In the long run we are all dead … A New Hope

Keynes

People said “Business of trees is THE long-term thing.” Yeah. When decent-sized logs are needed for construction in Japan, we have to wait. It’s not only that. Thanks to frequent earthquakes, officially or otherwise Japanese construction standard is rigorous for materials. (Legally defined standard for woods can be found here.) In order to produce logs that can satisfy minimum requirement for housing, a coniferous tree should have at least 14cm of diameter, with straight shape and minimum number of knots visible from outside. Its texture must be dense enough to pass the product test so that there are many minus points, like skewed growth rings or insufficiently covered knots by cambium, which are the signs of inadequacy to cope with sudden loads of earthquake. So as to deliver such coniferous trees in the climate of Japanese archipelago, we need soil rich enough with organic materials and sufficient water, but both should not be too much. Excess nutrients let the trees grow too fast, and lender insufficiently dense texture. Before planting seedlings, foresters need to prepare the ground “just right.” For enough sunshine to baby trees, periodic weeding is necessary for the first 3-5 years. To make the trees with less knots and let the sunlight come through smoothly for photosynthesis, pruning is required until the lowest bow is at about 10-15m high. 10-15m is the threshold for nurturing a profitable tree; foresters use the arboreal characteristics which shows the trunk above the lowest bow become conical with a growth point at the top, and the below is a robust cylinder. Meanwhile, for diameter of a marketable tree, thinning will be required. Too sparse the tree distribution is, too coarse the texture. Too congested, the trees remain lanky for decades. Optimal allocation creates enough room for the canopy to spread evenly to all directions, which helps to make the trunk beautifully circular with just-right hardness. The entire procedures are done in steep Japanese mountains for at least 15 consecutive years. The process requires expertise, and lots of money.

Those are the materials required
for housing construction.
They are prepared for
an order-made private house
in Kamakura.

During the World War II Imperial Japanese government mobilized everything for total war, forests included. In addition, after the atomic and other bombs destroyed almost completely the cities in all over Japan, people needed construction materials to rebuild. The shortage of construction materials was acute. The available domestic logs earned handsome profit. Our great-grand parents deforested quite a lot of mountains for money. (Here is the link to see a photo of Tanzawa Mountains around 1955. It’s, really, a woooooow thing.) Yet, domestic forestry could not meet the demand. Japan had a miracle economic growth till 1973 Oil Crisis. Japanese looked for everywhere on the planet and started to import lots of lots of lots of logs and building materials from all over the world. Eventually Japan became very expensive country where for mass-housing construction cheap imports were a norm even after the reconstruction boom. When you can have low-cost imports, no one bother to look after these domestic trees for mass housing. In case a forest has an enthusiastic owner who takes care of the trees, the products are inevitably expensive. They are for luxurious order-made structures, not for average households. It pushed up the price of woods including imports. The technology of housing started to depart from traditional construction with woods. The colleges reduced the study time of wooden buildings for architecture students, since they must learn more economical way to provide houses. The domestic forestry came to be a quasi-dead industry. The price of the trees collapsed to the bottom in 2013.

This is how Tanzawa Mountains look like
from Hadano City in 2016.

Nominal yen price of an average domestic tree in situ (per usable 1m3)
Source: 2015 White Paper for Japanese Forests and Forestry
Year	Cedar	Cypress	Pine	Number of forestry workers hirable with the price per 1m3 cedar	Average forestry wage (yen) per diem
1955	4478	5046	2976
1960	7148	7996	4600	11.8 (1961 data)	768 (1961 data)
1965	9380	10645	5743	7.7	1220
1970	13168	21352	7677
1975	19726	35894	10899	3.7	5283
1980	22707	42947	11162
1985	15156	30991	7920	1.8	8629
1990	14595	33607	7528
1995	11730	27607	5966	1	11962
2000	7794	19297	4168	0.6	12160
2005	3628	11988	2037	0.4 (2004 data)	11650 (2004 data)
2010	2654	8128	1496
2012	2600	6856	1464
2013	2465	6493	1376
2014	2968	7507	1638
2015	2833	6284	1531

When Japanese grandpas deforested massively, they at least planted seedlings …. expecting they would fetch a good price later. They did not dream the end of unprecedented construction boom for growing population, or international competition. Now the trees in Japan lost the battle to cheap imports and to the changed construction method. The forests were abandoned. The majority of babies planted 70-50 years ago were literally neglected without proper weeding, pruning, and thinning. They are now adult trees. In Kanagawa Prefecture, 40 years are the standard max to harvest a cedar tree to provide regular-sized timber products. Quite many 70 years old artificially planted cedars and cypresses are past their prime and “lower quality” resources for construction. Their forest also creates unintended consequences for environment. In an afforested area with proper cares, the sunshine comes to the ground through the optimally distributed canopy. It lets the seeds slept in the soil wake up under the tall tree. The undergrowth is rich and the biodiversity is high even within a man-made forest. Such vegetation can retain rain drops more efficiently by cushy leaf mold. It provides steady sources of water to the rivers. When a forest is abandoned, the opposite will occur. The steep mountain slope becomes very dark without much green on the floor. When rain falls down, there’s not much on the ground to keep the H2O from heaven. Rain easily becomes a torrent before reaching to a regular stream. On their way, they wash away the soil. Worst case scenario is hillside landslide where a torrential rain becomes ravenous stream within the forest, excavates the mountain itself in massive scale, and scoops up the roots of the trees. The mountain collapses, man-made structures down there will be crushed by tumbling-down boulders and huge trees. Even huge dams can be destroyed. People could be killed and the cities dependent on the water coming from those mountains will have water shortage. This risk is the fundamental reason why the City of Yokohama and Kanagawa Prefecture collect environment tax for funding the efforts to stop at least further degradation of forest in our city and prefecture.

A remnant of a log of Chamaecyparis pisifera from a quasi-abandoned forest in Niiharu.
Even for the amateur’s eyes of mine,
it’s not at commercial grade …
it had about 50cm of diameter ... what a waste …

They are the logs of
Chamaecyparis obtusa presentable for markets.

An artificial forest in Hakone area where we did
thinning exercises for forest instructor training.
It’s the property of Kanagawa Prefecture, and
quite many volunteers enter the site for maintenance.
Nonetheless,
there is oversupply of trees to be pruned and thinned.
The forest floor is this much dark, morning and afternoon.
We trainees talked about “losing the touch of time.”

Even so, when Japanese Meteorological Agency issues a forecast of “effective humidity,” it’s not the rate of vapor in the air. It measures how dry a wood product for housing is, for alerting the people about fire hazards. The weather-people calculate the moving average of daily degree of dryness of a wood situated in their instrument shelters nationwide, and tell us “Today’s dryness of Yokohama is 57% (; this is the average of January 2016).” Living in wooden structures is the foundation of Japanese psyche. We have kept the relationship with wood products despite of the disintegrated forestry industry. Then, very interestingly, thanks to a very new trend of international trade, sustainable development discussion at global policy making, and pure, soothing smell of trees in Japanese traditional houses, a seemingly finished domestic industry might be resurrected soon. I’ll tell you next week what we were shown during the forest instructor training about the efforts for eco-friendly forestry in Kanagawa.

“Project Godzilla – a landscape with an eye”
by Yukinori Yanagui.
Downtown Yokohama had his exhibition “Wondering Position”
at BankArt Studio NYK, ended this New Year Holiday week.
I was intrigued by the image of ruins for Yanagui.
It is made of woods mainly. He’s very Japanese …
I don’t think an artist from Aleppo would
present the concept of destruction in this way.

The contact address for Kanagawa Natural Environment Conservation Center 神奈川県自然環境保全センター is

657 Nanasawa, Atsugi City, 243-0121 〒243－0121　厚木市七沢657

Phone: 046-248-0323

You can send an enquiry to them by clicking the bottom line of their homepage at http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/div/1644/