Of all the potential threats to Japan’s national security at the turn of the twentieth century, the “red pine army” was perhaps the least overtly menacing. Yet in the view of Honda Seiroku, a professor of forestry writing in the pages of Tōyō gakugei zasshi, Japan’s first popular science magazine, the accelerating “red pine advance” posed a grave threat to the nation: “Having captured Shikoku, Kyushu, and the southern half of the archipelago, the red pines have already subdued the plains of Kantō. Now, they are aggressively advancing to the Ōshū region along the Eastern and Western coastlines of Hondō and the Rikū Kaidō. Moreover, beech forest, the original landlord of the region, was not able to withstand the attack of ruinous deforestation and wildfires, the vanguards of the coming red pine army.”[1]

Seldom has forest succession been put more dramatically. Outlining what was soon to become known as his “red pine ruination theory” (aka- matsu bōkokuron), Honda explained how human activities such as fire setting and fuel collection had stripped the forest floor of its nutrients. This in turn opened the gates for the red pine invaders, a pioneer species that was quick to set roots on open forest floor. Once established, Honda warned, the shade-intolerant pinus densiflora would monopolize access to light, water, and nutrients, leaving little space for the growth of other species and thereby raising the risk of timber blight.[2]

If Honda’s outlook put forward a historical view of ecology, it was also an ecological view of history. In a manner reminiscent of George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature (1864) was among the first texts to bring into focus the environmental consequences of untrammeled deforestation, Honda marshaled a wealth of historical evidence from the great civilizations of the past to underscore the gravity of forest depletion. Greece, Sicily, Babylon: the fall of these once great societies offered chilling reminders of how forest management determined, as he put it, the “rise and fall of nations.”[3] For Honda, deforestation was but the prelude to an onslaught of environmental crises including erosion, drought, and floods. Unchecked deforestation, as such, spelled disaster—indeed potential ruin—for the nation. “The state of a nation’s forests,” he would later write, “is an expression of that country’s destiny.” This was not simply a matter of bureaucratic land management. To Honda, it raised the specter of the “attrition of national strength.”[4]

Coinciding as it did with the wave of Japanese nationalism stimulated by Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, this was a rousing message for readers in 1900. Honda soon found himself lecturing widely on the topic, which, despite resistance from the scientific community, garnered tremendous public interest.[5] More than any other Japanese forester of his day, Honda made a public case for the value and necessity of state-led forest management. His voice was only amplified as he rose through the ranks of academia to become one of Japan’s most celebrated woodsmen as well as “the father of its parks,” a title he earned as an advocate for green spaces in Japan and its colonies.[6]

Infused with technical jargon and European scientific theories, Honda’s outlook would have been scarcely familiar to the generations of woodcutters, officials, and farmers who had managed for centuries the forests of pre-industrial Japan. To be sure, the seventeenth-century rhetoric regarding the careful practice of erosion and flood control (chisan chisui) through tree planting propounded by Kumazawa Banzan and Uesugi Yōzan, among others, provided an ideological template for Meiji forestry officials. As early as the 1830s, moreover, scholars such as Satō Nobuhiro had begun to theorize, in the words of Federico Marcon, “a system of human dominion over nature that consisted of the state control of production and commercialization of agricultural products, an instrumentalist conception of knowledge, a notion of the material environment as a potential treasure holder of resources exploitable for human needs and the recruitment of scholars in economic activities.”[7]

But whereas Tokugawa-era agricultural reformers advocated forest management as a means to increase tillage and forestall natural disasters, Honda and his generation promoted forestry as a linchpin of international commerce and military strength. When a seventeenth-century official in Akita Domain warned that “destitution in the mountains will result in destitution of the realm,” his concern adhered to provincial boundaries.[8] When Honda warned of a looming red pine invasion, he appealed to national security in the face of Western imperialism. Especially novel was the manner in which Honda cast Japan’s forests as pillars of its industrial strength. For Honda, Japan’s breakneck modernization demanded a new set of methods that could not only harness the productive power of the archipelago’s forests but also channel it into the developmental agenda of the Meiji state.

We begin, then, by charting the evolution of Japanese forestry practices across the Meiji era (1868–1912), a period marked by intensive state building and national reinvention. In particular, this chapter tracks the development of the Meiji state’s forestry system in four interlocking registers: the centralization of authority, the sacralization of sylvan space, the professionalization of experts, and the expansion of territorial control. Considered together, these developments elucidate what I call the imperialization of forestry: the process whereby Japan’s forests were freighted with new meaning as building blocks of capitalism, sites of emperor worship, and symbols of national prestige.

If the Meiji era witnessed “a state-led effort to alter how people saw the natural world,” as Ian J. Miller has persuasively argued, Japan’s forests were indispensable to redefining the relationship between nature and the nation.[9] At the same time that Meiji subjects encountered a carefully curated form of ecological modernity on the grounds of Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, they explored arboreta, tended to school forests, and participated in arbor days like never before. By the turn of the twentieth century, these and other activities had become fixtures of what more and more Japanese considered their national forest culture: a reverence of tree and forest supposedly imprinted into the Japanese character. From these invented sylvan traditions emerged a new quasi-official ideology of airin shisō, “forest-love thought.” Built on what Julia Adeney Thomas calls the Meiji-era “conceit” of “Japan’s permanent love of nature,” forest-love thought equipped the state with a new vocabulary of sylvan nationalism used to assert national and imperial dominion over local forests.[10] More than that, against the backdrop of Japan’s ascent as a colonial power, “forest love” became a centerpiece of its civilizing mission abroad. To understand how forestry operated in Korea as a source of ideological as well as political authority, in short, we must first look at its evolution in the mountains of the Meiji era, where Japan’s empire of forestry set it roots.

CENTRALIZATION

Rapid industrialization followed closely on the heels of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the political revolution carried out in the name of the newly enthroned Meiji emperor. Convinced that the surest way to spare Japan from Western colonial subjugation was through rapid industrial growth, the Meiji leadership mobilized the material foundations of the archipelago to build, as one popular slogan of the day put it, “a rich country and strong army.” More specifically, in the words of Itō Hirobumi, a leading statesman and later architect of the Japanese takeover of Korea, the Japanese government set out to “make good Japan’s deficiencies by swiftly seizing upon the strengths of the western industrial arts; to construct within Japan all kinds of mechanical equipment on the western model, including shipbuilding, railways, telegraph, mines and buildings; and thus with one great leap to introduce to Japan the concepts of enlightenment.”[11] The following decades witnessed considerable growth along these lines. Smoke-belching factory chimneys cut imposing figures across new industrial belts; railway lines branched out into new corners of the archipelago; modern “materials of civilization”—iron, steel, ferroconcrete—gave rise to ever-more-imposing cityscapes.

Yet while this new materiality symbolized for many Japanese a rupture with their past, it was to no small degree underpinned by an age-old emblem of Japanese tradition: wood. Indeed, as Gregory Clancey reminds us, if one probes just beneath the surface of the material components of Meiji-era industrial modernity, Japan’s dependency on wood is everywhere on display. Railways grew only as far as supplies of rail ties would allow. Coal mines were deathtraps without the pit props and mining timbers that stabilized shafts. Factories across the industrial spectrum required large quantities of charcoal and cordwood to keep engines turning and furnaces firing. Far from relegating Japan’s wooden society to a bygone era, Japan’s industrial takeoff only compounded its material dependencies on its woodlands.[12]

These swells in demand notwithstanding, the Meiji government was at first far more attentive to arable land than to forest. Owing to the fact that rice production was the foundation of the Tokugawa tax system—an issue of grave concern to the fiscally fragile Meiji state—officials initially prioritized the classification and redistribution of cultivable lowlands. This is not to suggest that Meiji officials were completely uninterested in sylvan matters. Eager to unlock new revenue streams through the creation of “imperial forests,” Ōkubo Toshimichi, Kido Kōin, and other influential statesmen pressed for new titles to the “woodlands and wastelands” (sanrin gen’ya) that comprised roughly 80 percent of the landscape.

Woodland redistribution, however, was hamstrung from the start. In contrast to the relatively swift resolution of issues related to arable land tenure, the ascription of woodland ownership taxed the resources—and patience—of forestry officials for decades. Especially vexing was the need to distinguish between public (kan) and private (min) forests, which required hard-and-fast boundaries when in fact tenure rights were anything but clear-cut.[13] That many forests in the vicinity of villages were subject to iriai arrangements—centuries-old communal land-use customs that often spanned entire hamlets, mountains, and regions—only compounded the complexity. Any effort to unravel the skein of customary usage rights had to untangle multiple threads, creating friction not simply between the state and rural society but also between neighboring hamlets and households.

Early Meiji forestry was beset by another problem as well: toothless enforcement. Lines on a map do not a boundary make. Lacking the resources to police newly enclosed private and state forests, local officials could only watch in frustration as farming households continued to glean fuel and fertilizer from newly enclosed state woodlands. A string of edicts over the 1870s attempted to shore up woodland boundaries and respond to the material needs of farming communities through ad hoc licensing schemes, but irreparable damage to land-use arrangements was already done. In effect, the Meiji state’s “assault on the commons,” to borrow Margaret McKean’s phrase, precipitated a policy collapse of the state’s own design.[14] By pressing for the swift nationalization of the commons, government officials undermined the very elements of Tokugawa forestry that enabled it to function so well—the village autonomy, provincial variation, and compound authority that had historically diminished the need for a strong state forestry apparatus. The plasticity that had long allowed hamlets to tailor land-use patterns to local needs abruptly ran aground the governing impulses and fiscal priorities of the nation-state. With little incentive to comply with edicts from the center and with no small measure of antipathy injected into rural perceptions of the city-dwelling ruling class, farming households suddenly had less cause to think long term.

So it was that, as one Bureau of Forestry report later put it, “the political revolution in the beginning of the Meiji Era produced a disastrous effect upon the preservation of the forests”: “The forests throughout the country were mercilessly cut down so that there appeared in all quarters of Japan hills and mountains deprived of trees. The consequence was that not only was the forest economy jeopardized but the economic order of the people at large was deranged, dealing heavy blows upon the productive industry of the people by giving rise to annual inundations which devastated many parts of the country.”[15] Perhaps the forestry bureaucrat Takahashi Takuya best captured the frustrations of his colleagues when he described the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration as a time marked by the “total erosion of the institutions of forest control and protection.”[16]

For villagers, these shifts represented more than a policy failure; they were a betrayal of the very spirit of Tokugawa forestry: the notion that its benefits be shared equally between the government and the people. Farming households were not going to sit idly by as profit-hungry corporations and bureaucrats cordoned off local woodlands. Many took matters into their own hands. According to one official estimate, no fewer than two million trees were illicitly felled and five million lost to arson between 1878 and 1887.[17] Statistics of this sort were used in turn by Meiji foresters to assign blame for deforestation to upland communities when the reality was that new lumbering technologies and improving modes of transport were accelerating timber harvests across Japan. Whatever the cause, there is no question that the first two decades of the Meiji period witnessed considerable deforestation—a fact perhaps best evidenced by the appearance of “bald mountains” (hageyama) in some of the more densely populated regions of archipelago.[18]

With the deterioration of Japan’s forests came the realization that the Meiji government needed to invest more robustly in the protection and oversight of its woodlands. To that end, Interior Ministry officials established in 1877 a Forestry Office in their Geography Bureau, which later became its own freestanding agency.[19] At the same time, a growing chorus of officials called for what many considered the centerpiece of state forestry: a comprehensive forestry law. Among the staunchest advocates for this legal overhaul were members of the Iwakura Mission, a diplomatic envoy and observation tour that traveled across the United States and Europe from 1871 to 1873. If the official chronicle of the mission authored by Kume Kunitake is any indication, trees and forests left a lasting impression on its participants. From the majestic redwoods of Yosemite to the white poplars lining the streets of Washington, D.C., trees of all types colored the envoy’s perceptions of Western modernity. It was in continental Europe, however, where forestry matters sprang to the fore of Kume’s account. As one might expect from a legal scholar and historian, Kume exhibits less interest in the physical geography of European forests than in the regulatory frameworks behind them: “Before the advance of industry in Europe, in an age when people did not know that iron could be used in place of timber, vast woodlands were cut down and forests decimated in Greece, Spain, France and Britain. It was in light of this that forestry systems were subsequently promoted so that nowadays, while liberal politics are increasingly practiced in Europe, in forestry laws alone the freedoms of former times are actually being curtailed.” However “restrictive” these systems may have been, he concluded, their costs were clearly outweighed by the “long-term benefits brought to the people.”[20] Insofar as this judgment reinforced the need for a strong central state, it neatly aligned with the broader political vision of the Meiji oligarchy.

Yet, for reasons both financial and political, a forest law was slow to materialize. It was not, in fact, until the 1880s that a broad coalition of interests, stirred to action by a series of catastrophic floods, finally rallied behind its promulgation. The result was the Forest Law (Shinrinhō) of 1897, the capstone of the Meiji state’s effort to assert control over Japan’s woodlands. Although the legal framework would see substantial modifications over the coming decade, it established, among other things, a criminal code for forestry and a complex web of land-use regulations. Arguably its most important provisions, however, were those governing Forest Owners Associations (Shinrin kumiai): local institutions of forest management that would, lawmakers hoped, operate as ground-level units of policy coordination and community surveillance.

Laws engendered record keeping. With increasing precision, hard data on timber yields, acreage, and stock accumulation filled the pages of the Bureau of Forestry’s statistical reports. By 1910, there were ten major state forest reserves, each with its own branch office, as well as 211 minor forest divisions. A total area of 7,587,335 chō of state forest fell under the jurisdiction of a growing band of federal foresters: 10 forest managers, 22 commissioners, 35 technical advisers, 1,428 rangers.[21] After three decades of trials and tribulations, in other words, a truly national administrative framework for forest management had taken shape. Still wanting, however, was broad public support for the project of national forest conservation. The narrator of Shimazaki Tōson’s popular historical novel Before the Dawn doubtless spoke for countless villagers when he asked of the enclosure of his native woodlands, “When it had caused so much suffering for such a long time, what reason could there have been for so rigorously controlling the Kiso forests?”[22]

SACRALIZATION

Chastened by the realities of governing remote upland communities from their offices in Tokyo, foresters had by the early 1880s begun to insist on the participation of the broader public in the cultivation of a new conservationist spirit alongside the forest itself. Such was precisely the charge placed before the Japan Forestry Association (Dai Nippon Sanrinkai), a civic institution established in January 1882 for the purpose of stimulating the “mutual support of the government and the people” in all matters related to forestry.[23] Comprised of a wide range of intellectuals and civil servants—from scientists to lawyers to educators—it rose to prominence as the premier institution for public outreach and the popularization of forestry research. What started as a group of 343 had by 1910 grown to more than 4,000 members, many of whom would become vigorous contributors to forestry work in Korea through the association’s affiliate group on the peninsula.[24] Through lecture circuits, demonstrations, and youth group activities, this organization and its local chapters brought the agenda of metropolitan bureaucrats to the doorsteps of farming households.

Their efforts both reflected and promoted Meiji-era shifts in popular perceptions of the Japanese landscape. Given the cultural salience of forest, tree, and wood to Japanese society, it was only a matter of time before each was braided into the emperor-centered political ideologies of the Meiji state. At a time when some Japanese were growing wary of what seemed to be a slavish adherence to all things Western, Japan’s forestry traditions presented a means to reconnect with the roots of pure Japaneseness. From the 1880s onward, that is to say, Meiji ideologues began to allude to a monolithic Japanese “forest culture”—supposedly timeless customs of forest reverence that transcended the regional, class, and social divisions of the nation. Blending theories of social Darwinism with the latest thinking in climate science, they turned to Japan’s environmental setting for insight into their national character.

Few did so more evocatively than Shiga Shigetaka, “the John Ruskin of Japan,” whose 1894 encomium to the Japanese landscape captured the attention of readers across the archipelago. Equal parts travel guide and scientific treatise, Shiga’s Theory of the Japanese Landscape (Nihon fūkeiron) called on all Japanese to treasure the geographical diversity of the archipelago. To Shiga, himself a periodic contributor to the journal of the Japan Forestry Association, Japan’s mountains and forests were more than latent backdrops to Japan’s history; they were active agents that had molded the Japanese character over millennia. Stripped down to its core, he insisted, Japan’s national fiber was much like that of the Japanese pine—weathered, resilient, upstanding. To understand what set Japan apart from the West and even the rest of Asia, he argued, one need look no further than the pine and the life-giving soil from which it grew: “The beautiful sceneries of mountains and abundant plants have long been nourishing the Japanese love of nature and will continue to do so in future.” Shiga implored the Japanese public not only to actively enjoy their terra patria but also to work to ensure its protection: “To destroy such motivation for people would result in destroying humanitarian enlightenment.”[25]

That Shiga would invoke “humanitarian enlightenment” as grounds for landscape protection hints at the growing influence in Japan of Western ideas about natural resource conservation. Indeed, for all his emphasis on the singularity of the Japanese landscape, Shiga relied heavily on European ideas about geology, botany, and even alpinism to convey the splendor of the Japanese islands. In this sense, his writings formed a bridge to not only European science but also notions of sylvan enlightenment: the conviction that forests were a visible metric of modernity, that the thickness of forest cover was an indicator of national progress. In this, Shiga kept close company with the members of the Iwakura Mission, who returned from their travels firm believers that a strong central forestry apparatus was a hallmark of great nation status. This was especially true for Itō Hirobumi, who traveled throughout Europe in 1882 alongside Nakamura Yaroku, a prominent forestry expert. For Itō, these experiences underscored the myriad virtues of forestry—tax revenue, industrial growth, military preparedness—that he would later champion in his position as the resident-general of Korea.[26]

Shiga’s was but one of the earlier expressions of the environmental determinism that would come to undergird Japanese claims to racial and cultural superiority over their colonial subjects. Whatever its sensitivity to the geographical variation found in the archipelago, his was a project of cultural homogenization. In drawing attention to geographical structures that had ostensibly shaped Japanese society since time immemorial, he set out to distill Japanese identity down to its kokusui, its “national essence.” Intentionally or not, Shiga and other like-minded writers equipped Meiji officials with powerful rhetorical devices used to bolster claims about the innate conservationist sensibilities of the nation. By coupling the conservation of the landscape to the conservation of Japaneseness, they gave the Bureau of Forestry a persuasive new argument for the centralized control of local landscapes.

Not all Japanese, however, embraced such characterizations of a unified forest culture. On the contrary, by the late 1880s, a countervailing project of sylvan localism was under way. Alarmed that Japan’s rich mosaic of village forest traditions was being effaced by the centrifugal forces of sylvan nationalism, a small but vocal group of scientists and activists set out to preserve the intimate bond between farmer and forest, village and mountain. Front and center in this project was Yanagita Kunio, the folklorist who, over the course of numerous ethnographic surveys, produced detailed compendia of legendary, divine, and supernatural trees. More interested in the substance of individual trees than the abstraction of entire forests, Yanagita was naturally drawn to the relationship between local Shintō shrines and the groves that surrounded them—sacred forest parcels (chinju no mori) that, according to legend, offered spirits safe passage down to Earth. What emerges from his accounts is a prevailing sense of symbiosis and harmony—an interlocking social, spiritual, and ecological system finely attuned to the rituals of rural life.

Yanagita painted an idyllic portrait of village forestry in no small part as a critique of Meiji modernization. Together with the biologist Minakata Kumagusu, he sought to draw attention to what was truly at stake in the nationalization of woodlands: rending the social and spiritual fabric of agrarian society. Yet, Yanagita also partook in the invention of sylvan tradition. His romantic portrayals of a harmonious balance between village and forest helped to naturalize the idea that Shintōism was an age-old force of conservation. In turn, as state Shintō became a fixture of emperor worship, the Japanese state arrogated to itself and its imperial figurehead new conservationist credentials. In the process, the Meiji emperor was further elevated as the great forest warden of the realm. “Sacred forest, sacred nation”: such was the logic of what Aike P. Rots calls the “making” of Japan’s sacred forests.[27] Never mind that by the turn of the century the state’s Shrine Merger Policies were then decimating the purportedly sacred forests surrounding Shintō shrines, Meiji officials increasingly invoked Shintōism and its associated rituals as the fount of a national environmental consciousness.

By the turn of the century, the scattered commentary on Japan’s forest culture had coalesced into a new catchphrase of sylvan nationalism: airin shisō, “forest-love thought.” Mixing universalizing rhetoric about national resource conservation with essentializing notions of Japan’s timeless forest culture, airin shisō was a catch-all term for the habits of mind and body championed by foresters: rational use of the forest’s bounty; an appreciation of the subliminal power of forest scenery; enjoyment of woodlands through hiking and other outdoor activities. It signified, among other things, thrift, duty, nature worship, and the recognition of the link between nature’s protection and the nation’s future.

In some cases, the language of airin shisō was imported from abroad. One treatise on forest-love thought took as its starting point Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration that “a people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”[28] Yet, just pages later the author was plumbing the depths of the Nihon shoki, one of Japan’s oldest written records, for evidence of its undying admiration of forests. Airin shisō, in short, was profoundly modern yet anchored in antiquity. It allowed Japanese officials to cloak the practical imperatives of forestry in the rhetoric of progress while simultaneously nurturing a distinctive sense of national pride based on enduring traditions.

Ceremonial tree plantings assumed an especially prominent place in the public celebration of forest-love thought. That the promotion of Arbor Day came at the behest of an American, despite Japan’s own centuries-long traditions of regenerative forestry, further reveals the global inflections of the forest-love thought campaign. The initial catalyst for large-scale ceremonial tree plantings was the 1893 visit to Japan of the American minister Birdsey Grant Northrop. A leading proponent of Arbor Day in the United States, Northrop traveled to Japan to preach a message of reforestation, village improvement, and youth education—topics that he had championed during his time as an educator in his native Connecticut. As a Protestant minister, Northrop also fused the Holy Testament with the gospel of tree planting. He propounded a particular strand of Protestant environmentalism that married the conservationist ethos with a deep-seated faith in service to a higher power.[29]

Northrop’s lectures in Japan caught the attention of Makino Nobuaki, then the vice minister of education. Just a year before Northrop’s visit, Makino had opined that because forests are “naturally vital to the national economy,” the public must strengthen what he called “the spirit of loving the forest.”[30] Northrop’s message appealed to Makino on many levels. Not only would Japan’s own Arbor Day further fasten the bonds of local society, it would enable Japanese across class lines to express their love of nation by actively nurturing it, one sapling at a time.[31]

With these goals in mind, Makino began to lobby teachers’ associations to set aside land for school forests. His appeal won support. In 1895, local and prefectural governments began to allocate woodlands to schools for just this purpose. Thereafter, school districts, with the backing of the Ministry of Education, began to implement a wide array of student-led tree-planting activities. As Takemoto Tarō has shown, these programs grew over the coming years into a central component of the state-led effort to shape Japanese—and, later, Korean—attitudes toward forest conservation from the bottom up.[32]

As symbols of Japan’s national essence and spaces of imperial service, forests were imbued with new meaning over the course of the Meiji era. While the Forest Law was perhaps the clearest expression of the centralization of forestry, the promotion of forest-love thought and its attendant activities also reflected significant changes in the Japanese forest consciousness. Couched in terms of the national good and a love of country, the conservation and regeneration of forests became a civic duty. To plant trees was to improve local society, strengthen the state, and revere the emperor and his luxuriant realm.

PROFESSIONALIZATION

The seedbeds of the Nishigahara nursery proved fertile terrain for the growth of scientific forestry practices in Japan. Established in 1878 on a small plot of land on the outskirts of Tokyo, Nishigahara was initially envisioned by the Meiji government as a space for the experimental cultivation of foreign seeds and saplings. It was not long, however, before the space outgrew its original purpose. By the early 1880s it had become one of Japan’s first forestry schools, where Japanese who had trained abroad began to graft the methods of European forest science and administration onto homegrown silvicultural practices.[33]

At the helm of this institution was Matsuno Hazama. Initially sent to Germany to study economics, Matsuno naturally gravitated toward the study of forestry, partly because both disciplines were closely linked in German higher learning. Upon completing his study at the Erbswalde Forestry Academy, then one of Europe’s premier forestry schools, Matsuno returned to Japan, where the Home Ministry tapped him to establish the Nishigahara nursery. He found able partners in this mission in Nakamura Yaroku (a pioneering dendrologist who had earned a doctorate from the University of Munich) and Shiga Taizan (a renowned expert in physics and chemistry who had also studied in Germany). Together, these men—“the three elder statesmen of the forestry world in the early Meiji years”—became vital conduits for the diffusion of Germanic forestry in Japan.[34]

The institution at Nishigahara grew alongside its saplings. Following a merger in 1882 with the Komaba School of Agriculture, the Forestry School at Nishigahara was absorbed by Tokyo Imperial University, where it became Japan’s flagship for forestry research. Although the appointment in 1887 of Heinrich Mayr, a respected German scholar of forest science, meant that Japanese students no longer had to travel abroad to gain exposure to European forestry methods, many continued to do so. Their primary destination was Eberswalde, where they studied under Robert Hartig, an expert in forest pathology. So central was Hartig to the training of Japanese students that, according to Fukushima Yasunori, a veritable “Hartig route” took shape—a path that led directly from the halls of the School of Forestry in Tokyo to Hartig’s classrooms and back, in turn, to the offices of the Japanese government.[35]

Over time, however, Japanese students branched out to other knowledge centers in Europe. Takashima Hokkai, for one, matriculated from 1885 to 1888 at the National School of Water Resources and Forests in Nancy, France, departing just one year before the arrival of Gifford Pinchot, who would go on to establish the United States’ own Forest Service.[36] The Meiji government dispatched still others to undertake study tours of forestry projects across the globe: from industrial logging outfits in Canada to riparian-improvement projects in the Netherlands. Japan’s pursuit of knowledge about the tools and techniques of Western forestry, in other words, was wide-ranging. Although the influence of Germany on the professionalization of forestry in Japan should not be understated, it was but one of many points of reference. Much like their American counterparts, Japanese foresters set out to “adapt, rather than adopt” German and French practices, while turning to other countries for specific technologies and policy templates that aligned with their forest management priorities.[37]

In the case of erosion control methods, for example, Japanese foresters came to conclude that, given the unusually steep slopes found in both Austria and Japan, Austrian erosion control techniques were especially well suited for use in the archipelago. Working under the guidance of Amerigo Hoffman, an Austrian forestry engineer who spent an eight-year stint as an instructor at Tokyo Imperial University, Japanese officials launched pilot erosion control projects in Aichi Prefecture, where bald mountains stretched across the coast of the Seto Inland Sea.[38] On Hoffman’s recommendation, they carved a complex system of dikes and terraced barriers into the hillsides. This was a heavily engineered intervention. It brought concrete and modern engineering methods into the toolkit of foresters and marked, as one Japanese participant would later recall, “a total transformation” of the erosion control methods of the past.[39]

One aspect of Japanese forestry, however, hardly changed: the day-to- day techniques of silviculture, the principal legacy of the “green archipelago.” Europe may have offered engrossing intellectual rationales and policy frameworks for the managerial centralization of state forestry, but Japan had an advanced “silvicultural corpus” of its own—one tailored to its climate and sensitive to its botanical realities. Years of experimentation with seedlings imported from Europe and the United States left many forestry professionals convinced that many of their own regenerative forestry practices stood on their own merits. Why turn to French guidelines for coppicing when Japanese agricultural manuals had spelled out highly refined methods for centuries? Forestry practitioners also soon discovered that some voguish Germanic planting schemes—mixed-form regeneration (Mischformen) and selection cutting (Plenterwald), for example—already had Japanese analogues in the customary practices of satoyama: the integrated management of paddy fields and forestlands by agricultural communities. Although many scientists endorsed the use of select foreign species (such as acacia and American alcova) and filtered their plans through European theories on forest succession, morphology, and seed germination, Meiji-era planting practices often stayed true to their Tokugawa antecedents. Insofar as the preservation of Japanese planting practices offered a counterweight to the influence of more profit-oriented German methods, it also enabled Meiji ideologues to further play up Japan’s uninterrupted traditions of forest love and care.

If any single discipline strove to integrate European scientific forestry concepts into Japanese management paradigms, it was the emerging field of rinseigaku: what Honda Seiroku’s textbook on the subject described as an “academic approach to the relationships between forestry projects and the enterprise of the nation and its people.”[40] In contrast to the emphasis placed on practical know-how by Tokugawa agronomists, rinseigaku was chiefly concerned with modeling, policymaking, and organizational efficiency. Students of rinseigaku were trained in the science of abstraction and resource commoditization: pricing and market demand, stand rotation schedules, scaling-up operations.

Of particular salience to the discipline was the “normal forest” (Normalwald) model, a German management principle whereby each stand is measured and placed into rotation stages that ensure its prolonged productivity. While nursery culture and rotation cutting had sustained the renewal of forests across Japan for centuries, rinseigaku systematized this process.[41] The task before the forester was not just the protection and cultivation of forestland but the construction of a long-term plan in which each woodlot and tree was reduced to a measurable whole and connected to the market economy. This outlook evinces a broader shift in Meiji-period thinking on the very meaning of the term resource (shigen): the disaggregation and objectification of “living” ideas about interconnected local life forms into discrete material resource pools.[42]

Japanese students traveled to Tokyo Imperial University from across the archipelago for immersion in this subject matter. Requiring as it did high competencies in math, science, and foreign languages, the barrier to admission to this program was high. Many of Japan’s earliest students of forestry, as a result, came from elite samurai households. Matsuno, Shiga, and Nakamura all passed through domain academies before taking up forestry as a professional pursuit. Their career trajectories cannot be understood without accounting for the privilege afforded them by their social status. Nevertheless, as time wore on, these older, blue-blooded scholars were joined by the sons of middle-class merchants and farmers to comprise a diverse cohort of students hailing from regions across the archipelago. Officials in the Home Ministry, for their part, saw in this cohort the next generation of forestry bureaucrats. Indeed, much as the Yale School of Forestry was envisioned as an incubator for the forest rangers needed to flesh out the ranks of Gifford Pinchot’s nascent US Forestry Service, so was Tokyo Imperial University seen as a launching pad for the careers of Japanese forest administrators.

No one embodied the ideal of the forestry scholar-bureaucrat more completely than Saitō Otosaku. Born in 1866 as the first son of a large farming family, Saitō grew up in the Sekikawa region of Niigata Prefecture, under the shadows of the western Japanese Alps. Like many other young men seeking to “rise in the world,” as one Meiji-era maxim had it, he eventually made his way to Tokyo. In 1885, Saitō enrolled in the forestry school at Nishigahara, where he met Honda Seiroku, Kawase Zentarō, and other aspiring foresters who would become close friends and collaborators over the course of his career. Saitō’s connection with colonial forestry began in 1895, when, upon his graduation from Tokyo Imperial University, he was dispatched to the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War to survey Korea’s woodlands for military purposes. Saitō spent the next decade shuttling across the Japanese empire and its forestry institutions as an official for the Forestry Bureau of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce. By the turn of the century, he had earned a reputation as a versatile and dedicated forester—renown that he would bring with him to Korea, to which he moved in 1909 to take up a top post in Korea’s newly established Bureau of Forestry.[43]

Like many of his peers, Saitō was also a devout Christian. Baptized at the age of twenty-five, he was a teetotaler and active member of his church. In keeping with the Puritan-style moralism of his pulpit, he considered austerity and diligence as inseparable from the daily work of forest conservation. He made no bones about his preference for hiring men of faith into the ranks of the forestry service and actively sought Christians to staff the Forest Management Bureau he eventually supervised in Korea. While not all forestry officials shared Saitō’s religious zeal, something resembling a Protestant conservation ethic had gained traction in Japan.[44]

Saitō’s narrow hiring preferences notwithstanding, avenues for entry into the forestry service were steadily expanding. While most of the top echelon of the Bureau of Forestry continued to bear the imprimatur of Tokyo Imperial University, the growing institutional infrastructure of forestry education began to channel more rank-and-file personnel—rangers, technicians, assistants—into the forestry bureaucracy. By 1910, there were as many as forty-seven different vocational or technical schools offering some form of training in forest management, usually tailored to the specific needs of each prefecture.[45]

Among the many young men to seize on the professional opportunities offered by these prefectural schools was Asakawa Takumi. Born in 1891 in the Kitakoma region of Yamanashi Prefecture, Asakawa’s care was entrusted at an early age to his grandfather, who instilled in him a love of ceramics, poetry, and plant collecting. The latter passion prompted Asakawa to enroll in the Yamanashi School of Agriculture and Forestry at the age of sixteen—around the time he was baptized into the Methodist Church. After two years of instruction in the basic principles of forestry science, he took up work as a forest engineer in one of Japan’s largest National Forest reserves in Akita Prefecture. When, in 1914, his brother Noritaka decided to move to Korea to teach in an elementary school, Asakawa followed. Once in Seoul, he was able to secure work in the first Forestry Experiment Station established by the colonial government.[46] There, he conducted a number of groundbreaking experiments in seed germination—efforts that would both accelerate reforestation efforts in Korea and launch his own lifelong investigation into Korean folk culture.

In a sense, Honda Seiroku, Saitō Otosaku, and Asakawa Takumi embodied the three tiers of the forestry bureaucracy. At the top of this system were charismatic, public-facing men of letters such as Honda: scholars and professors of forestry science who had earned doctorates from foreign institutions and cultivated a robust international network of scholarly exchange. Just below them were the seasoned bureaucrats, policy experts like Saitō who had cut their teeth administering forests across Japan’s empire. For their plans to come to life, however, the system required technicians like Asakawa: low-ranking civil servants who could conduct research and implement policy. Collectively, these men designed, debated, and introduced a series of forestry reforms that markedly transformed Japan’s landscape and, with it, the profession of forestry as a whole.

COLONIZATION

The professionalization of forestry in Meiji Japan took place against the backdrop of territorial expansion. Beginning with Hokkaido, Japanese officials took on the administration of timber landscapes as vast as they were unfamiliar. Japan’s victories in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars in 1895 and 1905, respectively, expanded the southern and northern limits of Japan’s forest holdings to include the subtropical evergreen forests of Taiwan and the temperate coniferous forests of Karafuto. As a whole, these forest zones acquainted bureaucrats with an assortment of challenges inherent to establishing control over outlying woodlands. Just as importantly, they functioned as mirrors of ecological modernity, enabling the Japanese to define their own forest culture in contradistinction to the states of nature found in colonial hinterlands.

As a laboratory for forest science and a large-scale experiment in woodland-tenure reform, the expansive forests of Hokkaido were important sites for the development of colonial forestry practices. What distinguished Hokkaido in the eyes of Meiji foresters was not just its harsh winter climate; it was also the scarcity of woodland ownership claims. Although Ainu chiefdoms had complex customary arrangements regarding land use (and had for centuries relied on forests for fuel, forage, shelter, and rafts, among other things), forest exploitation was for the most part confined to areas immediately surrounding villages and fishmeal-fertilizer production sites. This is to say nothing of the fact that epidemic diseases such as smallpox had decimated Ainu communities, leading to a net population decline over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[47] As a result, Ainu chiefdoms struggled to assert their customary rights to the island’s woodland, which was routinely mischaracterized as untouched “primeval forest.” The enclosure and redistribution of national or imperial forests was thus more or less freed from the competing claims that had beleaguered foresters on the densely populated islands to the south.

As officials would come to learn over the coming decades, the relative dearth of ownership claims on the island was both a boon and a burden. On the one hand, it enabled government-backed foresters to pursue a broad range of policies to develop, lease, or sell woodlands. On the other, it became patently clear that the commercial development of the island’s sizeable forests would be impossible without the labor of Japanese settlers and the investment of Japanese corporations. That is to say, though enthusiasm for the ample forest resources of Hokkaido was high, the resources of the still embryonic forestry service were often inadequate to make use of them.

It was in Hokkaido, therefore, that foresters first confronted some of the more vexing puzzles of settler colonialism and industrial capitalism. How might foresters work in concert with corporations to develop forestry? What policies could be implemented to coax settlers and financiers into molding the landscape in a manner consistent with the state’s designs? Questions such as these weighed heavily on the minds of the small cadre of forestry experts detailed to the Hokkaido Development Agency (Kaitakushi, hereafter HDA). Established in 1869, the HDA first set out to promote agricultural settlement in Hokkaido in order to fend off foreign claims and alleviate Malthusian concerns with overpopulation on the home islands. The development of forestry, as such, was secondary to immigration and agriculture, the twin imperatives of Hokkaido’s early colonization.

At first, the harvesting of forests unfolded on a decidedly small scale. Carried out principally by farmers and migrants recruited from among former samurai (the lifeblood of Hokkaido’s early colonization), timbering activities increased only slightly over the first decades of the Meiji period. The primary concern of many settlers was, in fact, clearing forestland they deemed “an impediment to development.”[48] Even as demand for Hokkaido’s timber products was growing in mainland Japan (as well as in more distant markets in China), industrial forestry operations were slow to start. In 1881, the total value of forestry products shipped out of Hokkaido was only ¥2,209—a trifling figure in relation to the estimated value of available timber stock.[49] The principal obstacle was infrastructure. With few roads and railways, it was difficult to both harvest Hokkaido’s resources and attract corporations that would invigorate the lumber trade.

Frustrated with the sluggishness of industrial forestry operations on the island, HDA officials embarked in the 1890s on a new effort to entice capital. The passage of the 1897 Hokkaido Uncultivated Land Disposal Act marked a critical turning point in this regard. Among its key provisions was a land-leasing process that entitled parties to the eventual transfer of ownership rights, provided that they meet reclamation standards established by the state. In effect, the law was used to dole out of large tracts of Hokkaido’s woodlands to Japanese corporations at cut-rate prices.[50]

And come they did. The arrival of corporate-backed prospectors in the late 1890s was just the first step toward the growth of large-scale private timber operations. Much to the delight of the HDA, small lumbering firms like the Kushiro Kōgyō Kaisha soon gave way to large corporations like the Ōji Paper Company. Lured by favorable laws, preferential treatment, and the boom in demand that accompanied the Russo-Japanese War, these corporations assumed control over substantial tracts of Hokkaido’s forests. Of the many governing strategies fine-tuned in the forests of Hokkaido, this policy framework—the outsourcing of forestry operations to nonstate entities through an elaborate land-lease system—most directly shaped the architecture of forest management in Korea.

Alongside the growth of the timber industry in Hokkaido emerged a new set of forest management challenges in Taiwan, Japan’s first formal colony. Abundant in resources and commercially underdeveloped by the Qing regime prior to Japan’s takeover in 1895, Taiwan’s predominantly subtropical evergreen forests provided forestry bureaucrats with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in generating revenue and modernizing nature. In contrast to their counterparts in Hokkaido, however, Japanese foresters in Taiwan were determined to do so without the involvement of capitalists, whom they considered a corrupting influence.[51]

As would be the case time and again, the neat idealism of policy proposals confronted a messier reality on the ground. Early financial and administrative setbacks forced a temporary closure of the Forestry Bureau in Taiwan, leaving officials with little recourse but to set aside their concerns about profiteering and partner with Japanese corporations. Even then, many of the woodlands long prized by the colonial government defied profitable development. If the ruggedly mountainous terrain was not hindrance enough, survey parties had to carry out their work under the threat of attack by native mountain dwellers—“barbarians and savages,” in the idiom of the time—whose contempt for colonial officials was well known. One of the more violent conflicts occurred in December 1897, when a survey party led by Saitō Otosaku was ambushed deep in the mountains—a confrontation that, following “pacification” efforts by Japanese gendarmerie, left twenty-three islanders dead.[52] These clashes left a deep impression on Saitō and his colleagues, who came to view uncharted forest regions in colonial territories as spaces of subversion. Less discernible threats also lurked in the forest: at home in the tropical climate, malaria posed a constant threat to the bodies of surveyors, officials, and laborers alike. Taiwan’s forests, in short, proved far more recalcitrant to state control than many had anticipated.

The discovery of extensive stands of old-growth cypress at Ari Mountain (Alishan) in 1900 brought all of these issues to the fore. Hoping to seize the opportunity to exhibit their skills in woodland management, forestry officials again shunned the involvement of private capital and funneled considerable state resources into an ambitious commercial timbering venture. And disastrously so: as Kuang-chi Hung has shown, the Alishan forestry project soon became “the shame of Taiwan.” After years of investment and the laborious installation of timber railways (modeled on those used in the northwestern United States), the project was declared bankrupt in 1915, leading some commentators to question the value of state-led forestry in the colonial context.[53]

If anything, these bruising episodes in Taiwan offered Japanese foresters a crash course in colonial politics. Although bureaucrats waxed enthusiastic about the commercial possibilities of Taiwan’s natural endowments, they quickly learned that well-stocked stands and profitable ventures did not always go hand in glove. Industrial obstacles took many forms: infrastructural requirements, labor shortages, capital shortfalls. Facing stiff and sometimes violent resistance from indigenous residents, moreover, Japanese lumbermen had little choice but to turn to gift-giving rituals that aimed to build trust and open access—what Paul Barclay has called “wet diplomacy,” given the frequent involvement of alcohol.[54] Other obstacles originated in the metropole. Although foresters agreed that Taiwan presented a trove of natural resources, issues surrounding how those materials should be developed and their profits distributed remained hotly disputed. Litigated publicly in the pages of Japan’s rapidly expanding print media, these debates raised the political stakes of forestry, forcing officials to think more carefully not only about their relationship with nonstate actors but also about how to frame their work to the general public. Every so often, as in the case of Alishan, they riveted public attention to a question of burning concern at the time: For whose benefit and at what cost should the Meiji state commit its already limited resources to developmental projects in the colonies?

Echoes of this question reverberated northward as well, toward the resource-rich island of Sakhalin, the southern portion of which became Karafuto Prefecture after it was ceded to Japan in 1905 as a spoil of the Russo-Japanese War. Endowed with, by one account, “inexhaustible forests,” Japan’s “northern treasure house” grew from a small fishing outpost into the center of gravity for Japan’s industrial logging operations.[55] Following a wave of surveys in 1906, many Hokkaido-based logging companies hastened to gain access to the island’s timber reserves, touching off a race for felling concessions across the island. 

In their initial stages, these timbering projects more or less mirrored those found elsewhere in Japan. But following the discovery by corporate-backed scientists that Karafuto’s forests were ideally suited for paper-product manufacture, an industrial metamorphosis was soon under way. Naturally comprised of thick stands of white fir, spruce, and other softwoods coveted for pulp production, Karafuto became the primary resource reserve of the then burgeoning Western-style paper industry. What started as a run-of-the-mill lumbering enterprise thus became in the 1910s a proving ground for industrial innovation. Harnessing new techniques in chemical production and state-of-the-art technologies for wood-pulp processing (modeled partly on those pioneered in the United States and France), Karafuto-based manufacturers began to ramp up the production of pulp, rayon, and other synthetic fibers.[56]

Foremost among them was the Ōji Paper Company, which tightened its hold over Japan’s northern forests and with them the paper and pulp industry writ large. Thanks in part to the breakthroughs in mechanical processing systems, Ōji emerged as a trailblazer of industrial forestry, whose operations and output were outdone perhaps only by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company across the Pacific.[57] Ōji not only churned out large volumes of pulp but also began to manufacture rayon-based fabrics, innovating techniques for the mass-production of chemical components that fueled industrialization drives elsewhere in the empire. To accomplish all of this, Ōji and its industrial managers constructed a sophisticated supply chain that linked fir stands in Karafuto to pulp factories in Hokkaido to distributors in Tokyo and beyond. Ever-hungry for pulp and profits, beginning in the late 1910s, Ōji set its sights on the forest stocks of the Asian continent. Through strategic mergers and oligopolistic business tactics, Ōji steadily enlarged its market position, as its supply chains grew in tandem with the empire.[58]

In Karafuto and Ōji, then, we see the emergence of transnational forestry operations that became vital pipelines for the empire-wide circulation of natural resources. Once viewed as sources of timber, fertilizer, and fuel, Karafuto’s forests became reserves of pulp and chemical components that corporations could harness with cutting-edge machinery and new processing procedures. Karafuto thus offered many foresters a hard look at the capriciousness of the market, the protean value of wood, and the ever-evolving relationship between technological innovation and forest management.

CONCLUSION

By the time Japan had established a protectorate over Korea in 1905, the forests under the control of the Japanese empire stretched over 3,500 kilometers—and over twenty-five degrees of latitude—from Taiwan to Karafuto. These forests were not simply ecologically diverse; each presented Japanese foresters with a unique set of policy challenges, climatic considerations, corporate allies, and political constraints. Whereas forestry bureaucrats had viewed capitalists as essential partners in Hokkaido, they begrudgingly tolerated them in Taiwan and gave them free rein in Karafuto. Whereas they set out to open up land in Hokkaido, they prioritized the stabilization of finances in Taiwan and the extraction of pulp in Karafuto. Foresters were not oblivious to this variation. To the contrary, the range of landscapes brought under their purview underscored for many the fact that forestry methods developed in Japan or studied abroad were not universally applicable. It was accordingly incumbent on officials in each region and in each bureau to customize policies to the ecological conditions, governing structures, and natural resource portfolios found in each territory.

A number of forces nonetheless bound these territories into a common management framework. One was the marketplace. Forest resources found throughout these new colonial territories were channeled via railways and shipping lanes into a regional timber trade that grew in lockstep with Japan’s sphere of influence. It was not merely bureaucrats who shaped these resource flows. The forestry outfits of transnational corporations were also enmeshed in supply and production chains that redistributed materials to meet the growing demand for forest resources.

Further fastening these forestry projects together was the common language of professional forestry—the cameralist approach to forest management diffused through the premier academies of Europe and taught diligently in the growing institutions of forestry education in Japan. More and more, Japanese forestry professionals operated within intellectual networks that spanned the empire and even the globe. Many of their conversations happened in private, through letters, meetings, and conferences. But their successes and setbacks were also regularly discussed in the growing corpus of trade publications, research bulletins, and popular journals that took shape around the forestry enterprise. It was in the pages of these bulletins that foresters hashed out how to adjust their approaches to meet the demands of colonial landscapes, including those found in Korea. And it was in the institutions of forestry education that lasting interpersonal bonds were forged, comradely associations that shaped the composition of the colonial forestry bureaucracy and greased the palms of the timber industry across the empire.

Blending, among other things, German theories, American technologies, French laws, and Japanese planting practices, forestry in Meiji Japan was decidedly compound in nature. But at its core stood a set of axioms shared among forestry professionals. Modern forest management was to be calculative, rational, and planned—in a word, scientific. It was also to serve a greater cause. A handmaiden to agriculture and industry, forestry was closely linked to the developmental agenda and fiscal health of the Meiji state. The language of forestry was accordingly couched in terms of national progress—and its inverse, national decline. While it fell to the forester to devise plans that would maximize yields, forest management was only as good as the society within which it was practiced. Japan’s woodlands, in this sense, became a new arena of national service, a space where virtuous subjects conserved on behalf of the emperor.

This rhetoric was only sharpened in Korea, where denuded red pine landscapes purportedly prevailed. To forestry professionals such as Honda Seiroku, the peninsula presented an object lesson in red pine ruination, a cautionary tale of the failure of centralized forestry. To Japanese settlers and colonial officials more generally, the peninsula’s “bald mountains” became physical monuments to Koreans’ allegedly malformed environmental ethics. “Nothing impresses on the traveller’s mind the feeling of the desolateness of the country so deeply as the sight of Korean mountains,” went one typically prejudiced Japanese account. Fortunately for Koreans, it continued, “the necessity of revivifying Korean forests was especially keenly felt by the tree-loving Japanese as they came over to this country.”[59] In this and other ways, Japan used its status as a “forest-loving” nation to justify its colonial occupation of Korea. Despite the fact that Meiji forestry reforms gave rise to countless bald mountains of their own, colonial boosters in Korea wasted no time in burnishing Japan’s credentials as a conservation leader in Asia—a forward-thinking “first-rank nation,” whose enlightened experts and industrious settlers would clothe the peninsula’s red soil in green.

Notes

[1] Honda Seiroku, “Wagakuni jiriki no suijyaku to akamatsu,” Tōyō gakugei zasshi 230 (1900): 468.

[2] On Honda’s broader ecological outlook, see Komeie Taisaku, “Kindai ringaku to kokudo no shokusei kanri: Honda Seiroku no ‘Nihon shinrin shokubutsutai ron’ o megutte,” Kūkan, shakai, chiri shisō 17 (2014): 3–18.

[3] Honda Seiroku, “Sekai ni okeru rinsō henka to kokuun no shōchō,” Ringakkai zasshi 20 (1923): 59.

[4] Honda Seiroku, “Rinsō no henka to kokuun no shōchō,” Chōsen nōkaihō 11, no. 7 (1916): 4.

[5] On the reception of his ideas, see Miyake Miyahisa, Chōsen hantō no rinya kōhai no genin: Shizen kankyō hozen to shinrin no rekishi (Tokyo: Nōrin Shuppan, 1976), 30.

[6] For a closer look at Honda’s career, see Chiba Tokuji, Hageyama no bunka (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1973).

[7] Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 291.

[8] As qtd. in Totman, The Green Archipelago, 184.

[9] Ian J. Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 5.

[10] Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 10.

[11] As qtd. in Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 73.

[12] Clancey, “Seeing the Timber for the Forest.”

[13] Conrad Totman, Japan’s Imperial Forest, Goryōrin, 1889–1946: With a Supporting Study of the Kan/Min Division of Woodland in Early Meiji Japan, 1871–76 (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007), 11.

[14] Margaret McKean, “Conflict over the Contemporary Fate of Common Lands in Meiji Japan,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March 1995.

[15] Bureau of Forestry, ed., Forestry of Japan (Tokyo: Department of Agriculture and Commerce, 1910), 85.

[16] MRI, 62.

[17] Conrad Totman, Japan: An Environmental History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 180.

[18] On the geography of Meiji-era deforestation, see Chiba Tokuji, Hageyama no kenkyū (Tokyo: Nōrin Kyōkai, 1956).

[19] MRI, 1–3.

[20] Kume Kunitake, The Iwakura Embassy 1871–73: A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Journey of Observation throughout the United States of America and Europe, vol. 3: Central Europe, trans. A. Cobbing (Surrey: Curzon, 2002), 209.

[21] Bureau of Forestry, ed., Forestry of Japan, 85.

[22] Shimazaki Tōson, Before the Dawn, trans. William Naff (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), 691.

[23] MRI, iii.

[24] Bureau of Forestry, ed., Forestry of Japan, 118.

[25] Shiga Shigetaka, Nihon fūkeiron, in Shiga Shigetaka Zenshū, ed. Shiga Shigetaka Zenshū Kankōkai (Tokyo: Shiga Shigetaka Zenshū Kankōkai, 1928), 173–74.

[26] The impact of these tours is taken up in Totman, Japan’s Imperial Forest, 18–23.

[27] For a critical assessment of Shintō environmentalism as ideology, see Aike P. Rots, Shintō, Nature, and Ideology: Making Sacred Forests (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

[28] Andō Tokio, Tsūzoku kyōiku airin shisō (Fukushima: Shōshiki Yōtatsu Shōkai, 1913), 1.

[29] See, for example, Grant Birdsey Northrop, Rural Improvement, 1880– (1880; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

[30] “Makino Nōshōmu daijin danwa,” Yomiuri shimbun, July 20, 1892.

[31] For a broader treatment of these ceremonial plantings, see Okamoto Kikuko, “Meijiki Nihon bunkashi ni okeru kinen shokuju no rinen to hōhō: Honda Seiroku ‘Jusai zōrinhō’ o chūshin ni,” Sōkadai bunka kagaku kenkyū 10 (2014): 69–97.

[32] For a pathbreaking study of school forests, see Takemoto Tarō, Gakkōrin no kenkyū: Mori to kyōiku o meguru kyōdō kankei no kiseki (Tokyo: Nōsangyoson Bunka Kyōkai, 2009).

[33] On the origins of this institution, see MRI, 232–65.

[34] Negishi Kenichiro, Tange Takeshi, Suzuki Makoto, and Yamamoto Hirokazu, “Chiba Enshūrin enkakushi shiryō,” Enshūrin 46 (2007): 91.

[35] Fukushima Yasunori, “Wagakuni ringaku sōsōki ni okeru rinseigaku ni tsuite,” Sanrin 4 (2011): 13.

[36] For a broader treatment of Takashima’s career, see, for example, Shimazu Toshiyuki, “Chirigakusha toshite no Takashima Hokkai,” Kūkan, shakai, chiri shisō 15 (2012): 51–75.

[37] Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 34–35.

[38] This project is examined in Chiba, Hageyama no kenkyū, 148–73.

[39] MRI, vol. 2, 177.

[40] Honda Seiroku, Rinseigaku: Kokka to shinrin no kankei (Tokyo, 1894), 5.

[41] Totman, The Green Archipelago, 168.

[42] On this point, see Satō Jin, “Motazaru kuni” no shigen ron: Jisoku kanō na kokudo o meguru mō hitotsu no chi (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011).

[43] On Saitō’s academic pedigree, see Takemoto, Gakkōrin no kenkyū, 160–91.

[44] Takemoto Tarō, “Shokuminchi ni okeru ryōkka undō seisaku no igi: Saitō Otosaku no ashi ato kara,” paper presented at the Kankyō Seisakushi Kenkyūkai (The Environmental Policy History Research Group), 2012.

[45] MRI, 232–36.

[46] For a biography of Asakawa, see Takasaki Sōji, Chōsen no tsuchi to natta Nihonjin: Asakawa Takumi no shōgai (Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2002).

[47] On these epidemiological factors, see Brett Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 177–203.

[48] Koseki Takayoshi, “Hokkaido ringyō to Hokudai,” Hokudai hyakunenshi, tsūsetsu (1982): 789.

[49] Koseki Takayoshi, “Hokkaidō ringyō no hatten katei,” Hokkaidō Daigaku Nōgakubu Enshūrin kenkyū hōkoku 22, no. 1 (1962): 60.

[50] Hokkaidō Ringyō Keiei Kyōgikai, ed., Hokkaidō sanrin shi, senzen hen (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Ringyō Kaikan, 1983), 89–91.

[51] For a pioneering study of forestry in colonial Taiwan, see Kuang-chi Hung, “When the Green Archipelago Encountered Formosa: The Making of Modern Forestry in Taiwan under Japan’s Colonial Rule,” in Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present, ed. Bruce Batten and Philip Brown (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015), 175.

[52] On this and other survey efforts, see MRI, 458–77.

[53] Hung, “When the Green Archipelago Encountered Formosa,” 182–84.

[54] ­These tactics are examined in Paul Barclay, Outcastes of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 43–113.

[55] MRI, 477.

[56] On the early development of lumbering on the island, see, for example, Karafuto Ringyō-shi Hensankai, ed., Karafuto ringyō shi (1960; Tokyo: Ozorosha, 2005).

[57] For the official account of these developments, see Ōji Seishi Kabushiki Kaisha, ed., Ōji Seishi shashi (Tokyo: Ōji Seishi Kabushiki Kaisha, 2001).

[58] Ōji’s forestry operations are examined in Ōji Seishi Kabushiki Kaisha, ed., Ōji Seishi sanrin jigyōshi (Tokyo: Ōji Seishi Kabushiki Kaisha, 1976).

[59] Bank of Chosen, ed., Economic History of Chosen (Seoul: Bank of Chosen, 1920), 90–91.