Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (57 page)

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 increas
ingly 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 speci
fying 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 prod
ucts, forbade "foreign" peasants of other villages to use his own village's for
est, 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 inven
tory 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

3-51/2 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 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 silvi-cultural journals and manuals, exemplified by the first of Japan's great silvicultural treatises, the
Nogyo 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 in
stead 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 plan
tation 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 economi
cally 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 la
bor 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 dur
ing 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 in
stance 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 Japa
nese plantation foresters specialized in wood for particular uses and were
thereby able to command top prices for an established "brand name." For
instance, Yoshino plantations became known for producing the best staves
for cedar barrels to hold sake (rice wine).

The rise of silviculture in Japan was facilitated by the fairly uniform
institutions and methods over the whole country. Unlike the situation in
Europe, divided at that time among hundreds of principalities or states,
Tokugawa Japan was a single country governed uniformly. While south
western Japan is subtropical and northern Japan is temperate, the whole
country is alike in being wet, steep, erodable, of volcanic origins, and divided between steep forested mountains and flat cropland, thus providing
some ecological uniformity in conditions for silviculture. In place of Japan's
tradition of multiple use of forests, under which the elite claimed the tim
ber and the peasants gathered fertilizer, fodder, and fuel, plantation forest

became specified as being for the primary purpose of timber production,
other uses being allowed only insofar as they did not harm timber produc
tion. Forest patrols guarded against illegal logging activity. Plantation
forestry thereby became widespread in Japan between 1750 and 1800, and
by 1800 Japan's long decline in timber production had been reversed.

An outside observer who visited Japan in 1650 might have predicted that
Japanese society was on the verge of a societal collapse triggered by cata
strophic deforestation, as more and more people competed for fewer re
sources. Why did Tokugawa Japan succeed in developing top-down solutions
and thereby averting deforestation, while the ancient Easter Islanders, Maya,
and Anasazi, and modern Rwanda (Chapter 10) and Haiti (Chapter 11)
failed? This question is one example of the broader problem, to be explored
in Chapter 14, why and at what stages people succeed or fail at group
decision-making.

The usual answers advanced for Middle and Late Tokugawa Japan's
success
—a supposed love for Nature, Buddhist respect for life, or a Con
fucian outlook—can be quickly dismissed. In addition to those simple
phrases not being accurate descriptions of the complex reality of Japanese attitudes, they did not prevent Early Tokugawa Japan from depleting Ja
pan's resources, nor are they preventing modern Japan from depleting the resources of the ocean and of other countries today. Instead, part of
the answer involves Japan's environmental advantages: some of the same
environmental factors already discussed in Chapter 2 to explain why Easter
and several other Polynesian and Melanesian islands ended up deforested, while Tikopia, Tonga, and others did not. People of the latter islands have the good fortune to be living in ecologically robust landscapes where trees
regrow rapidly on logged soils. Like robust Polynesian and Melanesian islands, Japan has rapid tree regrowth because of high rainfall, high fallout of
volcanic ash and Asian dust restoring soil fertility, and young soils. Another part of the answer has to do with Japan's social advantages: some features of
Japanese society that already existed before the deforestation crisis and did not have to arise as a response to it. Those features included Japan's lack of
goats and sheep, whose grazing and browsing activities elsewhere have dev
astated forests of many lands; the decline in number of horses in Early
Tokugawa Japan, due to the end of warfare eliminating the need for cavalry;
and the abundance of seafood, relieving pressure on forests as sources of protein and fertilizer. Japanese society did make use of oxen and horses as

draft animals, but their numbers were allowed to decrease in response to
deforestation and loss of forest fodder, to be replaced by people using spades, hoes, and other devices.

The remaining explanations constitute a suite of factors that caused
both the elite and the masses in Japan to recognize their long-term stake in preserving their own forests, to a degree greater than for most other people. As for the elite, the Tokugawa shoguns, having imposed peace and eliminated rival armies at home, correctly anticipated that they were at little risk of a revolt at home or an invasion from overseas. They expected their own
Tokugawa family to remain in control of Japan, which in fact it did for 250 years. Hence peace, political stability, and well-justified confidence in their
own future encouraged Tokugawa shoguns to invest in and to plan for the long-term future of their domain: in contrast to Maya kings and to Haitian and Rwandan presidents, who could not or cannot expect to be succeeded
by their sons or even to fill out their own term in office. Japanese society as
a whole was (and still is) relatively homogeneous ethnically and religiously,
without the differences destabilizing Rwandan society and possibly also
Maya and Anasazi societies. Tokugawa Japan's isolated location, negligible
foreign trade, and renunciation of foreign expansion made it obvious that it
had to depend on its own resources and wouldn't solve its needs by pillaging another country's resources. By the same token, the shogun's enforce
ment of peace within Japan meant that people knew that they couldn't meet
their timber needs by seizing a Japanese neighbor's timber. Living in a stable
society without input of foreign ideas, Japan's elite and peasants alike ex
pected the future to be like the present, and future problems to have to be
solved with present resources.

The usual assumption of Tokugawa well-to-do peasants, and the hope of
poorer villagers, were that their land would pass eventually to their own
heirs. For that and other reasons, the real control of Japan's forests fell in
creasingly into the hands of people with a vested long-term interest in their
forest: either because they thus expected or hoped their children would inherit the rights to its use, or because of various long-term lease or contract
arrangements. For instance, much village common land became divided
into separate leases for individual households, thereby minimizing the
tragedies of the common to be discussed in Chapter 14. Other village forests
were managed under timber sale agreements drawn up long in advance of
logging. The government negotiated long-term contracts on government
forest land, dividing eventual timber proceeds with a village or merchant in return for the latter managing the forests. All these political and social