Land of the pampered plantation - forestry in Japan - World Forests

TP0056

Halfway up a hillside in the Shirakami Mountains, a logger wearing a canary-yellow hardhat and kneehigh split-toed boots withdraws a machete from a cherry-bark sheath slung on his belt. After hacking the stiff grasses around a two-foot-diameter cedar, he ceremonially strips the bark on the backside of the trunk, sings out a melodious warning, and cranks a chainsaw. He makes a cut deep enough to steady the saw, then backs off. Standing two feet away from the trunk, holding remote-control electronic cables in each hand, he guides the saw through its cut without danger of contracting "shaking disease." When the tree starts to move, the timber faller shuts down the saw, pulls it free, and blows a sharp blast on a whistle. Five minutes after the process began, the cedar drops perfectly along the line of the undercut.

This is Japan, where forests are grown as crops and timber management is a ritual. After centuries of wood cutting on a land base roughly the size of California, the Japanese continue to enjoy forest reserves on 68 percent of their land. The stands are tended with doting, hands-on care that produces what the Japanese consider the world's highest-quality lumber.

"We think Japanese cedar and cypress are the most beautiful woods in the world," says Osamu Waseda, a retired Japan Forestry Agency official now managing a private forest in Wakayama Prefecture. "Beauty is the most important aspect of wood in Japan, and that won't change."

The reality today, however, includes many forests standing in idle neglect while their dismayed owners watch the nation's dependence on imported lumber explode to a staggering 70 percent of the total supply. Some have been forced out of business or into head-on competition with imported wood. From Kyushu in the south to Hokkaido in the north, they complain about the high cost of production, the shortage of labor, and the abundance of cheap foreign lumber. The number of small sawmills dropped from 24,230 in 1960 to 18,260 in 1985; during the same period the number of forestry workers declined by nearly 50 percent.

Yet high in the mountains of this island country, standing in almost regal contempt of these economic realities, are forests managed for quality, not quantity. The clear fine-grained boards sawn from native cypress and cedar are part of a national tradition that is not threatened by foreign timber. Although some manufacturers worry about a dwindling supply, Japanese consumers appear willing to wait for products grown in stands their foresters have learned to sustain through time.

The fact that Japan can boast of forests at all is the result of a national awareness, cultivated through a series of near disasters, that trees are a key to both environmental and economic stability. Japanese schoolchildren learn the adage, "Mountains are earth's treasures, but without trees, they are without value. To weaken the forest is to weaken the land."

This ethic was not intrinsic to the people who first inhabited the islands. Overcutting began in the sixth century. The emperors who commanded the construction of elaborate temples bequeathed to the world both its oldest and its largest wooden buildings. They also left a legacy of environmental disaster, denuding the hillsides around the ancient capital of Nara and stripping the land of its rich soil.

Centuries later, government officials slowed relentless timber harvesting with a series of regulations. Among them was a ban on crosscut saws that forced poachers to chop down their booty with noisy axes, making detection a simple matter of keen ears. At the same time, villagers began actively replanting their naked hillsides with sugi (Cryptomeria japonica, Japanese cedar) and hi-no-ki (Chamaecyparis obtusa, Japanese cypress). The plantation forests established by the 19th century marked the beginnings of regenerative forestry in Japan.

World War II forced a change of priorities. Entire tracts of timber were clearcut, and in a feverish drive to rebuild after the war, the government imposed few limits on how much or what kind of wood could be harvested. When the Japanese recovered enough to notice the swath they had carved out of their timber resources, they returned with fervor to the reforestation practices developed a century before. Trees growing in plantations today, mostly sugi and hi-no-ki, comprise almost half the entire growing stock. Most are less than 30 years old; only around 650,000 acres are growing trees older than 60 years. But these plantations cover 12 million acres and have tripled in volume since 1960.

Signs of labor-intensive methods range from forest floors swept clean of competing vegetation to meticulous spacing of a single species in an even-aged stand. Along the Kamo River near Kyoto, woodsmen adorn the trunks of 20-year-old Kitayama sugi with red and blue plastic wrappers, an adaptation of a technique used by their ancestors. The saplings are among the millions of board-feet nationwide destined to become polished poles occupying the place of honor in traditional Japanese homes. The loose weave of the colored wraps will imprint a pattern on the wood that enhances its natural beauty to the Japanese eye.