G'day again Jack,

Well, a shakuhachi doesn't have a fipple ... defined by my work Oxford Concise as: "a plug at the mouth-end of a wind instrument." (In the case of a recorder, that's the 'block' that makes a recorder a "block-flute".) On a shakuhachi there's just the empty bore of the bamboo. Below that is the labium (Latin for "lip") - the sharp edge that 'cuts' the wind and generates the parcel of harmonics from which (your fingering of) the instrument selects a definite note.

(Some chinese top-blown bamboo flutes do have a rather notional "fipple" ... a thin slice of the inter-nodal membrane - that is traditionally fretted, so that you have to go through contortions to keep it from leaking - especially since these have the labium cut back into the bore - strange people ... ! Anyway they are not much like the Chinese ancestor of the shakuhachi.)

I notice that commercial shakuhachis don't seem to have their labia formed from the basic bamboo - rather the labium is usually an insert - sometimes of a hard, off-white, plastic, but probably bone ... or ivory ... in the good models.

See you after what passes for a democratic election (until the pollies work out how to make such bothersome behaviour illegal. - Little Johnnie is studying the American endeavours with a very keen eye!).

Regards,

Bob