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By Root 2157 0

and were off limits to peasants. The amount of timber that you could use in building your house varied with your social status: 30 ken (one ken is a beam 6 feet long) for a headman presiding over several villages, 18 ken for such a headman’s heir, 12 ken for a headman of a single village, 8 ken for a local chief, 6 ken for a taxable peasant, and a mere 4 ken for an ordinary peasant or fisherman. The shogun also issued rules about permissible wood use for objects smaller than houses. For instance, in 1663 an edict forbade any woodworker in Edo to fabricate a small box out of cypress or sugi wood, or household utensils out of sugi wood, but permitted large boxes to be made of either cypress or sugi. In 1668 the shogun went on to ban use of cypress, sugi, or any other good tree for public signboards, and 38 years later large pines were removed from the list of trees approved for making New Year decorations.

All of these negative measures aimed at solving Japan’s forestry crisis by ensuring that wood be used only for purposes authorized by the shogun or daimyo. However, a big role in Japan’s crisis had been played by wood use by the shogun and daimyo themselves. Hence a full solution to the crisis required positive measures to produce more trees, as well as to protect land from erosion. Those measures began already in the 1600s with Japan’s development of a detailed body of scientific knowledge about silviculture. Foresters employed both by the government and by private merchants observed, experimented, and published their findings in an outpouring of silvicultural journals and manuals, exemplified by the first of Japan’s great silvicultural treatises, the Nōgyō zensho of 1697 by Miyazaki Antei. There, you will find instructions for how best to gather, extract, dry, store, and prepare seeds; how to prepare a seedbed by cleaning, fertilizing, pulverizing, and stirring it; how to soak seeds before sowing them; how to protect sown seeds by spreading straw over them; how to weed the seedbed; how to transplant and space seedlings; how to replace failed seedlings over the next four years; how to thin out the resulting saplings; and how to trim branches from the growing trunk in order that it yield a log of the desired shape. As an alternative to thus growing trees from seed, some tree species were instead grown by planting cuttings or shoots, and others by the technique known as coppicing (leaving live stumps or roots in the ground to sprout).

Gradually, Japan independently of Germany developed the idea of plantation forestry: that trees should be viewed as a slow-growing crop. Both governments and private entrepreneurs began planting forests on land that they either bought or leased, especially in areas where it would be economically favorable, such as near cities where wood was in demand. On the one hand, plantation forestry is expensive, risky, and demanding of capital. There are big costs up front to pay workers to plant the trees, then more labor costs for several decades to tend the plantation, and no recovery of all that investment until the trees are big enough to harvest. At any time during those decades, one may lose one’s tree crop to disease or a fire, and the price that the lumber will eventually fetch is subject to market fluctuations unpredictable decades in advance when the seeds are planted. On the other hand, plantation forestry offers several compensating advantages compared to cutting naturally sown forests. You can plant just preferred valuable tree species, instead of having to accept whatever sprouts in the forest. You can maximize the quality of your trees and the price received for them, for instance by trimming them as they grow to obtain eventually straight and well-shaped logs. You can pick a convenient site with low transport costs near a city and near a river suitable for floating logs out, instead of having to haul logs down a remote mountainside. You can space out your trees at equal intervals, thereby reducing the costs of eventual cutting. Some Japanese plantation foresters specialized in wood for