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Many top-down measures were aimed at curing the imbalance between cutting trees and producing trees, initially mainly by negative measures (reducing the cutting), then increasingly by positive measures as well (producing more trees). One of the first signs of awareness at the top was a proclamation by the shogun in 1666, just nine years after the Meireki fire, warning of the dangers of erosion, stream siltation, and flooding caused by deforestation, and urging people to plant seedlings. Beginning in that same decade, Japan launched a nationwide effort at all levels of society to regulate use of its forest, and by 1700 an elaborate system of woodland management was in place. In the words of historian Conrad Totman, the system focused on “specifying who could do what, where, when, how, how much, and at what price.” That is, the first phase of the Tokugawa-era response to Japan’s forest problem emphasized negative measures that didn’t restore lumber production to previous levels, but that at least bought time, prevented the situation from getting worse until positive measures could take effect, and set ground rules for the competition within Japanese society over increasingly scarce forest products.

The negative responses aimed at three stages in the wood supply chain: woodland management, wood transport, and wood consumption in towns. At the first stage, the shogun, who directly controlled about a quarter of Japan’s forests, designated a senior magistrate in the finance ministry to be responsible for his forests, and almost all of the 250 daimyo followed suit by each appointing his own forest magistrate for his land. Those magistrates closed off logged lands to permit forest regeneration, issued licenses specifying the peasants’ rights to cut timber or graze animals on government forest land, and banned the practice of burning forests to clear land for shifting cultivation. In those forests controlled not by the shogun or daimyo but by villages, the village headman managed the forest as common property for the use of all villagers, developed rules about the harvesting of forest products, forbade “foreign” peasants of other villages to use his own village’s forest, and hired armed guards to enforce all these rules.

Both the shogun and the daimyo paid for very detailed inventories of their forests. Just as one example of the managers’ obsessiveness, an inventory of a forest near Karuizawa 80 miles northwest of Edo in 1773 recorded that the forest measured 2.986 square miles in area and contained 4,114 trees, of which 573 were crooked or knotty and 3,541 were good. Of those 4,114 trees, 78 were big conifers (66 of them good) with trunks 24-36 feet long and 6-7 feet in circumference, 293 were medium-sized conifers (253 of them good) 4-5 feet in circumference, 255 good small conifers 6-18 feet long and 1-3 feet in circumference to be harvested in the year 1778, and 1,474 small conifers (1,344 of them good) to harvest in later years. There were also 120 medium-sized ridgeline conifers (104 of them good) 15-18 feet long and 3-4 feet in circumference, 15 small ridgeline conifers 12-24 feet long and 8 inches to 1 foot in circumference to be harvested in 1778, and 320 small ridgeline conifers (241 of them good) to harvest in later years, not to mention 448 oaks (412 of them good) 12-24 feet long and 3-5-½ feet in circumference, and 1,126 other trees whose properties were similarly enumerated. Such counting represents an extreme of top-down management that left nothing to the judgment of individual peasants.

The second stage of negative responses involved the shogun and daimyo establishing guard posts on highways and rivers to inspect wood shipments and make sure that all those rules about woodland management were actually being obeyed. The last stage consisted of a host of government rules specifying, once a tree had been felled and had passed inspection at a guard post, who could use it for what purpose. Valuable cedars and oaks were reserved for government uses