The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan

Introduction: An Overview of Preindustrial Japanese Forest History

Introduction: An Overview of Preindustrial Japanese Forest History Every foreign traveler in Japan is delighted by the verdant forestshrouded mountains that thrust skyward from one end of the island chain to the other.1 The Japanese themselves are conscious of the lush green of their homeland, which they sometimes refer to as midori no retto, "the green archipelago." At first glance Japan seems to be a world of primeval forests, a gorgeous natural creation reflecting that frequently mentioned Japanese love of nature. In fact, the abundant verdure is not a monument to nature's benevolence and Japanese aesthetic sensibilities but the hard-earned result of generations of human toil that have converted the archipelago into one great forest preserve. To put the issue directly, Japan today should be an impoverished , slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands. Instead, it is a highly industrialized society living in a luxuriantly green realm. Despite intense pressure on a vulnerable topography, the people ofJapan have done less to ravage their land and bring ruin upon it than have many other societies past and present that have been favored by a less dense population and more benign terrain. We can look at the heaths and bogs of northwest Europe; the barren littoral of the Mediterranean; the ravaged mountains of south-central Korea and China; the dying Sahel region of Africa; or the disasters now unfolding in Latin America and i Southeast Asia as forests there are ripped out with no effective thought for the morrow. Japan should be a ruined land because of the particular interaction there of geography and history. Geologically, the Japanese archipelago is an unstable complex of acutely inclined upthrust arcs and nodes.2 These convoluted, quake-prone mountains tower above narrow valleys whose swift-running streams debouch onto small deposition plains that mostly front the ocean. The steep mountainsides are covered by a thin, coarse, immature soil that is continually being leached of the few nutrients it has. Periodically, patches slide, exposing raw bedrock. This sliding frequently results from heavy deluges that occur during the early summer monsoons and autumn typhoons. Upland and riverine surfaces facing the Sea ofJapan are also threatened by heavy spring-snow runoff. When left untouched by humans, the island chain's dense and varied natural vegetation can usually hold its soil in place, with only sporadic avalanches and surface damage occurring after volcanic activity, earthquakes, or forest fires. However, humans have not left those mountains untouched. For centuries the island chain has supported on its limited arable land an extremely dense population that has consumed great quantities of forest products obtained directly from the mountains.3 Such heavy consumption could easily have led to the denuding of mountainsides, permitting regolith to thunder down into valleys, whence it would surge out across once-fertile plains, repeatedly covering them with debris and exposing them to chronic and unpredictable drought, flood, and erosion. It is this sequence of events, resulting from a dense population pressing for centuries against an easily destabilized forest terrain, that long ago should have turned Japan into a zone of ecological desolation and human misery. But that did not happen, and we can wonder why. In broadest terms the history ofJapan's human-forest relationship has consisted of two phases.4 First was a thirty-thousand-year preagricultural phase, during which Homo sapiens sapiens used puny wood, bone, and stone tools to exploit a wooded landscape whose essential character he could not alter. Second has been a far shorter phase encompassing the past twenty-five hundred years, during which a swelling human population, equipped with an increasingly 2 Introduction complex and demanding technology, has altered fundamentally the character of more and more woodland—not only bottomland but also accessible upland areas. This second phase emerged silently, with deforestation first occurring gradually as a corollary of agricultural land clearing. During the seventh century the introduction from the Asian continent of a large-scale architecture led to a tremendous building boom that was sustained by a surge in logging. This surge, the "ancient predation," severely tested the carrying capacity of forests in the Kinai basin, the watershed on the main island of Honshu where Japan's rulers were headquartered.5 With construction booming , forest output began to fall short of demand, and ecological despoliation became apparent near the two successive capital cities of Nara...