Rotten Woods; To save its dying forests, Japan is encouraging loggers to cut more.

Newsweek International, January, 2005

Byline: Hideko Takayama

Japan is out of whack. A 61-year-old man in Nagano goes to walk his dog, and a bear comes out of the woods and kills him. In Toyama, astronomers are forced to close an observatory to visitors until the local bears go into hibernation. A farmer near the city of Sendai walks out to his fields and finds his cabbage and radish plants gone--eaten by wild monkeys. Deer nibble away an entire forest on the outskirts of Tokyo. What are the animals trying to say?

Takeshi Maeda thinks he knows. "Our mountains are rotting," says the land-use expert and member of Japan's Upper House. In recent decades, Japan's timber companies and developers have wreaked havoc on Japan's forests, and they've done it without a saw or a bulldozer. The...