Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [185]
Japan thereupon entered a period, lasting over two centuries, in which it cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, for reasons reflecting even more its agendas related to China and Korea than to Europe. The sole foreign traders admitted were a few Dutch merchants (considered less dangerous than Portuguese because they were anti-Catholic), kept isolated like dangerous germs on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and a similar Chinese enclave. The only other foreign trade permitted was with Koreans on Tsushima Island lying between Korea and Japan, with the Ryukyu Islands (including Okinawa) to the south, and with the aboriginal Ainu population on Hokkaido Island to the north (then not yet part of Japan, as it is today). Apart from those contacts, Japan did not even maintain overseas diplomatic relations, not even with China. Nor did Japan attempt foreign conquests after Hideyoshi’s two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in the 1590s.
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.