel-framed for termite resistance with interiors using as much Japanese timber as possible.
When the group later exited its overseas operations, Love set out to keep its knowledge of the two species alive in Australia and started Japanese Timber Australia “from scratch in 2020”. “It was a very tough time to start a business in the middle of COVID restrictions, but I thought we lost something that had long term benefits to Australian construction,” he said.
Hisao Yamada, chairman of the Japan Wood-Products Export Association, opens the seminar at T3 Collingwood before Dunn delivers the Australian keynote and four suppliers present, including a laminated timber maker from Yoshino in Nara Prefecture. “Our connections and network in Japan have grown significantly,” Love said, with several members of his supply network due in Melbourne for the seminar.
- To find out more about the seminar, which Wood Central is organising for the Japan Wood-Products Export Association and the Japan International Forestry Promotion and Cooperation Center, contact Jason Ross on jason@woodcentral.com.au. For part two of this series, on sugi, hinoki, and health, click here.
