I'm envious of Japanese woodworkers because I don't have the patience to even complete a simple Japanese box.
[This is really a wood shaving that's paper-thin. And from what I've seen of other Japanese carpenter videos, this isn't even all that thin a piece!] [1] [2]
The image above may look like a piece of paper with a design on it but no—that's a wood shaving! What you don't see in the picture above is the block of wood with that pattern (built up out of many layers of thin strips of wood glued together, cut, glued, cut, glued, to get that pattern) and the block plane he's using to shave off a thin portion to get what effectively is a pattern piece of paper.
And yes, it is paper thin, glued to the outside of the resulting box.
It's just blowing my mind the level of effort put into a simple box.
[1] /boston/2015/12/28/wood-paper.jpg
![[1] /boston/2015/12/28/wood-paper.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2015/12/28/wood-paper.jpg){kind=link}