Japan’s long history of scientific forest management is not well known to Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800. When I first visited Germany in 1959, I was astonished to discover the extent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban.
But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surprising, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It has the highest population density of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains, while most people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable sources of timber. Because of that forest mantle, the Japanese often refer to their island nation as “the green archipelago.” While the mantle superficially resembles a primeval forest, in fact most of Japan’s accessible original forests were cut by 300 years ago and became replaced with regrowth forest and plantations as tightly micromanaged as those of Germany and Tikopia.
Japanese forest policies arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis paradoxically brought on by peace and prosperity. For almost 150 years beginning in 1467, Japan was convulsed by civil wars as the ruling coalition of powerful houses that had emerged from the earlier disintegration of the emperor’s power in turn collapsed, and as control passed instead to dozens of autonomous warrior barons (called daimyo), who fought each other. The wars were finally ended by the military victories of a warrior named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1615 Ieyasu’s storming of the Toyotomi family stronghold at Osaka, and the deaths by suicide of the remaining Toyotomis, marked the wars’ end.
Already in 1603, the emperor had invested Ieyasu with the hereditary title of shogun, the chief of the warrior estate. From then on, the shogun based at his capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo) exercised the real power, while the emperor at the old capital of Kyoto remained a figurehead. A quarter of Japan’s area was directly administered by the shogun, the remaining three-quarters being administered by the 250 daimyo whom the shogun ruled with a firm hand. Military force became the shogun’s monopoly. Daimyo could no longer fight each other, and they even needed the shogun’s permission to marry, to modify their castles, or to pass on their property in inheritance to a son. The years from 1603 to 1867 in Japan are called the Tokugawa era, during which a series of Tokugawa shoguns kept Japan free of war and foreign influence.
Peace and prosperity allowed Japan’s population and economy to explode. Within a century of the wars’ end, population doubled because of a fortunate combination of factors: peaceful conditions, relative freedom from the disease epidemics afflicting Europe at the time (due to Japan’s ban on foreign travel or visitors: see below), and increased agricultural productivity as the result of the arrival of two productive new crops (potatoes and sweet potatoes), marsh reclamation, improved flood control, and increased production of irrigated rice. While the population as a whole thus grew, cities grew even faster, to the point where Edo became the world’s most populous city by 1720. Throughout Japan, peace and a strong centralized government brought a uniform currency and uniform system of weights and measures, the end of toll and customs barriers, road construction, and improved coastal shipping, all of which contributed to a trade boom within Japan.
But Japan’s trade with the rest of the world was cut to almost nothing. Portuguese navigators bent on trade and conquest, having rounded Africa to reach India in 1498, advanced to the Moluccas in 1512, China in 1514, and Japan in 1543. Those first European visitors to Japan were just a pair of shipwrecked sailors, but they caused unsettling changes by introducing guns, and even bigger changes when they were followed by Catholic missionaries six years later. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including some daimyo, became converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, rival Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries began competing with each other, and stories spread that friars were trying to Christianize Japan as a prelude to a European takeover.
In 1597 Toyotomi Hideyoshi crucified Japan’s first group of 26 Christian martyrs. When Christian daimyo then tried to bribe or assassinate government officials, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.) In 1614 Ieyasu prohibited Christianity and began to torture and execute missionaries and those of their converts who refused to disavow their religion. In 1635 a later shogun went even further by forbidding Japanese to travel overseas and forbidding Japanese ships to leave Japan’s coastal waters. Four years later, he expelled all the remaining Portuguese from Japan.
~~Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed -by- Jared Diamond
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