During those centuries of relative isolation, Japan was able to meet most of its needs domestically, and in particular was virtually self-sufficient in food, timber, and most metals. Imports were largely restricted to sugar and spices, ginseng and medicines and mercury, 160 tons per year of luxury woods, Chinese silk, deer skin and other hides to make leather (because Japan maintained few cattle), and lead and saltpeter to make gunpowder. Even the amounts of some of those imports decreased with time as domestic silk and sugar production rose, and as guns became restricted and then virtually abolished. This remarkable state of self-sufficiency and self-imposed isolation lasted until an American fleet under Commodore Perry arrived in 1853 to demand that Japan open its ports to supply fuel and provisions to American whaling and merchant ships. When it then became clear that the Tokugawa shogunate could no longer protect Japan from barbarians armed with guns, the shogunate collapsed in 1868, and Japan began its remarkably rapid transformation from an isolated semi-feudal society to a modern state.
Deforestation was a major factor in the environmental and population crisis brought on by the peace and prosperity of the 1600s, as Japan’s timber consumption (almost entirely consisting of domestic timber) soared. Until the late 19th century, most Japanese buildings were made of wood, rather than of stone, brick, cement, mud, or tiles as in many other countries. That tradition of timber construction stemmed partly from a Japanese esthetic preference for wood, and partly from the ready availability of trees throughout Japan’s early history. With the onset of peace, prosperity, and a population boom, timber use for construction took off to supply the needs of the growing rural and urban population. Beginning around 1570, Hideyoshi, his successor the shogun Ieyasu, and many of the daimyo led the way, indulging their egos and seeking to impress each other by constructing huge castles and temples. Just the three biggest castles built by Ieyasu required clear-cutting about 10 square miles of forests. About 200 castle towns and cities arose under Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, and the next shogun. After Ieyasu’s death, urban construction outstripped elite monument construction in its demand for timber, especially because cities of thatch-roofed wooden buildings set closely together and with winter heating by fireplaces were prone to burn, so cities needed to be rebuilt repeatedly. The biggest of those urban fires was the Meireki fire that burned half of the capital at Edo and killed 100,000 people in 1657. Much of that timber was transported to cities by coastal ships, in turn built of wood and hence consuming more wood. Still more wooden ships were required to transport Hideyoshi’s armies across the Korea Strait in his unsuccessful attempts to conquer Korea.
Timber for construction was not the only need driving deforestation. Wood was also the fuel used for heating houses, for cooking, and for industrial uses such as making salt, tiles, and ceramics. Wood was burned to charcoal to sustain the hotter fires required for smelting iron. Japan’s expanding population needed more food, and hence more forested land cleared for agriculture. Peasants fertilized their fields with “green fertilizer” (i.e., leaves, bark, and twigs), and fed their oxen and horses with fodder (brush and grass), obtained from the forests. Each acre of cropland required 5 to 10 acres of forest to provide the necessary green fertilizer. Until the civil wars ended in 1615, the warring armies under daimyo and the shogun took fodder for their horses, and bamboo for their weapons and defensive palisades, from the forests. Daimyo in forested areas fulfilled their annual obligation to the shogun in the form of timber.
The years from about 1570 to 1650 marked the peak of the construction boom and of deforestation, which slowed down as timber became scarce. At first, wood was cut either under the direct order of the shogun or daimyo, or else by peasants themselves for their local needs, but by 1660 logging by private entrepreneurs overtook government-ordered logging. For instance, when yet another fire broke out in Edo, one of the most famous of those private lumbermen, a merchant named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon, shrewdly recognized that the result would be more demand for timber. Even before the fire had been put out, he sailed off on a ship to buy up huge quantities of timber in the Kiso district, for resale at a big profit in Edo.
The first part of Japan to become deforested, already by A.D. 800, was the Kinai Basin on the largest Japanese island of Honshu, site of early Japan’s main cities such as Osaka and Kyoto. By the year 1000, deforestation was spreading to the nearby smaller island of Shikoku. By 1550 about one-quarter of Japan’s area (still mainly just central Honshu and eastern Shikoku) had been logged, but other parts of Japan still held much lowland forest and old-growth forest.
In 1582 Hideyoshi became the first ruler to demand timber from all over Japan, because timber needs for his lavish monumental construction exceeded the timber available on his own domains. He took control of some of Japan’s most valuable forests and requisitioned a specified amount of timber each year from each daimyo. In addition to forests, which the shogun and daimyo claimed for themselves, they also claimed all valuable species of timber trees on village or private land. To transport all that timber from increasingly distant logging areas to the cities or castles where the timber was needed, the government cleared obstacles from rivers so that logs could be floated or rafted down them to the coast, whence they were then transported by ships to port cities. Logging spread over Japan’s three main islands, from the southern end of the southernmost island of Kyushu through Shikoku to the northern end of Honshu. In 1678 loggers had to turn to the southern end of Hokkaido, the island north of Honshu and at that time not yet part of the Japanese state. By 1710, most accessible forest had been cut on the three main islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu) and on southern Hokkaido, leaving old-growth forests just on steep slopes, in inaccessible areas, and at sites too difficult or costly to log with Tokugawa-era technology.
Deforestation hurt Tokugawa Japan in other ways besides the obvious one of wood shortages for timber, fuel, and fodder and the forced end to monumental construction. Disputes over timber and fuel became increasingly frequent between and within villages, and between villages and the daimyo or shogun, all of whom competed for Japan’s forests. There were also disputes between those who wanted to use rivers for floating or rafting logs, and those who instead wanted to use them for fishing or for irrigating cropland. Just as we saw for Montana in Chapter 1, wildfires increased, because the second-growth woods springing up on logged land were more flammable than were old-growth forests. Once the forest cover protecting steep slopes had been removed, the rate of soil erosion increased as a consequence of Japan’s heavy rainfall, snowmelt, and frequent earthquakes. Flooding in the lowlands due to increased water runoff from the denuded slopes, higher water levels in lowland irrigation systems due to soil erosion and river siltation, increased storm damage, and shortages of forest-derived fertilizer and fodder acted together to decrease crop yields at a time of increasing population, and thus to contribute to major famines that beset Tokugawa Japan from the late 1600s onwards.
The 1657 Meireki fire, and the resulting demand for timber to rebuild Japan’s capital, served as a wake-up call exposing the country’s growing scarcity of timber and other resources at a time when its population, especially its urban population, had been growing rapidly. That might have led to an Easter-Island-like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more nearly sustainable resource consumption rates. The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.
Part of the shift involved increased reliance on seafood and on trade with the Ainu for food, in order to relieve the pressure on farming. Expanded fishing efforts incorporated new fishing techniques, such as very large nets and deepwater fishing. The territories claimed by individual daimyo and villages now included the sea adjacent to their land, in recognition of the sense that fish and shellfish stocks were limited and mi
ght become exhausted if anyone else could freely fish in one’s territory. Pressure on forests as a source of green fertilizer for cropland was reduced by making much more use of fish meal fertilizers. Hunting of sea mammals (whales, seals, and sea otters) increased, and syndicates were formed to finance the necessary boats, equipment, and large workforces. The greatly expanded trade with the Ainu on Hokkaido Island brought smoked salmon, dried sea cucumber, abalone, kelp, deer skins, and sea otter pelts to Japan, in exchange for rice, sake (rice wine), tobacco, and cotton delivered to the Ainu. Among the results were the depletion of salmon and deer on Hokkaido, the weaning of the Ainu away from self-sufficiency as hunters to dependence on Japanese imports, and eventually the destruction of the Ainu through economic disruption, disease epidemics, and military conquests. Thus, part of the Tokugawa solution for the problem of resource depletion in Japan itself was to conserve Japanese resources by causing resource depletion elsewhere, just as part of the solution of Japan and other First World countries to problems of resource depletion today is to cause resource depletion elsewhere. (Remember that Hokkaido was not incorporated politically into Japan until the 19th century.)
Another part of the shift consisted of the near-achievement of Zero Population Growth. Between 1721 and 1828, Japan’s population barely increased at all, from 26,100,000 to only 27,200,000. Compared to earlier centuries, Japanese in the 18th and 19th century married later, nursed their babies for longer, and spaced their children at longer intervals through the resulting lactational amenorrhea as well as through contraception, abortion, and infanticide. Those decreased birth rates represented responses of individual couples to perceived shortages of food and other resources, as shown by rises and falls in Tokugawa Japanese birth rates in phase with falls and rises in rice prices.
Still other aspects of the shift served to reduce wood consumption. Beginning in the late 17th century, Japan’s use of coal instead of wood as a fuel rose. Lighter construction replaced heavy-timbered houses, fuel-efficient cooking stoves replaced open-hearth fireplaces, small portable charcoal heaters replaced the practice of heating the whole house, and reliance on the sun to heat houses during the winter increased.
Many top-down measures were aimed at curing the imbalance between cutting trees and producing trees, initially mainly by negative measures (reducing the cutting), then increasingly by positive measures as well (producing more trees). One of the first signs of awareness at the top was a proclamation by the shogun in 1666, just nine years after the Meireki fire, warning of the dangers of erosion, stream siltation, and flooding caused by deforestation, and urging people to plant seedlings. Beginning in that same decade, Japan launched a nationwide effort at all levels of society to regulate use of its forest, and by 1700 an elaborate system of woodland management was in place. In the words of historian Conrad Totman, the system focused on “specifying who could do what, where, when, how, how much, and at what price.” That is, the first phase of the Tokugawa-era response to Japan’s forest problem emphasized negative measures that didn’t restore lumber production to previous levels, but that at least bought time, prevented the situation from getting worse until positive measures could take effect, and set ground rules for the competition within Japanese society over increasingly scarce forest products.
The negative responses aimed at three stages in the wood supply chain: woodland management, wood transport, and wood consumption in towns. At the first stage, the shogun, who directly controlled about a quarter of Japan’s forests, designated a senior magistrate in the finance ministry to be responsible for his forests, and almost all of the 250 daimyo followed suit by each appointing his own forest magistrate for his land. Those magistrates closed off logged lands to permit forest regeneration, issued licenses specifying the peasants’ rights to cut timber or graze animals on government forest land, and banned the practice of burning forests to clear land for shifting cultivation. In those forests controlled not by the shogun or daimyo but by villages, the village headman managed the forest as common property for the use of all villagers, developed rules about the harvesting of forest products, forbade “foreign” peasants of other villages to use his own village’s forest, and hired armed guards to enforce all these rules.
Both the shogun and the daimyo paid for very detailed inventories of their forests. Just as one example of the managers’ obsessiveness, an inventory of a forest near Karuizawa 80 miles northwest of Edo in 1773 recorded that the forest measured 2.986 square miles in area and contained 4,114 trees, of which 573 were crooked or knotty and 3,541 were good. Of those 4,114 trees, 78 were big conifers (66 of them good) with trunks 24-36 feet long and 6-7 feet in circumference, 293 were medium-sized conifers (253 of them good) 4-5 feet in circumference, 255 good small conifers 6-18 feet long and 1-3 feet in circumference to be harvested in the year 1778, and 1,474 small conifers (1,344 of them good) to harvest in later years. There were also 120 medium-sized ridgeline conifers (104 of them good) 15-18 feet long and 3-4 feet in circumference, 15 small ridgeline conifers 12-24 feet long and 8 inches to 1 foot in circumference to be harvested in 1778, and 320 small ridgeline conifers (241 of them good) to harvest in later years, not to mention 448 oaks (412 of them good) 12-24 feet long and 3-5-½ feet in circumference, and 1,126 other trees whose properties were similarly enumerated. Such counting represents an extreme of top-down management that left nothing to the judgment of individual peasants.
The second stage of negative responses involved the shogun and daimyo establishing guard posts on highways and rivers to inspect wood shipments and make sure that all those rules about woodland management were actually being obeyed. The last stage consisted of a host of government rules specifying, once a tree had been felled and had passed inspection at a guard post, who could use it for what purpose. Valuable cedars and oaks were reserved for government uses and were off limits to peasants. The amount of timber that you could use in building your house varied with your social status: 30 ken (one ken is a beam 6 feet long) for a headman presiding over several villages, 18 ken for such a headman’s heir, 12 ken for a headman of a single village, 8 ken for a local chief, 6 ken for a taxable peasant, and a mere 4 ken for an ordinary peasant or fisherman. The shogun also issued rules about permissible wood use for objects smaller than houses. For instance, in 1663 an edict forbade any woodworker in Edo to fabricate a small box out of cypress or sugi wood, or household utensils out of sugi wood, but permitted large boxes to be made of either cypress or sugi. In 1668 the shogun went on to ban use of cypress, sugi, or any other good tree for public signboards, and 38 years later large pines were removed from the list of trees approved for making New Year decorations.
All of these negative measures aimed at solving Japan’s forestry crisis by ensuring that wood be used only for purposes authorized by the shogun or daimyo. However, a big role in Japan’s crisis had been played by wood use by the shogun and daimyo themselves. Hence a full solution to the crisis required positive measures to produce more trees, as well as to protect land from erosion. Those measures began already in the 1600s with Japan’s development of a detailed body of scientific knowledge about silviculture. Foresters employed both by the government and by private merchants observed, experimented, and published their findings in an outpouring of silvicultural journals and manuals, exemplified by the first of Japan’s great silvicultural treatises, the Nōgyō zensho of 1697 by Miyazaki Antei. There, you will find instructions for how best to gather, extract, dry, store, and prepare seeds; how to prepare a seedbed by cleaning, fertilizing, pulverizing, and stirring it; how to soak seeds before sowing them; how to protect sown seeds by spreading straw over them; how to weed the seedbed; how to transplant and space seedlings; how to replace failed seedlings over the next four years; how to thin out the resulting saplings; and how to trim branches from the growing trunk in order that it yield a log of the desired shape. As an alternative to thus growing trees from seed, some tree species were instead grown by planting cuttings or shoots, and others by the tech
nique known as coppicing (leaving live stumps or roots in the ground to sprout).
Gradually, Japan independently of Germany developed the idea of plantation forestry: that trees should be viewed as a slow-growing crop. Both governments and private entrepreneurs began planting forests on land that they either bought or leased, especially in areas where it would be economically favorable, such as near cities where wood was in demand. On the one hand, plantation forestry is expensive, risky, and demanding of capital. There are big costs up front to pay workers to plant the trees, then more labor costs for several decades to tend the plantation, and no recovery of all that investment until the trees are big enough to harvest. At any time during those decades, one may lose one’s tree crop to disease or a fire, and the price that the lumber will eventually fetch is subject to market fluctuations unpredictable decades in advance when the seeds are planted. On the other hand, plantation forestry offers several compensating advantages compared to cutting naturally sown forests. You can plant just preferred valuable tree species, instead of having to accept whatever sprouts in the forest. You can maximize the quality of your trees and the price received for them, for instance by trimming them as they grow to obtain eventually straight and well-shaped logs. You can pick a convenient site with low transport costs near a city and near a river suitable for floating logs out, instead of having to haul logs down a remote mountainside. You can space out your trees at equal intervals, thereby reducing the costs of eventual cutting. Some Japanese plantation foresters specialized in wood for particular uses and were thereby able to command top prices for an established “brand name.” For instance, Yoshino plantations became known for producing the best staves for cedar barrels to hold sake (rice wine).
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Page 40