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By Root 2076 0

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