Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman (review)

Seeds of Control adds a new dimension to a growing list of transnational studies that link Japan to other regions. Forestry was in a state of transition at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries as its practitioners sought to become more scientific and to promote silviculture in a burgeoning and increasingly integrated global market. Japan quickly joined this movement, endeavoring to promote efficient growth and harvesting of timber in its growing colonial empire, first in Taiwan and subsequently in Korea.

David Fedman has given us a very fine study of a product commonly, and often directly, consumed by the rural residents who comprised the vast majority of Korea's late nineteenth and early twentieth-century population, even the poorest of farmers: wood. His approach is in contrast to other recent transnational studies. For example, Hoi-eun Kim's Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan (University of Toronto Press, 2016) focuses on a particular individual engaged in a limited professional position. The late Aaron S. Moore examined Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and scholars as regional planning developed and was transported to mainland Northeast Asia in Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan's Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013). Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945 by Daqing Yang (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) uses technology as the entry point for exploring the political and cultural context of Japan in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Asian world. Finally, Brett Walker, Timothy George, and others have given us a good sense of Japan's externalization of its environmentally destructive production to China and elsewhere. These are important approaches and subjects; however, they most immediately affected a small portion of the population. Fedman embraces or engages all these approaches as they bear on the development of Korean forestry and its impact on the broader population.

Although the title might lead a reader to conclude that this is a study of imperial Japan's exploitation of Korea (which it is), it is also much more. Economic statistics and citations from law and administrative studies certainly comprise a significant component in the analysis, but this study moves beyond statistics and treatises compiled by elite governors and their adjuncts. Fedman is interested in what happens at multiple social levels, and his analysis moves between top-down and bottom-up perspectives that explore quotidian interactions of Koreans, Japanese (resident and nonresident), and the woodlands. As a source of fuel, fertilizer, food, flood amelioration, house-building materials, and toolmaking, Korean forests and their health directly affected the lives of Korean farmers and others. Fedman's work thus provides insights into the daily existence of ordinary, especially rural, people as they interacted with their environment and higher administrative authorities.

Issues associated with Japanese colonization and Japanese treatment of Koreans haunt efforts to assess the impact of colonial policy on forestry (among many other subjects) and are intimately imbricated in continuing political concerns, but Fedman adroitly avoids potential ideological pitfalls to present readers with a clear, readable, highly nuanced study of the introduction of scientific forestry to Korea. He successfully separates the different domestic, colonial, regional, and historical threads spun by a combination of government attempts to control woodlands and popular reactions, regional geography, and economic demands over the century prior to the conclusion of World War II. In the process, he assesses propagative, conservational, and exploitative tendencies from the nineteenth-century Chosŏn dynasty to World War II and, more succinctly, to the 1970s.

In addition to an introduction and conclusion, three major divisions mark the monograph's core: Roots (chapter 1, Imperializing Forestry; and 2, Korea, Green and Red), Reforms (chapters 3–6, Righting the Woodlands; Engineering Growth; The Timber Undertaking; Civic Forestry), and Campaigns (chapter 7, Forest-Love Thought). The individual chapters explore the official efforts of governing authorities to...