The original article (in Japanese) is not that specific on what glue was used, though it did say that it took him four times as long as with ordinary wood strips because he had to glue the waribashi together.

But I don’t think his point was to build an environmentally zero-footprint canoe (nor a perfect canoe: it is also heavier than a regular strip-built canoe). He was trying to point out the waste.

You also need to consider the source of the wood strips in the “regular” canoe. Most of the time, it is old-growth red cedar, which is rapidly disappearing from forests in the US and Canada. A lot of petroleum is used cutting down these massive timbers, trucking them around, and shipping milled wood strips around.

In this case, the waribashi wood was, at best, going to be composted. Most likely it was on its way to a landfill or incinerator.

I have a friend who is considering making a bamboo-strip canoe, since bamboo is much faster growing than red cedar. He’s been experimenting with gluing bamboo, which turns out to be a difficult thing.