Logging the Unloggable: Timber Transport in Early Modern Japan

D uring the seventeenth century the people of Japan overcut forests from one end of their archipelago to the other. Earlier loggers had been able to obtain great quantities of excellent timber from easily accessible stands along deepflowing streams, float the pieces to landings, and carry them by ship or cart to the construction site. By the late 1600s, however, the last of the large oldgrowth timber accessible to a stream or roadway capable of handling the pieces had been cut, and loggers were moving miles back into the interior woods in search of exploitable timber. This dramatic change in the basic condition of the forest presented loggers with serious transportation problems and elicited some remarkable engineering and managerial solutions. Two basic characteristics of the situation made the disappearance of accessible timber a particularly difficult problem to overcome. First, the geography of Japan is unfavorable to logging. The archipelago lacks continental flatlands; it consists of slender deposition plains sandwiched between convoluted arcs and nodes of mountain land. On these mountains both the felling and moving of timber are difficult. Relatively young in geological time, these mountains are acutely upthrust and covered by coarse, infertile, and easily destabilized regolith. Out of these young, starkly beautiful, easily eroded mountains tumble streams whose levels of water and debris fluctuate sharply and quickly, depending on the vagaries of weather. Only in their lower reaches do the streams make reliable arteries of commerce, and even there the erratic flow makes them treacherous. Despite their inadequacies for lumber transport, however, these streams were essential to early modern loggers, since the character of the mountains precluded highway transport of all but the smallest of pieces, such as cooperage and fuelwood. Second, river transport was complicated by the social history of seventeenth-century Japan. Nearly one hundred fifty years of endemic warfare ended around 1600, and the nation entered an era of sustained peace. Administratively divided into some 250 daimyo domains, Japan was united by a nationally shared culture and by a hegemonic, autocratic regime, the shogunate, which kept the daimyos under tight control. With peace came rapid socioeconomic growth; the population grew apace, from some 18 million in the 1590s to 26 million in the 1720s. All the flatlands were opened to cultivation, and tillers pushed their land-opening efforts farther and farther up into the narrow valleys and the lower slopes of mountains. In the process, they contributed to terrain destabilization and rapid runoff, thereby intensifying the problem of irregular water flow and making log transport all the more difficult. The erosion that accompanied land opening and deforestation led to stream siltation on the plains, compelling dredging and the creation of ever-higher levees to hold the rivers in their beds. These levees were repeatedly endangered by logs in transit. Moreover, tillers wished to put as much arable land as possible into wet-rice production. To that end, they developed extensive irrigation systems, the necessary water for which came from streams through the erection and maintenance of elaborate, often fragile systems of dams, dikes, and gates. When logs came hurtling down twisting rivers that were cluttered with ledge, rock, and erosion debris, often they would smash into the irrigation apparatus, endangering or damaging agricultural operations. And if they punched or wore holes through levees, they could precipitate destructive local flooding. Understandably, downstream villagers often saw upstream loggers as serious enemies, and they acted accordingly, both within and without the law. Loggers could not ignore them. In short, basic historical trends in the seventeenth century were complicating the use of streams as arteries for timber transport just when rampant deforestation was forcing loggers to rely ever more heavily on these very streams for floating out the wood that sustained Japanese civilization. The tactics and strategies by which lumbermen dealt with these problems are intrinsically interesting, and they also shed light on broader issues of Japanese technological history and social organization. Moreover, they illuminate areas of technological convergence and singularity in the Japanese approach to a worldwide Droblem: moving timber from stumn to market.