A maple only has 2 bud area were internode, so if it does produce 5/6 shoots they will all be coming from the same 2 opposite spots on the trunk and will very quickly cause inverse taper and be unaesthetic. If you aren’t too concerned with growing aesthetically pleasing trees then by all means.
I’ve just never really seen JMs grow in broom styles besides maybe kiyohime which for whatever reason tend to lend themselves to the style.
My choice would be chopping to the first existing shoot and growing it out some more and then following up with subsequent chops.
No I do not want to grow something that is aesthetically unpleasing, my whole passion/fascination with the art is to grow something of beauty, and the meditative-like state I get of tuning out all the normal day to day problems and anxieties we all face, and simply staring at one of my trees for an hour or more and just envisioning what it could be, and learning how to manipulate the tree to achieve this.
And to your next post, the lower trunk does have some movement but yes like you stated, repotting it at a different angle wouldn't quite work if I wanted to keep the existing nebari. What drew me to this tree was the roots, trunk diameter, taper (although not so important if I chop to that first shoot) and extremely cheap price point in relation to the rest of the nursery stock I see in my area.
Thank you for the information on the air-layering while still trying to stimulate growth further down the trunk! To be quite frank I have never successfully made an air layer, however I have only tried in the very beginning of my journey into the art, and both were on very old ground grown plants, one bloodgood maple at my mother's that I now don't think would make a good bonsai, and the other on a giant juniper that was more tree than shrub, but I was younger and over eager and impatient. That bloodgood my mother had in a concrete circle in her back yard patio for like 15 years and died a few years after I tried the air layer so perhaps it wasn't truly thriving and strong.
I live in California in the East Bay area, I think we are right around the ideal time to start an air layer. This is a question to the more successful artists here, have you had more luck with the standard scraping up to an inch of bark down to cambium later or the tourniquet method? Obviously specifically with Japanese maples but I am interested in anyone's experience with either method as long as they share what type of tree they had success with.
