According to the comments that is just a variation of coppicing, which is several millennia old and practiced around the world. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

According to the comments that is just a variation of coppicing, which is several millennia old and practiced around the world. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing which also mentions the Japanese variant) While coppicing does results in fairly straight trees, they're still circular and will result in large amounts of waste if you try to cut dimensional lumber out of it.