The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan

Chapter Four. The Negative Regimen: Forest Regulation

Chapter Four The Negative Regimen: Forest Regulation The earliest historical evidence of woodland management inJapan dates from the ancient predation. After a couple of centuries such management appears to have fallen into desuetude, however, not reviving until the 14005 and 15005, when villagers and subsequently daimyo initiated a new era offorest regulation. During the seventeenth century, forest management acquired urgency as widespread land clearance and overcutting precipitated both erosion with its downstream ramifications and wood scarcity with its socioeconomic consequences. As decades passed, governments and villages all over the realm adopted and elaborated measures to counter the malign effects of excess, attempting most immediately to resolve disputes arising from conflicts over forest-use rights. By century's end the Japanese had constructed an elaborate system for managing woodland and its yield. Regulation: An Overall View Early modern forest regulation throughout Japan encompassed similar spheres: the woodland, the transportation route linking forest to town, and the town itself, that is, the spheres of production, distribution, and consumption. Policies and organs directly regulating woodland use—specifying who could do what, where, when, how, how much, and at what price and how all that was to be enforced and what punishments would follow infractions—were the 83 84 The Emergence of Regenerative Forestry core of the negative regimen. Regulations pertaining to transport and consumption of forest products were also of enough significance to merit brief comment. Woodland Management In essence, early modern forest management consisted of administrative rules and arrangements for enforcing them. The rules and arrangements mostly developed as ad hoc responses to immediate problems, being produced and later maintained and modified by interaction among the bakufu, the han governments, and the thousands of villages dotting the realm. Because of their tangled provenance , woodland regulations and procedures were tremendously diverse in particulars. Nevertheless, two factors gave them a high degree of functional consistency.As indicated in chapter 3, the basic problems that produced the negative regimen were essentially the same nationwide, and the range of possible solutions varied little from place to place. In addition, the practices that emerged were patterned on administrative forms and techniques of the creating agents—governments and villages—and these were quite similar throughout the land. Because woodland management was precipitated by forest overuse, it had two basic objectives: protection and production. "Protection forests" sheltered homesteads, villages, fields, roads, streams, or shores from damage by flood, wind, or other natural forces. "Production forests" yielded timber, fuel, or other desired products. In general, interest in protection forests emerged first, becoming widespread by the mid-seventeenth century. The rulers, whose regimes depended on rural production and whose positions forced them to deal with downstream consequences of upstream abuse, gave particular attention to protection forestry. Concern for production developed somewhat later, becoming pervasive by century 's end. On many sites, needless to say, policy sought to attain both objectives. The predominant agent of government forest policy was the Tokugawa bakufu, the elaborate shogunal regime headquartered in the city of Edo. It administered directly about a fourth of the realm, mostly in central Japan.1 Subordinate to the bakufu were the gov- The Negative Regimen 85 ernments of the 25O-odd regional barons, or daimyo, each headquartered in its own castle town and in charge of a semiautonomous domain (han). In the aggregate these han governments controlled the remaining three-fourthsof the country. Hereditary vassals, the samurai, who exercised administrative, police, and military authority on behalf of their lords, staffed the bureaucracies of both the bakufu and han. Heads of more distinguished vassal families held higher offices; minor families, lower posts. Most samurai, high and low, lived in their lords' castle towns, along with a large populace of merchants, artisans, manual laborers , and various other people. The bulk of the population, some 85 percent of the eighteenth century's approximately thirty million , lived in the countryside in villages usually governed by councils of elders chosen from well-to-do and influential community members.2 These elders administered local affairs, settled disputes, and collected taxes on behalf of their lord in accord with regulations issued by that lord, whether shogun or daimyo. District administrators, usually samurai serving as regional representatives of their lord, communicated the regulations to villages and, in theory at least, assured that they were obeyed. Forest organization reflected these larger arrangements. Shogun and daimyo administered most woodland within their respective jurisdictions, placing it under the authority of...