To restore and preserve satoyama landscapes is still possible in much of Japan, particularly on the edge of urban areas. Not twenty-five miles from the center of Tokyo, beside another new town, there are 4006 little forests of konara and kunugi, each about three acres in size. They are now cut in rotation, on a cycle of twenty years, a proportion each year. With this woodland, they can make an estimated thirty thousand tons of wood per year, enough to heat, cool, and light almost ten thousand homes in the area.
But in the countryside, the former coppice woodlands often have been completely extirpated. In the postwar era, as wood became less important for heating and cooking, the authorities decided it might instead become a great modern industry. Not only in Japan but in Scandinavia and in other densely wooded lands, they ripped out mile after mile of coppice woodland, replacing them with vast plantations of fast-growing, board-producing conifers. In Japan, the main species were Japanese cedar and red pine. The idea was to both supply the whole domestic market for wood and to create an export market. When one drives through western Sweden today, one thinks that the whole country is by nature an unbroken forest of spruce; similarly, in northern Japan it seemed that every hillside was clothed from top to bottom in Japanese cedar, or sugi. In neither case were they spontaneous natural forests. They were both installed.
Like so many marketing ideas, this one did not work out as planned. In the 1960s, the Japanese got 80 percent of their building wood from their own plantations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, they got less than a quarter of it. Because they insisted upon living wages for the people who grew and harvested the wood, it became far cheaper to import the boards from Southeast Asia and from Canada. Just like the Swedes, in fact, the Japanese were left with acre after acre of conifers, wondering exactly what to do with them.
Nagereba mo. If it is thrown down, put it back. In 2018, there were 25 million acres of plantation forest in Japan. Rather than despair at the enormity, some people, both in Japan and Scandinavia, began to ask the question What did the booga mori, the coppice woods, the sprout lands, give us as a culture, and can we somehow use these plantation forests for the same ends? You cannot coppice or pollard a Japanese cedar or a spruce, but perhaps you can use and treat their woodlands in a way that yields the same physical and cultural rewards as the coppice woods.
What were those benefits? The trees provided local needs—for heat, craft, building, fodder—from the local area. They involved ordinary individuals in providing their own livelihood. They created an intimate—if often laborious—connection between people and the place they lived. They preserved the cultural language—the poetry, the saga, the dance—that had been created and sustained by the life of the woodlands.
Near the city of Morioka in Iwate prefecture in northern Honshu is Shiwa New Town. Local forestry, local agriculture, and local benefits are its watchwords. It is in every way the opposite of Tama New Town. When I visited in 2017, Shiwa consisted of fifty-seven houses, a city hall, a library and community center, a hotel, and a restaurant. Ground was being broken for a hospital and a town swimming pool. The wood for the buildings all came from surrounding plantations; the laminated posts and beams were all made inside the prefecture.
The energy station was the town’s hub. It was a red corrugated steel shack about the size of an average American garage. Inside was a clean, smooth-sided green and aluminum-silver cube about as big as a walk-in closet in a high-class house. Just outside the door was an immense, half-buried bin full of wood chips. It had a red corrugated cover that could slide over the top of it when it rained. Four days a week, a dump truck refilled the bin. In winter, the truck might visit four or five times a day. In summer, it came at most but twice. The chips were burned in the walk-in closet. The fire there heated and cooled all of the houses and all of the public buildings, 365 days per year. When I visited, the staff had just cleaned out a month’s worth of ash. It lay in clear plastic bags—two dozen of them—in a low pile. Later that day, it was to be given to a farmer to fertilize his fields.
Thus far, it might have been a technocrat’s dream of efficiency: a little bit of waste wood heated and cooled a whole town. Wunderbar! This alone was remarkable, but what made Shiwa really different was how they got the wood. Nearby was the plant that made the wood chips to stoke the boiler. Called the Shiwa Town Noorinkyoosha, or Agroforestry Company, it was a public-private partnership.
Most of the place consisted of long stacks of raw logs. Some were red pine that thanks to climate change had died of a disease that had now at last reached Iwate. (Before, it had been too cold for the vector insect to live.) Some were thinned Japanese cedar from woods as close as the nearest hill and as far as northern Iwate. Some were half-burned wood from a recent forest fire. Some were even from the woods knocked down by the tidal wave at Fukushima. It aged on site—the infected pine was smoked to kill the beetles—and then into the chipper it went. The machine was Austrian and shiny, and it took up a whole building. Most of the resulting chips went to the new town’s boiler. Some went to wood chip and pellet stoves that heated other local buildings.
How did they harvest the wood? Foresters brought some of it, but almost half was brought to the chipper by the citizens of Shiwa, Morioka, and surrounding towns. They got the equivalent of 500 yen per 100 kilos of wood that they brought to the site, and the town organized conveyance parties, when foresters left thinned wood by the sides of roads for people to collect and bring to town. Professor Harashina Koji, who helped design this system based on Scandinavian models, had gone on several collecting trips himself. He comfortably brought enough wood in a day to earn 5000 yen. But the pay was not in yen. It was in a currency that Harashina dubbed the ecobee coupon.
The coupon was good at most of the stores in Shiwa. The town itself was a postwar entity, created out of nine different villages, each of which had had its own farmers market. All of these markets were still in business, plus a tenth market that specialized in local wines. The stores were broad, light, and beautiful. There were fresh and dried vegetables, fresh and dried fish, meat, cereal, pickles, vinegars, soy, wine, candy. There was a great deal of mochi, the sticky rice paste for which Shiwa is famous. (The town is the number one producer of mochi in the nation.) Traditionally eaten on New Year’s, mochi is also the base of many Japanese desserts and may be accompanied by everything from strawberries to mugwort. Recently, mochi rice had been used as a feed for cattle, and Shiwa was a leading producer of the succulent mochimochi beef. (The word is another kakekotoba, a poetic pun: one “mochi” for rice paste, and the other a form of the verb motsu, which means “containing.”)
The point was to draw a larger circle in time—one that embraced the idea of the hahaso with its repeated local harvest—and a smaller circle in space, which like the satoyama landscape kept the goods and the benefits circulating inside the town. The coupons kept the money local. At the Shiwa Central Station, where the railroad stopped to take people to Morioka and more distant places, there was a wood chip stove and a solar roof. The fuel for the stove came from the Noorinkyoosha, and the solar panel roof was a product of local investors. The solar industry in Shiwa was funded entirely by local people, who benefited from the profits that the panels generated.
It was a way to rebuild a community. Some people grew and harvested the food and made it into finished products; others collected the wood and bought the food or invested in solar. Harashina recently did a survey and found that only 6 percent of people in the most rural parts of Iwate still heated and cooked with collected wood, but here in Shiwa they could still have a direct and intimate connection to the woods and fields.
An hour and a half by a winding road higher and deeper into the northern mountains stood Sumita, a town that since World War II had lived by plantation forestry. Tada Kinichi had been mayor there for sixteen years. The changes he spearheaded could be seen in the contrast between the old town hall and the new one: the former was a bunker of crumbling concrete and glass. It squatted like a toad only a couple hundred yards from the new hall, which was all wood and glass. The new building needs no columns, because its roof and walls are suspended on open-cambered trusses. Each of the trusses was made of larch imported from Hokkaido. At the lumber mill down the street the wood was made into bonded wood—strengthened by cutting, layering, and gluing—and formed into trusses. The walls were made of Japanese cedar from the surrounding hills. The interior was breathtakingly open, the trusses spreading like a forest canopy overhead. The light came into it as though into a well-thinned woodland.
The wood from the lumberyard supported the whole building in another way. The industrial planer generated sawdust, which was blown into a tank that fed a humming and rattling Rube Goldberg contraption. In went sawdust, out came wood pellets by the kilo. Three boilers beside the new town hall converted the pellets into all the energy needed for heat and for cooling the building. It was meant to provide a model for the surrounding area, and indeed the pellets—bagged and palletized—have found a wide market all over Iwate prefecture. Azuma Atsuki, the leading expert on the gray-faced buzzard in satoyama landscapes, checked the price of these pellets and ordered a pallet for his house in Morioka. The mill was the means by which the citizens could support their own town and their own efforts.
The town intended to put the ash residue from the boilers back into the rice paddies, but they could not. Sumita is less than one hundred miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the one that had melted down in the 2011 tsunami. When the wood was burned, the ash concentrated traces of radioactive cesium that had settled out of the air onto the forest. It was too radioactive to put back into the ground. The lesson was not lost on the people of Sumita: use what you are given, in and for your place, rather than depend upon miracle solutions.
In Shiwa and Sumita, the citizens benefit from the woodland and are involved in its maintenance, but only tangentially. Near the town of Tohno in Iwate, a small nonprofit called Tohno Econet has begun to make it possible for ordinary people to care for plantation forests. Its founder and head, Chiba Nagomi, got the funds to take over a disused lumber mill and turn it into a headquarters for his group of fifty volunteers. They thinned forests on private land, removing sick trees and opening up the forest to air and light. Doing so increased the plant and animal diversity, in just the same way that the hahaso did. Chiba built a charcoal oven and created a classroom. Some of the volunteers came to make charcoal. They learned to watch the smoke, how it turned from white, to yellow-white, to blue, to clear. Clear meant it was done. They made charcoal of the pine they have thinned, and also of willow. They have even made charcoal out of old beehives, out of carrots, and out of Japanese radishes. They drew with willow sticks, hanging their drawings in the room. They made furniture out of the thinned wood. They used wisteria and walnut bark to make baskets. An old woman showed them how to make boxes out of grass to store the charcoal. One group made firewood and took it home.
The central work was the thinning itself. There was a dramatic difference between the light of the thinned forest and the deep shadows of an unthinned one. More different plants grew in the thinned woods. More animals lived or hunted or bred there. The air and light helped reduce the incidence of disease among the forest trees.
They did not hire professionals to do the thinning, although the trees they removed were fifty feet or more in height, growing in tightly planted forests among other trees of equal and greater stature. An eighty-year-old forester came regularly from Morioka to teach a class in the proper use of the chain saw and proper felling techniques. The tools were not only substantial Stihl saws, but also felling levers, peaveys, a portable winch, and a Logosol, a portable lumber mill. Almost half the students were women. “Young ladies, old ladies,” mused Chiba. “They all love to learn to thin. When they start the day, the forest is dark and deep. When they finish, it is light and open.”
To demonstrate, he set the four of us up in a section of sugi wood that they were actively working. With Harashina and Azuma, we selected which of the trees we wanted to remove. The one we chose was about fourteen inches in diameter and about fifty feet tall. It had the white streaking on the bark that indicated a fungal disease. At first, however, it was hard to see how it could be brought down in the dense forest. Where was an open path for it to fall? We had to walk 360 degrees around it before we found the one alley along which it might come cleanly down. Then the dance began.
By happenstance, Azuma had recently taken a felling course with the same instructor. He agreed to do the work. Chiba told him to name the five principles. Azuma paused. He could not remember them. Together, they worked it out.
1: Look UP. There should be no crossing branches and no obstacles aloft to the fall. There should be no heavy cross wind moving the branches.
2: Look DOWN. There should be no grass or other obstacles to prevent a clean cut.
3: Look AROUND. The tree was 20 meters tall. He needed to look 40 meters all around it to make sure it was safe to fell.
4: Look for ESCAPE. There had to be a clear escape route for the cutter if something went wrong.
5: Look at the DIRECTION OF FALL. It should be clear of obstacles.
Azuma donned a hard hat and put a whistle on a lanyard around his neck. With Chiba’s help, he fired up a chain saw, with its twenty-four-inch bar. Now the work began in earnest. Chiba asked the key word of each principle as a question. Azuma responded “Yoshi!” meaning he had taken it into account:
Joohoo? Yoshi!
Ashimoto? Yoshi!
Chuuin? Yoshi!
Taihibasho? Yoshi!
Bajutohooko? Yoshi!
Azuma blew his whistle to warn everyone to stand away. Then he started to make a pie cut on the trunk. This open-mouth cut would determine the direction of the fall. When he was done, he moved to the opposite side of the tree. With the saw resting on his hip joint, so any kickback would go around his body and not into it, he began the back cut. The hinge closed and the tree fell, but it hung up in another tree.
Unfazed, Chiba cinched up the tag line he had attached to the trunk just in case and instructed Azuma to roll the base of the tree with the felling lever, keeping in mind the taihibasho should the trunk jump when it sprung free. After a few dozen grunts, the two worked the crown loose, and the tree fell with a satisfying crunching thud. Then we cut it into eight-foot lengths, dragged them to the mill with the portable winch, and began to saw them into boards. A Japanese cedar board is a beautiful thing. It is pale cream in the sapwood and rust red in the heartwood. The bark is charcoal gray. Each board looks like a magnificent slice of bacon.
When we were done, we lunched. Casually, Chiba said that he had to practice for the Hayachine shrine festival that afternoon. Would we like to come watch? He knew I was eager to see woodlands, not dances. “All the people there,” he cajoled, “are foresters and farmers. You can ask them lots of questions.”
“Okay,” I said. I had no idea what we were getting into.
Mt. Hayachine is the tallest thing around. It stands up out of the lowlands like a rumpled fedora. It is a kami, and it is full of kami. Some version of the shrine has been there since the eighth century, at the latest, and since at least that time people have danced the kagura. We walked through the great gate of weathered green-brown wood into a precinct of huge trees and the stumps of huge trees, all of them ancient Japanese cedars. Around both trees and stumps were the white lightning sacred braids that mark the place where a kami lives. Off on the west side lay the kaguraden, the small building where the dancers practice and where they store their costumes and equipment. There was one main room. We sat on the floor, and someone brought us soft drinks. Off went Chiba with a wave. He disappeared behind what looked like a stage curtain, a deep purple and dark gray cloth adorned with a pair of emblematic cranes facing each other.
Kagura is sacred dance. It almost ceased at the end of World War II. Most of the practitioners had died. In some places, only a single dancer survived, and he revived the dance there. (One man succeeded by offering a free meal to whoever would attend the practices.) I did not know then but have later learned that Hayachine Kagura is one of the two leading schools of the art in Japan. Like most such things, it ends up getting some odd acronymic designation from the government and from things like UNESCO, calling it an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The dancers happily perform for tourists and for visitors, and they sometimes go on the road, but the vocation of all kagura dancers—there are now more than four thousand groups of them in Japan—is to enshrine, invite, delight, and embody the kami. The very first kagura was danced by the goddess Ame-no-Uzume to attract the sun goddess, Amaterasu, out of the cave where she had hidden herself. The wild and ribald dance was so impassioned that thousands of kami all laughed at once. Wondering what the commotion was about, the sun goddess peeked out and was tricked and cajoled into reappearing, saving the world from eternal darkness. Once, kagura had been a tradition handed down among lineages of professionals; since the war, it has been managed and sustained by foresters, farmers, and shopkeepers. What had once been an aristocratic tradition was now a democratic vocation. Indeed, some young kagura dancers now begin to learn their craft in high school clubs.
Three men entered from a side door. One was old, his face drawn and thin as though he had been dried over a fire. The other two were middle-aged, one the shrine’s head caretaker and the other a local forester. The first man was carrying a pair of small cymbals, the second a two-headed drum, and the third a little undecorated cloth bag. From the bag, he drew two flutes and handed them to us. They were clearly made by him, rather roughly, out of single joints of bamboo. It is said that someone once came from Iwate University to write down the music of the kagura, but that he couldn’t. Each flute was made by the person who played it, and the tones and intervals of each one were unique to it. We handed them back, and he joined his fellow musicians.
We drank the fizzy pop. The three men milled around and finally settled in a line beside the curtain. With a bang on the drum, it began. The three played a stately music—if you have heard No or Kabuki music, you know what it is like—all alone. We stopped drinking and faced the stage. The drum set the deep tempo. The flute danced impossibly high over the top of it, and the cymbals punctuated the phrases.
Parting the curtain, two figures appeared. It was impossible to tell whether either was Chiba. Both were costumed in long full white robes, and they wore what amount to helmets with side flaps as big as elephant’s ears. On top of each helmet was the outline of a seated chicken, white with a red comb. I was about to chuckle when they started to move. They danced in a position that was almost squatting, their backs erect, their heads looking out six meters into the distance, their thighs held low, a fan held high in one hand and in the other a sprig of bamboo. They stamped and shuffled, shuffled and stamped, in steps in sets of three as they circled in different directions to mark out the sacred space for the dance. For the next twenty minutes the two followed each other, joined in a common circle, then followed again. When the dance ended, it seemed that they have indeed finished something, but I had no idea what. It could have gone on for another hour, and I would not have tired of it.
Ten minutes later, Chiba and his wife emerged. They had just performed the dance of Izanagi and Izanami—the inviting man and the inviting woman—through whom the world was created. (Eight of their children were the eight islands of Japan.) They had not just played them, but embodied them and invited them to attend. We knew none of this then. My wife asked Chiba what it was all about. “Male and female,” he said in slow, careful English. “Plus and minus. Gratitude.”
It occurred to me that there was no very great distance between the morning Chiba invoking the five questions to ask before felling a tree and the afternoon Chiba who had just been Izanagi. In both, there was a movement toward a world that is kinetically enspirited, in which engagement brings thanksgiving. Here was a way in which a forest initiative, modeled on the spirit of satoyama, had not only a material but a bracing cultural effect.
Nagereba mo. If it is washed away, put it back again.