Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (56 page)

spread that friars were trying to Christianize Japan as a prelude to a Euro
pean takeover.

In 1597 Toyotomi Hideyoshi crucified Japan's first group of 26 Christian
martyrs. When Christian daimyo then tried to bribe or assassinate govern
ment 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 fol
lowed 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 mis
sionaries 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.

Japan thereupon entered a period, lasting over two centuries, in which it
cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, for reasons reflecting even more its agendas related to China and Korea than to Europe. The sole for
eign traders admitted were a few Dutch merchants (considered less danger
ous than Portuguese because they were anti-Catholic), kept isolated like dangerous germs on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and a similar Chinese
enclave. The only other foreign trade permitted was with Koreans on Tsushima Island lying between Korea and Japan, with the Ryukyu Islands (in
cluding Okinawa) to the south, and with the aboriginal Ainu population on
Hokkaido Island to the north (then not yet part of Japan, as it is today).
Apart from those contacts, Japan did not even maintain overseas diplomatic
relations, not even with China. Nor did Japan attempt foreign conquests af
ter Hideyoshi's two unsuccessful invasions of Korea in the 1590s.

During those centuries of relative isolation, Japan was able to meet most
of its needs domestically, and in particular was virtually self-sufficient in
food, timber, and most metals. Imports were largely restricted to sugar and
spices, ginseng and medicines and mercury, 160 tons per year of luxury
woods, Chinese silk, deer skin and other hides to make leather (because Japan maintained few cattle), and lead and saltpeter to make gunpowder. Even the amounts of some of those imports decreased with time as do
mestic silk and sugar production rose, and as guns became restricted and
then virtually abolished. This remarkable state of self-sufficiency and self-
imposed isolation lasted until an American fleet under Commodore Perry
arrived in 1853 to demand that Japan open its ports to supply fuel and pro
visions to American whaling and merchant ships. When it then became

clear that the Tokugawa shogunate could no longer protect Japan from barbarians armed with guns, the shogunate collapsed in 1868, and Japan began
its remarkably rapid transformation from an isolated semi-feudal society to
a modern state.

Deforestation was a major factor in the environmental and population
crisis brought on by the peace and prosperity of the 1600s, as Japan's timber
consumption (almost entirely consisting of domestic timber) soared. Until the late 19th century, most Japanese buildings were made of wood, rather than of stone, brick, cement, mud, or tiles as in many other countries. That
tradition of timber construction stemmed partly from a Japanese esthetic
preference for wood, and partly from the ready availability of trees through
out Japan's early history. With the onset of peace, prosperity, and a popula
tion boom, timber use for construction took off to supply the needs of the
growing rural and urban population. Beginning around 1570, Hideyoshi,
his successor the shogun Ieyasu, and many of the daimyo led the way, indulging their egos and seeking to impress each other by constructing huge
castles and temples. Just the three biggest castles built by Ieyasu required clear-cutting about 10 square miles of forests. About 200 castle towns and cities arose under Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, and the next shogun. After Ieyasu's
death, urban construction outstripped elite monument construction in
its demand for timber, especially because cities of thatch-roofed wooden buildings set closely together and with winter heating by fireplaces were
prone to burn, so cities needed to be rebuilt repeatedly. The biggest of those
urban fires was the Meireki fire that burned half of the capital at Edo and
killed 100,000 people in 1657. Much of that timber was transported to cities
by coastal ships, in turn built of wood and hence consuming more wood. Still more wooden ships were required to transport Hideyoshi's armies
across the Korea Strait in his unsuccessful attempts to conquer Korea.

Timber for construction was not the only need driving deforestation.
Wood was also the fuel used for heating houses, for cooking, and for indus
trial uses such as making salt, tiles, and ceramics. Wood was burned to char
coal to sustain the hotter fires required for smelting iron. Japan's expanding
population needed more food, and hence more forested land cleared for
agriculture. Peasants fertilized their fields with "green fertilizer" (i.e., leaves,
bark, and twigs), and fed their oxen and horses with fodder (brush and
grass), obtained from the forests. Each acre of cropland required 5 to 10
acres of forest to provide the necessary green fertilizer. Until the civil wars
ended in 1615, the warring armies under daimyo and the shogun took fod
der for their horses, and bamboo for their weapons and defensive palisades,

from the forests. Daimyo in forested areas fulfilled their annual obligation
to the shogun in the form of timber.

The years from about 1570 to 1650 marked the peak of the construction
boom and of deforestation, which slowed down as timber became scarce. At
first, wood was cut either under the direct order of the shogun or daimyo,
or else by peasants themselves for their local needs, but by 1660 logging by
private entrepreneurs overtook government-ordered logging. For instance, when yet another fire broke out in Edo, one of the most famous of those private lumbermen, a merchant named Kinokuniya Bunzaemon, shrewdly recognized that the result would be more demand for timber. Even before
the fire had been put out, he sailed off on a ship to buy up huge quantities of
timber in the Kiso district, for resale at a big profit in Edo.

The first part of Japan to become deforested, already by
a.d.
800, was the
Kinai Basin on the largest Japanese island of Honshu, site of early Japan's
main cities such as Osaka and Kyoto. By the year 1000, deforestation was
spreading to the nearby smaller island of Shikoku. By 1550 about one-
quarter of Japan's area (still mainly just central Honshu and eastern
Shikoku) had been logged, but other parts of Japan still held much lowland
forest and old-growth forest.

In 1582 Hideyoshi became the first ruler to demand timber from all over
Japan, because timber needs for his lavish monumental construction ex
ceeded the timber available on his own domains. He took control of some
of Japan's most valuable forests and requisitioned a specified amount of
timber each year from each daimyo. In addition to forests, which the
shogun and daimyo claimed for themselves, they also claimed all valuable
species of timber trees on village or private land. To transport all that tim
ber from increasingly distant logging areas to the cities or castles where the
timber was needed, the government cleared obstacles from rivers so that
logs could be floated or rafted down them to the coast, whence they were then transported by ships to port cities. Logging spread over Japan's three main islands, from the southern end of the southernmost island of Kyushu
through Shikoku to the northern end of Honshu. In 1678 loggers had to turn to the southern end of Hokkaido, the island north of Honshu and at
that time not yet part of the Japanese state. By 1710, most accessible forest had been cut on the three main islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu) and
on southern Hokkaido, leaving old-growth forests just on steep slopes, in
inaccessible areas, and at sites too difficult or costly to log with Tokugawa-
era technology.

Deforestation hurt Tokugawa Japan in other ways besides the obvious

one of wood shortages for timber, fuel, and fodder and the forced end to
monumental construction. Disputes over timber and fuel became increas
ingly frequent between and within villages, and between villages and the
daimyo or shogun, all of whom competed for Japan's forests. There were
also disputes between those who wanted to use rivers for floating or rafting
logs, and those who instead wanted to use them for fishing or for irrigating
cropland. Just as we saw for Montana in Chapter 1, wildfires increased, be
cause the second-growth woods springing up on logged land were more flammable than were old-growth forests. Once the forest cover protecting
steep slopes had been removed, the rate of soil erosion increased as a con
sequence of Japan's heavy rainfall, snowmelt, and frequent earthquakes. Flooding in the lowlands due to increased water runoff from the denuded
slopes, higher water levels in lowland irrigation systems due to soil erosion
and river siltation, increased storm damage, and shortages of forest-derived
fertilizer and fodder acted together to decrease crop yields at a time of in
creasing population, and thus to contribute to major famines that beset Tokugawa Japan from the late 1600s onwards.

The 1657 Meireki fire, and the resulting demand for timber to rebuild
Japan's capital, served as a wake-up call exposing the country's growing scarcity of timber and other resources at a time when its population, especially its urban population, had been growing rapidly. That might have led
to an Easter Island-like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two
centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more
nearly sustainable resource consumption rates. The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.

Part of the shift involved increased reliance on seafood and on trade
with the Ainu for food, in order to relieve the pressure on farming. Ex
panded fishing efforts incorporated new fishing techniques, such as very
large nets and deepwater fishing. The territories claimed by individual
daimyo and villages now included the sea adjacent to their land, in recogni
tion of the sense that fish and shellfish stocks were limited and might become exhausted if anyone else could freely fish in one's territory. Pressure
on forests as a source of green fertilizer for cropland was reduced by making
much more use of fish meal fertilizers. Hunting of sea mammals (whales,
seals, and sea otters) increased, and syndicates were formed to finance the

necessary boats, equipment, and large workforces. The greatly expanded
trade with the Ainu on Hokkaido Island brought smoked salmon, dried sea
cucumber, abalone, kelp, deer skins, and sea otter pelts to Japan, in ex
change for rice, sake (rice wine), tobacco, and cotton delivered to the Ainu. Among the results were the depletion of salmon and deer on Hokkaido, the
weaning of the Ainu away from self-sufficiency as hunters to dependence on
Japanese imports, and eventually the destruction of the Ainu through economic disruption, disease epidemics, and military conquests. Thus, part of
the Tokugawa solution for the problem of resource depletion in Japan itself
was to conserve Japanese resources by causing resource depletion elsewhere,
just as part of the solution of Japan and other First World countries to
problems of resource depletion today is to cause resource depletion else
where. (Remember that Hokkaido was not incorporated politically into Japan until the 19th century.)

Another part of the shift consisted of the near-achievement of Zero
Population Growth. Between 1721 and 1828, Japan's population barely in
creased at all, from 26,100,000 to only 27,200,000. Compared to earlier cen
turies, Japanese in the 18th and 19th century married later, nursed their
babies for longer, and spaced their children at longer intervals through the
resulting lactational amenorrhea as well as through contraception, abor
tion, and infanticide. Those decreased birth rates represented responses of
individual couples to perceived shortages of food and other resources, as
shown by rises and falls in Tokugawa Japanese birth rates in phase with falls
and rises in rice prices.

Still other aspects of the shift served to reduce wood consumption. Be
ginning in the late 17th century, Japan's use of coal instead of wood as a fuel
rose. Lighter construction replaced heavy-timbered houses, fuel-efficient cooking stoves replaced open-hearth fireplaces, small portable charcoal
heaters replaced the practice of heating the whole house, and reliance on
the sun to heat houses during the winter increased.

Many top-down measures were aimed at curing the imbalance between cutting trees and producing trees, initially mainly by negative measures
(reducing the cutting), then increasingly by positive measures as well (pro
ducing more trees). One of the first signs of awareness at the top was a
proclamation by the shogun in 1666, just nine years after the Meireki fire, warning of the dangers of erosion, stream siltation, and flooding caused by
deforestation, and urging people to plant seedlings. Beginning in that same
decade, Japan launched a nationwide effort at all levels of society to regulate