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field and forest the farmer from kai province

The year is 1798, Kansei 9 by the Japanese calendar—the eleventh year of the reign of Shogun Tokugawa Ienari. It is high summer, and the hillsides of the Kai province of central Japan are at their most verdant, alive with the flowering climbers and shoots that flourish during these brief months, only to seed and die as fall approaches. The ground cover is speckled with tiny parti-colored blossoms, and the air shrieks with the deafening call of cicadas.

We have walked for several days from Edo, mostly along the Koshu-kaido, one of the five great roads that link the capital with the rest of the country. Our journey has taken us nearly due west, the first day through the flat, monotonous belt of farmland that surrounds the city, followed by two days of steep mountain passes, narrow river gorges, breathtaking views, and gravity-defying bridges.

Though the main road was wide enough for a military detachment, we met no carriages or draft wagons along the way, and only an occasional mounted rider—although idle palanquin bearers milling about at every stopping point badgered us for business. Even those have not been seen since we took a narrow side road heading north, deeper into the mountains. Though this road is narrow and dusty, the walk has not been overly strenuous, and we are rarely more than a half-day walk from a farmhouse or settlement where we could obtain a night’s lodging on an informal basis.

After one last winding, uphill trudge, we crest the hill and sigh with relief to see our destination, the village of Aoyagi*, spread in welcome across the valley below. Wispy tendrils of hearth smoke drift skyward from its thatched rooftops, and the gentle breeze brings the comforting smells of domestic life. From our present vantage point one might be forgiven for assuming that the village below endures an isolated and independent existence.

The forest seems to have hiked its skirts to make room for the village. Conifers like cryptomeria predominate but are healthily interspersed with copses of chestnut, zelkova, oak, and other towering deciduous hardwood trees, as well as large stands of bamboo. The understory teems with variety: shrubs and seedlings, ferns and vines, moss and fungi.

Along the journey, we have passed entire hillsides covered in white birch, all growing naturally, as well as lanes and fields bordered with ornamental cherry trees intentionally planted by human residents. And from time to time we have encountered vast plantations of Japanese cypress and cryptomeria growing in straight lines, prominently posted with notices reading, “Do not enter under strict penalty, by the authority of the Shogunal Forest Warden.” The forests themselves have begun to be cultivated.

Though we are still a half hour or more away from the village proper, the nearby hillsides are alive with human activity this morning. Household teams of villagers, mainly women and children bearing woven bamboo baskets and wooden carrying frames fitted with large sacks of woven rush straw, work their way methodically through the undergrowth, gathering essentials. As the seasons change, so do the objects of their gathering, particularly in the case of food that resists cultivation but can be found growing wild in significant amounts.

Late spring brings bamboo shoots, which must actually be dug rather than gathered, as well as many kinds of “mountain greens” like mustard flower and various ferns. Autumn is a particularly rich time, since the ground is liberally littered with chestnuts, walnuts, acorns, and other edible nuts and seeds, and many of the most desirable mushrooms can be found in abundance, as well as burdock root and other tubers. Even the winter months present several desirable foodstuffs, like shepherd’s purse, chickweed, and the other herbs that go into nanakusa, a special dish eaten on January 7.

But it is summer now, and the food-gathering teams are hunting for water chestnuts, mugwort, butterbur, and other edible greens. Although the villagers don’t realize it, their stone-age forebears foraged for the same items on the same slopes; these hills are capable of supporting small populations through foraging alone, and in times of famine they still provide significant sustenance.

On other days during the warm months of the growing season, the villagers gather fallen leaves and other organic matter to use as “green” fertilizer and mulch. That part destined for fertilizer is mixed with human waste in the compost pit—where the naturally occurring high temperatures caused by bacterial decomposition kill most pathogens—and is then applied to the fields at specified intervals.

Rural communities like this one depend upon gathered fallen wood for all of their fuel needs, and fuel consumption is strictly limited to that which can be satisfied by the amount of wood found lying on the ground—limbs and branches, mostly, with special permission required to take possession of fallen logs. Enforced by both custom and government policy, this practice has far-reaching implications. In essence, with very few exceptions, fuel needs have been satisfied for centuries by a fully renewable resource, that is, trees. But by eliminating tree-cutting for fuel, a potentially major source of environmental pressure from the rural population has been eliminated, and more lumber is made available for building and for producing charcoal fuel for the cities.

Though foraging and forest maintenance are essential activities for the community, it is obvious on our walk through the village that its central purpose is farming. In Aoyagi, one hundred families tend both irrigated rice plots—the average family holding being one cho, (about one hectare—1000 sq. m.)—and “dry” fields, averaging rarely more than one-fourth that size, and often quite a lot less. A typical homestead is about 150 square meters. So the largest environmental impact by far is from the rice fields. The area considered adequate for gathering forest fertilizer is five to ten times that devoted to crops.

Several factors influence the size and siting of the farm plots, the most significant being the slope of the land. Because flat bottomland is scarce throughout the country and the construction of rice paddies requires flat land, almost every acre of it has been cleared for this use. Terracing is a common method of converting sloped acreage into paddies, and though such fields require more effort to maintain and to irrigate, in many cases terracing has already been taken to extremes, particularly in the more remote and rugged regions.

The relationship between irrigated fields and those for non-irrigated crops is defined by local geography. With all of the flat land devoted to rice, other crops, such as vegetables, dry grains (wheat, millet, and barley), yams, and cash crops such as cotton and hemp, are usually planted on the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains. Even steeper slopes can support orchards and crops such as tea, with the result that agriculture is practiced in a stratified manner that conforms to the local environment. Except in the widest of valleys or the rare expanses of coastal lowland, the farmhouses themselves are likely to be nestled in clusters against the nooks and hollows of the hillsides, often somewhat distant from the family’s fields.

approaching the village

As we approach the village, we are passing through a very green but very human-influenced landscape. Certainly the largest environmental effect has been on the valley floor, where the previously existing ecosystem has been selectively dismantled and replaced with paddy agriculture. Trees have been cut down and the ground subdivided into shallow pockets. These paddies provide a ripe environment for other species that benefit from the changes humans have brought: frogs and fish flourish, feeding on insects whose numbers have increased with the new food source that rice represents. The frogs and fish in turn attract ducks, egrets, and other predators, and so on up the food chain.

What have declined are many weeds, bushes, grasses, and other botanical species, as well as boars, foxes, rodents, snakes, and other animals that seek dry ground during the summer. The result could be considered damage from the purely natural point of view. But by designing the agricultural process in a manner that makes the fullest possible use of naturally existing features, by seeking to maintain the fertility and productivity of the forests, and by the secondary effect whereby the paddies and other fields become ideal environments for other species, the farmers have developed an agricultural ecology that replicates the purely natural one in several of its most essential aspects. The balance has been altered, true, but humans are being supported in large numbers without degrading their environment.

Irrigation is a major undertaking. Waterworks in general have achieved a high degree of technical sophistication, with well-engineered aqueducts supplying major urban areas and ambitious river works easing navigation and lumber transport. Rice field irrigation is similarly sophisticated and well engineered, while often using simpler technical means; it is implemented with the same attention to social cooperation and environmental monitoring that distinguishes forest gathering activities. A new rice paddy cannot be built unless its impact on the shared water supply is acceptable to all concerned, and the actual construction of the dams and dikes is a cooperative effort. The farmers manage their water supply precisely and with foresight.

Gravity is made to do the work of moving water from source to destination wherever possible. While in some cases the geography makes this relatively easy, more often than not the choice is between expending resources and energy to construct an aqueduct to provide a gravity-fed water supply from a distant source, or to implement a system of human-powered pumps and lift systems to bring water from a low-lying source to paddies above. The former is a vastly preferred solution. The earliest irrigation systems in Japan, developed shortly after the beginning of paddy agriculture around 400 bc, utilized catchment basins to collect water until it was needed to flood the paddies, and this method is still widely practiced. Although in some situations it is necessary to dig artificial ponds for this purpose, for the most part naturally occurring ponds can be made to serve beautifully with the addition of weirs, sluices, and gates.

In cold parts of the country, sun shining on the pond water warms it to the optimal temperature for use before it is released to the crop; in other cases long, serpentine irrigation ditches serve an identical function. The design process is essentially one of augmentation—reinforcing and shaping naturally occurring features and forces. Natural ponds have the tremendous advantage of having evolved symbiotically with their watersheds and possess naturally occurring inflow sources as well as natural outflows; they are balanced with their local ecosystems in a way that is difficult to replicate through engineering alone. Larger projects such as levees and dikes, intended to limit damage from seasonal flooding, are usually based on similar principles. The meanders of the rivers are left untouched, but the riverbed is broadened, and low levees are built that allow natural flooding to pour into a wide catchment beyond.

One commonly used design that originated in nearby Koshu uses separate, discontinuous levees that are angled to the direction of flow to guide the flood-waters. They are planted with trees and bamboo to anchor and consolidate the earthwork and to encourage further natural growth. Riparian works like these undertaken during the previous century allowed a considerable increase in arable land through reclamation of otherwise dangerous flood plains, but there are few opportunities for similar gains now.

Although the dynamics of steeply terraced and lowland irrigation differ, in both cases the result is a gravity-fed cascade. From original sources such as rivers and streams, water flows into a catchment, and from there it is released into the paddies at prescribed intervals; it flows from one level to the next, and excess water can be released back into the waterways. This cascade captures sludge and organic matter and has a filtering and purifying effect on the water. For this reason it can be argued that these systems actually improve the local water supply, with benefits to those downstream.

sharing the wealth of water

At every step, from planning to construction and utilization, cascade irrigation requires very close cooperation among community members, and often among members of different communities. This is particularly true because—due to successive projects of clearing and reclamation as well as inter-marriage and redistribution of assets—a single family’s fields are likely to be scattered and interspersed with those belonging to others. Consequently, simply deciding the order in which fields will be flooded requires tremendous coordination and agreement, and the earthen dams separating one paddy from another must usually be considered assets shared by more than one family. The canals, ponds, sluices, and other major components of the irrigation system require the mediation and guidance of village headmen and possibly government representatives, and they are therefore assets shared by the village as a whole, under the jurisdiction of the village’s suiri kumiai, or water-use association.

The effort expended on constructing, maintaining, and intensively farming the extensive rice paddies goes far beyond what would be needed for self-sufficiency on a local scale, and beyond what would be necessary to secure a good living through open-market sales, because the government has saddled the peasantry with a large tax burden. Officially discouraged from eating the rice they grow, the peasants surrender a third or more as tax, sell some, put some in communal emergency stores, and keep a portion for consumption despite the prohibitions. Through their taxes, the 80 percent of the population that are farmers support the entire ruling class and subsidize the feeding of the remaining 10 percent who live in cities.

The lower slopes of many of the surrounding hills have been cleared for dry field agriculture, but they represent less than half of the total crop acreage. Although these proportions may be reversed in some areas where the market for cash crops is so well developed that tax liens can be paid from crop sales, by and large the lower hillsides are the only land that can be used for other crops once the premium land has been reclaimed for growing rice. Too steep to be terraced for paddies but not too steep to retain soil, the hillsides themselves are divided into two agricultural strata.

The lower level is devoted to vegetables, yams, grains such as wheat, millet, and barley, and fibers such as hemp and cotton, while the higher, steeper slopes can be used for orchards—apples, persimmons, peaches, mikan—as well as tea and mulberry bushes (to feed silkworms). These dry fields may be small enough to be considered family garden plots and satisfy subsistence and community needs alone, but where resources and market size allow, they may develop into truly commercial-scale activity. Many such crops can be grown with rainfall alone, but these fields must also be provided with a water supply, usually in the form of spring-fed ponds or additional wells (with the approval and assistance of the village well association, or igumi). In extreme cases, farmers resort to water lifting devices or buckets hauled by human power.

The hundred or so houses of the village are grouped in loose clusters, with one cluster of about twenty houses here at one end of the valley, along both sides of the dirt road we are following as it descends from the hillside. Somewhat uniform in size and general configuration, they nevertheless present great variety in detail and in the particulars of their layout. While in some regions multistoried farmhouses are the norm, here they are all essentially single-storied buildings with occasional second-story additions and other modifications, sheltered under thick, steep thatch roofs.

Homesteads consist of several related buildings arrayed around a roughly rectangular work yard. The largest structure, the house, is placed on the northern side of the yard, so that it will receive maximum southern exposure. The complex is not fully enclosed but is rather loosely delineated by the buildings themselves, some hedges, a few low walls and pathways, a small garden, a simply marked open gateway, as well as a line of sugi trees that appear to have been placed as a windbreak. It seems less of an architecturally designed unit than an incrementally evolved one, and in fact over the course of one hundred and fifty years it has undergone significant change and adjustment.

There is almost as much variety in the type, size, and placement of outbuildings among the various homesteads as there is among the houses themselves. Here as elsewhere, pragmatism and frugality rule. The wealthier farmers are likely to have a two-storied, whitewashed, fireproof storehouse for valuables and records. There is at least one family with a small, open-sided smithy, where others come to have tools repaired or hardware made. In some cases, home industries like weaving or brewing warrant the construction of extra work sheds and storage.

the homestead of the first-born son

We are on our way to the house of a man named Shinichi. Like most peasants, Shinichi has no family name, and though this sometimes leads to confusion, each family has other identifiers: the location of their homestead—near the bamboo grove, along the river, uphill from the well; dominant features of their house—a large roof, board fence, big storehouse; or job identifiers—roofers, carvers, smiths. Shinichi’s name means “Shin’s first-born son,” and there’s only one person who fits this description in this village.

Shinichi’s homestead is typically modest, with a simple open-sided shed for firewood, another for drying heaps of straw for household use, a green fertilizer shed, one for composting night soil, a small shed for ashes, and another for storing the bales of rice that represent a year’s ration for the family. There are simple roofed storage racks for ladders and bamboo poles, for buckets, lumber, and miscellany. Other homesteads may have special storage buildings for soy sauce and miso, for cotton or other cottage industries, or special work sheds. These outbuildings are usually dirt-floored.

Noticeably absent are large barns or separate stables. Very little meat is consumed, and no dairy products, and the use of draft animals as aids to farm labor has gradually declined to the point where it is extremely uncommon, largely because acreage cannot be spared for growing feed. Stable space for those families that possess a horse or an ox (about 10 percent of the total population) is often integrated into the main house, but a stable may also be combined with one or more of the other work functions.

Shinichi’s young son spots us and runs to announce our arrival. His father emerges from the house, wiping his hands on his short cotton tunic. His legs are bare because it is summer and, like most of the men and boys in the village, he wears only a loincloth under the tunic.

He welcomes us with excitement, and with his wife, Misaki, leads us to the well. She draws a bucket of water and hands us a wooden dipper. The water is clear and nearly ice cold, and we all express our appreciation and compliments, exchanging a moment of social ritual that establishes good will and gratitude for natural abundance. As Misaki hurries back into the house to prepare tea, we sit outside on a rough bench with our host.

The well we have drunk from is a roofed structure, with room for three or four people to haul water, wash vegetables, or fill tubs. A shallow wooden splash basin catches runoff, which drains into a simple stone-lined channel leading to a small pond. This pond, partly functional, partly ornamental, is manmade, and it is carefully sited to collect drainwater from the entire site, though many farmhouses are sited to take advantage of existing natural ponds.

Considering the heavy rainfall that Japan experiences, providing adequate drainage is high on the list of farm design requirements. The homestead is therefore provided with two sources of water, one potable (the well), and one for general use (the pond). Wastewater is collected to become part of the general use. Some villages have the additional benefit of nearby natural rivers and streams or engineered water supplies, use of which may be approved for households. Many villages have communal washing streams, and it is not uncommon to see baskets suspended in the irrigation culverts running alongside homes, to cool and preserve vegetables. But unlike the communal systems, household water supplies must be provided and maintained by each individual family.

The dirt-floored work yard occupies a little more ground area than the main house. It is a true multipurpose space for almost any farm activity that is better done outdoors. We see wash hung out to dry and racks of vegetables drying in the sun. This is also where carpentry and repairs take place. One end of the yard is devoted to a small kitchen garden and a compost heap for mulch. In particular, though, the area must be large enough for threshing and winnowing large quantities of rice after harvest.

The house is over one hundred years old, and it bears its age handsomely. Venerable and spacious, in materials and coloration it is fully of a piece with its surroundings. The thick thatch roof is massive and enveloping. Its eaves descend almost to eye level, providing a generous roofed space all around the exterior of the building. This intermediate space, the dobisashi, is ample enough for many kinds of work and shelters a variety of implements from the elements—fruits and vegetables can easily be strung up to dry here as well. For part of its length it shelters the engawa, the raised veranda, and the depth of the eaves allows someone seated there to converse easily with someone outside while both are sheltered from sun or rain. It is a simple arrangement, beautiful in its function and accommodation, and perhaps unique in the world.

Farmhouse walls come in many types. The materials used on the exterior surfaces are chosen for local cost and availability, appropriateness to local climate and weather, and the durability required at that particular location on the house. The lower walls of the large farmhouses in the mountainous, snowbound Hida region, for example, are usually covered in cryptomeria bark, giving them a moisture-resistant and easily replaceable surface. Vertically battened wood siding is common in several regions as well, and in the Akita region of the far north, the walls are thatched like the roofs for extra insulation from the cold. But the most common wall treatment by far is a mixture of clay and straw that is applied between exposed half-timbers as wattle and daub, and this is how Shinichi’s house is made.

From time to time one sees farmhouses that have a layer of hard white plaster added over the clay undercoat, resulting in a strikingly contrasting patterned wall like those of temple residences, and the homes of samurai and wealthy townsmen. But Shinichi’s farmhouse presents a face of earth to the world—sandy ochre expanses framed by tough structural timbers, all beautifully aged and eroded by time and patched with use. The walls of the few work areas under the eaves have been reinforced with panels of split bamboo, but even with this third material there is a wonderful harmony of earthen hues.

A simple wood-paneled sliding door gives access to a single generous ground-level opening, the o-do, and it is only in the details of its frame, as well as in the carved brackets that lend extra support to the eaves, that we see any truly decorative embellishment. On the other hand, the tight and skillful rope-work visible on the underside of the eaves, binding the poles and purlins of the roof to other, smaller elements, expresses a design spirit rooted in logic and economy but allowed to elaborate into an almost luxurious care and finish. Everything about the exterior of the house demonstrates a similar decisiveness, appropriateness, and awareness. Shinichi leads us inside.

inside a remarkable place

We find ourselves in a large, dark, earthen-floored space. Smoke wafts from a partly visible firepit to the apex of the roof high above, and the entire space is steeped in the smoky aroma. The atmosphere is damp and quite cool, even now at the height of summer. Sounds are muted by the earth beneath our feet.

We are in the doma, the earth-floored vestibule, starkly functional and ancient in spirit. This is a workspace, and the implements of farming life are arrayed on the wall like emblems: rakes, scythes, baskets, strainers, ropes, boxes, pestles, overshoes, hats. There is ample storage space for tools and food. A few of the larger farm contraptions like pumps and looms take up some floor space, but almost everything else finds a place off the floor. Rakes, ropes, tools, baskets, and racks are in nooks and crannies to our right. Straight ahead are an earthen stove and a back door, with assorted storage shelves and containers nearby. To the left is a raised, floored space with a suspended ceiling made of thin bamboo poles. Massive, squared wooden posts flanks the raised floor, but no wall or other divider separates it from the doma.

The floor of the doma is more carefully constructed than it appears, and it is very durable. Layer upon layer of clay mixed with lime have been laboriously pounded down and allowed to cure, leaving a surface more like concrete than plain earth. It is easy to clean and sheds water well, and after years of use the surface has taken on a pebbled texture, soothing to the eye and soft underfoot. This texture is all the more apparent because the only significant natural light comes through the wide door through which we have entered, a low-raking light that is diffused upward by the sheen of the floor and that puts its irregularities in high relief.

The Japanese have used these pounded earth floors since they began to build three thousand years ago, and the firepits and lashed and thatched roofs bear an identical pedigree. In fact, the doma sometimes goes by the name of niwa, “garden” or “courtyard,” implying that it began as a truly outdoor space. This degree of continuity, with design solutions being continually refined but surviving from neolithic times into the early modern period in clearly recognizable form, is remarkable and probably unprecedented among literate civilizations.

Shinichi seems to be proud and a bit self-conscious of his doma, which takes up nearly half of the overall interior area: proud because it is ample and generous and speaks of generations of hard work; self-conscious perhaps because it is nevertheless cluttered and worn.

The kitchen functions are divided between those performed in one corner of the doma and those done on the raised floor. A short step away from the raised floor is a plastered clay stove, or kamado. It is a model of fuel efficiency, built in place by specialized craftsmen out of adobe clay and made to order in any size, shape, or capacity. Shinichi’s stove is a fairly standard-sized one that has been in use for over fifty years. Shaped somewhat like a bean when seen from above, it is about knee high and is used in a crouching position.

This one has two fireboxes, one large and one small, each custom-fitted with a lidded iron pot. The largest is for rice, and while the others can be used for rice, they are more often used for vegetables and stews, as well as for steamed items. Each is independently fueled using scavenged wood and fallen branches. Straw, broken wooden implements, cloth, and charcoal can be used as well, but for the most part cooking with one of these stoves involves close monitoring of the fire, feeding it new sticks and twigs at frequent intervals. The time and attention required are more than compensated for by the economy of fuel use.

The other kitchen area is tucked against the rear wall of the raised floor area. Its main feature is a wooden sink, built into the floor and used from a seated position. The sink, set in front of a small, slatted window, is made of wooden planks carefully fitted together with joints tight enough to prevent leakage. Shinichi’s mother crouches over it, scrubbing a large white radish. She takes water from a large earthenware jug, fitted with a lightweight wooden lid. The water is drawn out with a wooden ladle, and the jug is replenished as needed from the well outside. A drain spout protrudes from one corner of the sink through the exterior wall below the window; from there it drips into a narrow, stone-lined channel and, like overflow from the well, flows as waste-water into the pond. This wastewater contains dirt and organic matter from vegetables and other foodstuffs, but nothing in the way of soap or toxic chemicals. Little that resembles soap is used, in fact, with rice hulls and other gentle abrasives being preferred for most purposes, so the wastewater is fairly clean.

The kitchen is equipped with a variety of storage shelves, but there are only a few dishes and cooking implements. Good durable dishes must be purchased from specialized craftsmen, such as potters and woodturners, and like most farm families, Shinichi’s tries to use only what they can make themselves, minimizing cash expenditures. Each family member has a bowl, a cup, homemade spoons and chopsticks, and little else. On the other hand, durable storage jars are considered worth the expense of purchase.

The family eats very little meat or poultry, and they consume their vegetables either fresh or preserved by drying or pickling in brine. Indeed, the variety of pickling techniques is awe inspiring. The kitchen has several large, lidded pickling jars, each containing a different item: radishes, plums, cucumbers, cabbage, and more. A number of these have been actually buried in the floor with just the lids protruding in order to take advantage of natural cooling. There are similar but smaller jars for miso, soy sauce, and cooking oil. Rice for daily use is stored in a finely constructed oblong wooden box with a close-fitting lid.

from the unclean to the clean

A low, thick beam called the agarikamachi, or “stepping-up sill,” marks the edge of the raised floor. Polished and worn from generations of physical contact, it is the ideal height for sitting, and it forms a clear demarcation line between the “unclean” doma, where outdoor footwear is worn, and the “clean” house proper, where wearing shoes is taboo. Our initial impression of the hiroma, or “big room,” is one of dark wood and bamboo. Open at the entrance, the hiroma is bounded to our right by the kitchen wall and shelves, and to the left by wide sliding doors that open onto the veranda. The far wall is a solid one, framed with smoke-blackened wooden boards. We slip off our footwear, and follow Shinichi in stepping up onto the floor.

The floor is made of thick, wide hardwood planks. No coating was applied as a finish, but generations of hand rubbing and contact with bare and slippered feet have rendered them black and shiny, and we can clearly see the light from the wide sliding doors reflected in the floor. The hiroma of many houses have no ceilings and are bound overhead only by the roughly hewn crisscrossed logs that serve as roof beams. But the bamboo ceiling of this particular room lends it a rustic dignity and delicacy, almost as if a simple lean-to has been erected inside the house. Transformed as it has been by long exposure to smoke, the bamboo reflects a warm russet light. This room is stark, resonant, robust, cool, and aromatic.

It is also well appointed. What appear at first glance to be solid walls are in fact sliding panels concealing capacious storage space, and upon closer inspection we can see that a few of these are actually movable, modular storage units that fit perfectly into wall openings and recesses. The thick, horizontal framing that surrounds the room at the height of the doorways supports shelves of various widths, upon which are stacked containers and household implements, boxes and baskets.

The most prominent shelf is a spiritual one: the kami-dana, or “god-shelf,” that bears a miniature Shinto shrine as well as votives and offerings for the gods of nature. There is also a simple, large recess in the wall in front of us, the oshi-ita, which is decorated with paper talismans. Together the kami-dana and oshi-ita transform the entire space into a place of devotion and spiritual significance, a place in which residents and visitors are constantly reminded that nature and the spirits by whose will all was created are the true center of life, and man is allowed to dwell here only with their permission.

The center of life in the house is the unassuming firepit, the irori—a square recess in the floor of this main room. It serves as a cooking facility, where pots of stew or gruel can be hung to cook, and fish and vegetables can be roasted on skewers. Other treats can be toasted over this fire as well, though rice and most rice dishes are better prepared on the kamado. The firepit is the information and communication center of the house. It commands a view of the doma as well, allowing someone seated here, usually the matron of the household, to witness all comings and goings and to monitor and direct all activity. We’ve arrived just as Shinichi and his family are finishing their midday meal. The cast-iron stew pot has been replaced by one for boiling water for tea, suspended over the embers by an adjustable hook. As Misaki and her mother-in-law bustle about the kitchen area, other members of the household lounge comfortably on woven straw mats, some sprawled on the cool floor in hopes of catching a short nap. All told, there are six people, an average number for a farm of this size.

Shinichi is the head of the household and is in his thirties. He grew up in this house, which was built by his grandfather on land obtained by his great-grandfather. As his name indicates, he is the eldest son of his deceased father, Shin. His wife, Misaki, who is a few years younger, grew up in a neighboring village; their marriage was an arranged one. The matron of the household, however, is Shinichi’s mother, who is over fifty years old and therefore quite elderly. Though she defers to her daughter-in-law in many matters, this is her domain and the place where she spends most of her day.

The couple has two children, the boy of twelve who had first noticed our arrival, and a girl of ten. Misaki was pregnant twice since, and while both came to term, they were “sent back” by the midwife at birth. While not explicitly prohibited, large families are strongly discouraged by social norms, and adequate resources for all can only be provided if the population growth of the village is inhibited. This is also the reason the sixth member of the household, Shinichi’s younger brother Tsuyoshi, has never married and lives here in his brother’s house.

More prosperous families with much larger landholdings might be able to consider allowing a second or even a third son to build a house and start a family, and many are taken into childless households or those with only daughters as adopted heirs. But the second son’s lot is assumed to be a solitary, if not strictly celibate, one. This value system definitely sacrifices a large measure of personal liberty for the greater common good. It may seem unfair, and some aspects of it, such as infanticide (dataimabiki, or literally “thinning out”), even extreme. But the voluntary limitation of birthrate and family size has led to a stable population nationwide for nearly two hundred years, to the benefit of all.

From where we sit we can see most of the rest of the house. Beyond the hiroma lie several other modest rooms, all opening onto each other and to the hiroma itself by large sliding doors. In inclement or cold weather, each room can be individually closed, shuttered, and independently heated with small braziers if needed. But on warm days like today everything is opened to the breeze, and it is possible to look from the doma all the way through to the other end of the house and into the garden beyond, a free-flowing enfilade of subtly differentiated living space.

Nearest the hiroma is the zashiki, a tatami-matted space that is less purely utilitarian but nonetheless well suited to many kinds of work as well as to the comfortable reception of guests. It is the most formal room of the house, and is where the third spiritual space, the butsudan, or Buddhist family altar, is located, concealed behind sliding or folding doors. Funerals are held in this room, as are the periodic devotional observances dictated by the faith that require the presence of a Buddhist priest.

The design and features of the zashiki provide a good indication of the prosperity of the household—and perhaps of the community as a whole. It also serves as a barometer for the broad cultural shift in which aspects of the aristocratic lifestyle have gradually percolated through society and become available to nearly everyone, even average families like Shinichi’s. There are many communities around the country where a zashiki with tatami mats would be considered an unnecessary luxury. In those areas, the zashiki would be nearly identical to the hiroma in terms of walls and flooring, and it would most likely not have a ceiling. Large straw mats might be placed on the floor as a kind of proto-tatami (for in fact tatami evolved from rougher, thinner woven mats).

But Shinichi’s zashiki is representative in its construction. It has a ceiling of lightweight battens and boards that is suspended from the beams above, requiring the services of a good carpenter. It has sliding doors as well as shoji made of rice paper over a fine wood framework, and although they were a bit pricey initially, they have proven to be quite durable and easily re-covered when the paper gets ragged. But these all require specialized craftsmen (like the “door and window man” who did the work here) and materials like paper—which cannot be made by most families at home, and so they represent a step away from true self-sufficiency and into the wider cash economy. At the same time, the design is simple to the point of austerity, is unembellished, and relies primarily on the harmonies and counterpoints of unadorned natural materials for its beauty.

a beautiful extension of space

The zashiki is also located to take best advantage of the engawa. With the exterior shutters open, the space under the eaves becomes a beautiful extension of the tatami room. The deep, low eaves shade the interior and modulate its light, and the shoji may be closed fully or partially to control the light even further. The engawa is an intermediate zone, and people can remain in that part where they are most comfortable at the moment or that part best suited to what they happen to be doing, without needing to break off conversation. It also allows visitors to drop by and chat very informally, standing under the eaves or sitting on the edge of the veranda.

To enter the house proper by removing one’s shoes and stepping up to the hiroma implies a long visit and, consequently, the expectation of further hospitality in the form of food and drink. The intermediate space of the engawa, however, with its “here but not really here” ambiguity, enables both parties to end conversation easily and return to what they were doing.

Tucked most deeply inside the house is the nando, or sleeping room. Like the zashiki, the nando has changed over the course of recent decades due to technical and economic developments. From time immemorial, it seems, the nando was a small, wood-floored room with a deep sill into which straw would be thrown as bedding for the entire household. Cotton futon bedding was unavailable, and actual bedding of any sort was only available to the wealthiest classes. Commoners slept in their one set of daily clothes, covering themselves with piles of loose straw and huddling together for warmth. It was uncomfortable and not particularly warm or hygienic.

The early eighteenth century witnessed an agricultural revolution, however, when cotton was grown on a large scale with the encouragement and support of the government. From the point of view of the government, cotton textiles present obvious advantages for outfitting armies because of their durability and strength when compared to hemp, the most commonly used fiber until then. (Silk, of course, is a superior fiber in these regards, but it remains a luxury item.) As cotton has become more widely available, it has declined in cost to the point where even commoners can afford more than one set of clothes as well as bedding, and everything can be repeatedly washed at high temperatures. Mortality records show that the overall health of peasants has improved with the introduction of cotton.

Like the zashiki, the nando of Shinichi’s house is floored with tatami—as is a small anteroom—and it has the deep closets for bedding storage that have started to become common around this time. It is still a fairly small room, however in which the whole family sleeps together, clean, warm, and comfortable.

We ask to use the toilet and are led there by Shinichi’s daughter. This is the smallest room in the house, and while located close to the entrance, it is an almost separate structure. It consists of two cubicles: one an open urinal for men, another just large enough for a wooden-floored squat toilet. The latter has a lightweight wooden door and latch, though there is no separation by gender, age, or status. It is simple and easy to clean, and though no one would consider it a pleasant place, it is made less offensive by incense and flowers. To the user, the toilet serves its purpose well. It is well ventilated (and consequently quite cold in winter), and a concern for hygiene is clear from the nearby hand-washing basin, which is found even in the poorest homes.

To the household, the toilet has an essential and positive economic value. Human waste, or night soil, has become an irreplaceable fertilizer, and considerable ingenuity has been expended on toilet design to allow these waste products to be easily collected and processed. The toilets are built over large wooden casks or earthenware jars sunken into the ground, with lids easily accessible from the ground level outdoors. The provision of a separate urinal is not purely for the convenience of the user; solids and liquids are processed differently before they are ready for the fields, and the underground holding tanks are also separate. From time to time, one sees outdoor urinals built directly over tanks, conveniently located for men working outdoors and intended to encourage them to deposit their waste fluids into the collection system rather than in the open field. Farmers also build toilets and urinals along well-traveled roads for public use, in the hopes of increasing their yields of fertilizer.

In fact, human waste has become a big business, and farmers go to great lengths to secure contracts to collect and transport night soil from the cities to use on their fields. In Europe, this waste is being dumped into rivers, polluting the water supply and leading to outbreaks of cholera, but here the frequent collection and efforts to minimize leakage and loss have positive health benefits for all.

The practice of bathing regularly also has tremendous health benefits. Whereas privately operated public baths have become very common in cities, where the density of the population can support the business on a large scale, bathing is a household affair in villages (unless there is a natural hot spring nearby). Although rapid development in bath facility design is taking place, including improvements in the construction of bathtubs and the design of water heating and drainage systems, few of these advances benefit peasants like Shinichi directly, and it will be over one hundred years before the average farmhouse is equipped with an actual bathroom, tub, and water heater.

At Shinichi’s household, once a week a large tub is dragged either into the doma or outside, filled with water heated on the kamado and over the irori, and everyone, including the neighbors, takes turns washing themselves and soaking. Bathers scrub themselves with small cloth pouches filled with rice bran, which provide the perfect amount of abrasion. Because no soap is used, the waste-water may be safely collected and sent to the pond. Heating this much water is laborious and consumes as much fuel as a day’s worth of meals, and consequently it is difficult to justify bathing more frequently.

There are bathing methods that use less energy, the most common being the steam bath. Often little more than a shuttered cabinet barely large enough for two people and fitted with a small charcoal brazier and a pan of water, the steam bath provides several intense cleansing minutes of pore-opening and sweating. After scrubbing and rinsing with cool water, one feels very clean and refreshed. In summer months, solar energy is used to save fuel. A large jar of water is placed outside directly in the sun, and over the course of the day, it becomes warm enough to be used for the evening bath. Water similarly warmed may also be used to jump-start the heating of water for tea, also saving fuel.

Over time, a variety of bathing arrangements have appeared, from the cook pot-like iron goemon-buro tub to small rooms that have no tubs but are equipped with drains in the floor. But the key component of the bath remains hot water, and the respect and value accorded it reflects an awareness that the benefits come with a significant cost in fuel and therefore in environmental impact. This drive to economize on hot bathwater will prove to be an enduring value (and continue to influence bath design) in later centuries as well.

self-sufficiency as a way of life

Life in the village is marked by self-sufficiency on several different scales. Shinichi’s household, like all the others, is nearly self-sufficient in food, producing enough rice for itself and for government levy and enough vegetables. Each household has at least a few fruit trees, can gather its share of forest foodstuffs, and can fish in the rivers. They press their own oil and ferment miso from soybeans. Unavoidably, temporary surpluses and deficits occur for each family, but more often than not, these can be remedied by the informal exchange that characterizes social interaction: one may receive a bushel of persimmons from a relative and reciprocate with a basket of fish. Unusual food items, perhaps for special occasions such as entertaining visitors, may only be obtainable by purchase, but this is infrequent.

Similarly, each household is self-sufficient in energy. Shinichi’s household uses only the fuel it can gather, which is never more than a fair share of the village’s supply. It has its own water supply in the form of the well. The house and work yards are designed to take advantage of solar energy, and the agricultural process would be unthinkable without it. The house is designed and oriented in conjunction with plantings to maximize natural shade and cooling breezes. Water power is used on a modest scale for pressing oil, grinding grain, and pulverizing minerals, but except for a handful of draft animals in the village, humans power nearly everything.

Shinichi’s family makes most of their tools and implements and produces their own clothes—from spinning and weaving fabric all the way to actually cutting and assembling garments. But here an individual household may begin to rely upon the resources of the village as a whole: it may need to supplement its own cotton with some grown nearby; it may prefer to obtain more expertly woven and dyed fabric; it may need expert metalwork for a particular tool; it needs pottery, tatami mats, and paper for shoji. In all of these areas, while each family may not be truly self-sufficient, the village in general is. In fact, the only essential item likely to be obtainable only from outside the village is salt. Other items are imported, of course, and itinerant peddlers are allowed to sell an increasingly wide variety of items to peasants—seaweed, tea, oil, wooden water dippers, pans, rice pots, paper, fans, rulers. Luxuries and status items are available, like better sake, better cabinetry, finer pottery, ornaments, and accessories, and this attests to the peasants’ increasing standard of living and integration with the wider cash economy. But the essentials are all locally sourced.

There is an incredible amount of recycling going on as well. Agricultural waste—what little there is, since most plants, from root to stalk, are fully utilized in some way—becomes compost and mulch. Similarly, fireplace ash is recycled into the fertilizer mix, as are worn-out woven rush and straw items. Metal (predominantly iron) is successively reworked. A broken cooking pot may be converted into several sickle blades, for instance, and broken blades beaten into straps and hooks.

Wood has a particularly long life cycle: a broken plow frame can become an axe handle, a broken axe handle refitted to a scoop, a broken scoop added to the firewood pile (and its ashes finding their way to the fields again as fertilizer). Clothing can be endlessly reworked, taken apart, remade, with the most intact portions of a worn-out jacket, for example, being carefully salvaged and worked into another as patchwork, which is eventually recycled into carrying pouches, and then as cleaning cloths. Old cleaning cloths can be cut into narrow strips and woven into indoor sandals or small mats, and when these are worn out, they will find their way to the compost heap or end up helping to heat water. In the village, this recycling takes place mostly at the level of households like Shinichi’s, but, in fact, it has been institutionalized and commercialized throughout the country.

Beyond being self-sufficient, most households are able to generate a surplus of some nonagricultural items, which eventually evolve into cottage industries. Though raising food for the nation is their primary purpose and responsibility as mandated by Shogun Ieyasu at the beginning of the era in 1603, in 1649 the government decreed that after their day’s labor is done, peasants should spend their evenings industriously working at crafts that can supplement their income. This is seasonal work as well, much of it ideally suited to occupying the winter months. It also provides a way of efficiently utilizing labor, since all hands are not always required for every agricultural task, and some can be better employed at other industries.

Among the most common cottage industries are straw work, basketry, and textiles. Straw work is incredibly wide in application since the rice straw (wara) from the harvest is the most readily available material for a great number of household necessities and is a prolifically renewable resource From their own leftover straw. Shinichi’s family weaves mats of all sorts, from large floor mats to small ones for seating to “hot pads” and decorative items. Large mats require a specialized weaving frame, usually homemade, and the technique is really that of textile weaving. They also weave pouches and carrying bags from straw, either rough and open weave for heavy-duty work or close and finely woven with decorative patterns for more presentable occasions.

They weave a number of clothing items from straw as well, primarily foot-wear, aprons, and foul-weather gear. Straw footwear ranges from lightweight sandals to heavy snow boots, as well as gaiters and overshoes. In fact, straw overshoes are even made for horses. Straw aprons are mainly for outdoor use, and because they require flexibility, they are usually very finely and decoratively woven. Raincoats and cloaks are made thick and bulky to minimize the amount of moisture that can penetrate, but they are surprisingly lightweight; their collars and neck closures are comfortably thin and flexible. Many kinds of hoods and hats, as well as mittens, can be made from rice straw, and when twisted into rope, its uses are multiplied.

They make bales in which to package and transport rice, as well as brooms, brushes, and even toys from rice straw. It is durable enough to last a season or a year, but most straw items need to be replaced regularly. (There is a particularly high built-in demand for new footwear.) Finally, of course, Shinichi’s family can easily recycle straw items into mulch or fuel, resulting in a zero-waste cycle of use.

They use woven reeds and bamboo strips for more durable items such as basketry and hats. Because of its resiliency, bamboo is particularly appropriate where stiffness and flexibility are desired, and it is fashioned into a variety of implements such as strainers, sieves, funnels, lids, dividers, as well as boxes, tubs, and even ceilings—all using basket-weaving techniques. Bamboo is extremely hardy, prolific, and fast growing, and like straw is easily recycled. It is an irreplaceable feature of Japan’s technical and material culture.

green cottage industries

There are many kinds of textiles that lend themselves to cottage industry, and some have evolved into mass production. True textiles include bast fibers (hemp and ramie), cotton, and silk. Of these, hemp is technically the most ancient and also the easiest to produce, and Shinichi’s family produces enough for its own use. Silk was introduced from China in about 300 ad as a labor-intensive elite good, but Shinichi’s household does not produce it. Cotton, though introduced from Korea and China initially in the twelfth century, was not produced on a large scale until the late seventeenth century, making it the most recent textile fiber. Shinichi’s household does not grow cotton, but weaves and dyes cotton they obtain from relatives.

All of these cottage industries involve trade-offs between resource allocation, environmental impact and the value and utility of the finished products. Examined in this light, straw work represents a nearly ideal process, while devoting farmland to cotton instead of less-productive textile plants represents environmentally sound judgment. Until the dyeing step, the textile processes are nonpolluting in general, their products reusable and recyclable. The finishing steps are essentially indoor activities, and as such they allow the architectural space to be efficiently used for other purposes as well.

Brewing and fermentation at the cottage-industry scale do not consume large quantities of either fuel or freshwater, and their intermediate products are consumable or compostable. The equipment required is primarily wooden barrels and earthenware jars, both of which can be used for years if not decades; these activities do not significantly increase the household’s environmental footprint. Making charcoal for sale is a special case because it involves the direct consumption of limited forest resources, transforming wood from a highly efficient heat source into a less efficient but more easily transported one. It is essentially a gathering activity, and it provides the fuel supply for city dwellers, a large fraction of the population.

Of the industries described above, only silk production embodies extravagance in several areas: acres devoted to mulberry trees, large architectural structures for raising the worms and, consequently, large consumption of building timber for the purpose, a several-fold increase in fuel consumption for heat, and a large outlay of human labor.

Two additional cottage industries should be considered from the standpoint of fuel and resource use, namely smithing and pottery. At the home-industry scale, these activities require several times the amount of fuel a typical household uses, and so their presence decreases the share available to all. Smiths require an intense charcoal fire to be kept burning at all times, while potters consume vast amounts of firewood every few weeks when the clay is fired. Both industries depend upon nonrenewable primary materials, namely iron and potters’ clay. It may be surprising to think of clay as nonrenewable, but extracting clay is in fact a mining operation, albeit with shovels and relatively shallow pits. Sources of suitable quality are relatively rare and rights of access and use are contentious issues.

Good-quality pig iron must usually be transported great distances and has a high initial cost, but full use is made of its easy recyclability. Though many repairs to iron implements can be improvised at home, villagers require access to a smith, even if he devotes part of his day to farming as well. Having a local potter is less essential except in cases where the local economy and other cottage industries depend upon having a ready supply, and it is not surprising that potters tend to form specialized villages close to good sources of clay.

into the forest

Shinichi and the other residents of Aoyagi Village spend most of their time in and around their homesteads and fields, some of which occupy the lower hillsides. They frequently spend days a bit deeper in the mountains gathering food and fuel. But the villagers also participate periodically in logging activities that take them even deeper into the forest. While some of their farming activities provide for local needs, most of their rice finds its way to Edo and the other large cities. Similarly, the lumber they help produce is intended almost entirely for the urban market, linking the well-being of the city to the environmental health of the countryside even more closely.

In forestry, as in farming, an ethic of conservation and husbandry prevails. The forests around Shinichi’s village are farmed for lumber products in a way that satisfies both the subsistence needs of the farmers themselves and the cities’ voracious appetite for timber products.

Man has altered the balance of natural species in the archipelago, and the forest shows human influence clearly. Even at this point, very little is left in a virgin state, and the climax stands of sugi and hinoki trees that are so highly valued were mostly cut in the time of Shinichi’s distant ancestors. The culture and the economy prefer these straight, aromatic, close-grained, and easy-to-work conifers for building material, and so much of the effort of forestry has involved finding and nurturing the best ones, cutting and extracting them, and planting more in their stead. Other species are not ignored, however, and they have their uses and so are valuable and marketable. But sugi is the new king of the forest.

Natural forest growth is a cycle of succession, where grassland sponsors scrub, which gives way to broadleaf species, and, possibly, conifers. Prior to man’s arrival and for long thereafter, the native forests of central Japan were a mixture of deciduous broadleaf and conifer, and where broadleafs with their broad crowns dominated—chestnuts, oaks, laurel, beech—the understory, which received ample sunlight, was rich in grasses, shrubs, and other plants, while also providing niches for abundant fauna.

The broadleaf forest is by nature varied. Sugi and hinoki are taller and narrower than broadleaf trees, however, and grow more closely together, so the dark floor of a climax conifer forest is usually awash in fallen needles and ferns and little else. At higher elevations and in colder regions very little else will thrive, but when man first arrived in central Japan he found mostly broadleaf forests, liberally interspersed with stands of conifers.

Japan first experienced localized deforestation and its ill effects long ago, when the rulers of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries virtually stripped the surrounding valleys to build their capitals at Nara (Heijo-kyo) and Kyoto (Heian-kyo). Their buildings were vast and luxurious and squandered immense quantities of first-growth timber, while gigantic bronze sculptures like the Great Buddha at Todaiji consumed entire hardwood forests for smelting. In aggregate, at this time and ever since, the commoners in towns and peasants in rural areas consumed more of the forest for their subsistence needs than did the ruling classes, but government-directed “command” forest clear-cutting regularly pushed the woodland environment beyond its ability to rebound healthily.

In many cases, the clear-cutting of coniferous woodland allowed healthier, more useful replacement growth to appear, as the natural replacement cycle leads to fast-growing broadleafs. These provide good fuel, their stumps and roots hinder erosion, and new shoots quickly emerge from the stumps, that can in time themselves be harvested. The undergrowth of this kind of replacement forest is ecologically rich and varied.

Unfortunately, because of overexploitation, and particularly the cutting of forests to make new farmland, in previous centuries this positive balance was rarely allowed to emerge. The needs of the peasants like Shinichi’s grandfather—who didn’t require many high-quality conifers but did need hardwood for fuel and forest litter for fertilizer as well as a variety of wild foods—began to collide head on with those of the rulers, who needed prime lumber. The government increasingly felt the need to close forests to peasant use, and it implemented prohibitions and penalties limiting harvesting, transportation, and consumption in clumsy attempts to conserve the resources.

A single hillside is expected to provide a large population with timber, firewood, fertilizer, and arable land, and though one can envision satisfying any two of these biomass needs reasonably, or three with difficulty, to meet all four would seem impossible. Now, however, the forests are producing more than ever before, and everyone, peasant and ruler alike, is getting pretty much what they need. Arrangements that allow long-term mixed use, with clearly defined rights and juridical recourse, have been implemented. Replacement silviculture techniques have been developed and widely disseminated. Conflicts between loggers and farmers over river use have been minimized. And consumption is limited by regulation, taste, the deeply held ethic of conservation, and a variety of technical factors. The new regime of forest management involves the villagers as essential shareholders, utilizes their knowledge and expertise, and provides them with clear economic benefit.

Much of the management and reforesting is made possibly by extensive and detailed tree censuses begun in the mid-seventeenth century, including actual stem counts and descriptions of stands of trees and bamboo. These have evolved into periodically updated forest registers, a key database that government officials, forest wardens, and entrepreneurs can use to plan and coordinate their activity. Similarly, these registers are essential resources for the policy-makers and scholars who write and publish the forestry guidebooks through which the new regenerative forestry methods are disseminated.

The government still reserves extensive forestland for itself, in the form of ohayashi, or “lord’s forests.” These include the best stands of construction-grade timber, the conifer woodlands on the upper slopes. There are mountainsides near Aoyagi that the peasants are forbidden to enter for any purpose without permission, though it is usually granted for cutting and collecting undergrowth, cutting lumber for dams and other irrigation works, and other clearly essential needs. Often villagers are required to pay fees for access, however, and to report dead or fallen trees and violations by others.

The government has become more understanding of villagers’ needs than in Shinichi’s grandfather’s time, but it still feels it must tightly regulate access. Most years, Shinichi and his neighbors are allowed to scavenge nearby logging sites for usable material after logging has been completed, after which the forest will be closed for years to allow regrowth. Villagers are sometimes granted access to forests in return for replanting. Enterprising villagers have been known to obtain permission to replant clear-cut conifer forests in larch, whose needles fall in autumn and can be used as extra fertilizer for the fields, while providing openings for sunlight to reach the forest floor and encourage undergrowth.

Control of most lower forests, largely broadleaf woodland as well as bamboo forest and grassland, has also been granted to the villages. The greater portion is generally communal land, with access governed by the carefully worked-out rules of iriai. Shinichi and many of his neighbors hold forest land with primary rights of disposition, so they can use it as they see fit. But in reality the boundaries are often unclear. Other village households share use of nearby mountains in an arrangement called wariyama, extremely common but at times contentious. These agreements sometimes divide forest access equally among all parties, and sometimes on the basis of the arable land area each household tills, while others stipulate different types of access for different purposes at different times. It is very confusing, and despite the existence of written records, disagreements arise that require arbitration by the other village elders.

Nevertheless, much of the woodland around the village is managed by the villagers themselves, and it meets their needs. Shinichi has standing permission to fell trees for home use or special needs and to gather undergrowth from village land. All of the villagers require more firewood than building timber, and they have standing needs for fertilizer material and forest foodstuffs, so not much tree cutting is initiated by them.

Regardless of the basic forest rights that villagers enjoy, the government designates particularly desirable trees as tomeki, or reserved trees, which can’t be cut by villagers no matter where they stand. In fact, an outstanding tall, straight hinoki about two hundred years old has shaded Shinichi’s work yard since long before his grandfather’s time. This is a tomeki, and though it has stood in place for generations, Shinichi knows that at any time it could be cut and carted away, with no compensation to him or his family. Seen overall, the rights to forest products are basically zoned and divided geographically, but often in shades of gray, with much overlap. Satisfying the many conflicting needs requires adequate oversight.

guardians of the forest

On forestry matters, Shinichi and the other villagers answer to Daisuke Ohbayashi, a forest overseer—ohayashi mamori—and one of the village elders of Aoyagi. This office was established a century ago, when the government was still attempting to insure adequate timber supplies for itself by prohibiting access to others. Peasant officials like Ohbayashi’s grandfather acquired status and badges of office—the right to wear swords and to use a family name in public—and minor stipends paid in rice, so for all intents and purposes they became low-ranking samurai for their trouble. And trouble it was. They discovered that policing the lord’s forest was nearly impossible, for villagers always found surreptitious means to gain access to what they understandably felt was their hereditary gathering ground.

The job included maintaining boundary markers and signs, preventing theft and unauthorized charcoal burning, and monitoring sanctioned logging activities. But when the official focus shifted from prohibitive conservation to large-scale replanting, the nature of the forest patrols changed as well, and Ohbayashi’s job is now quite a bit easier than either his grandfather’s or his father’s. His forest patrols still keep an eye out for fire, storm damage, and theft, but these activities are more likely to be performed communally by the villagers instead of by officials, who now take a more supervisory role. More importantly, through the forest patrols and by acting as paid woodsmen during their off season, the villagers like Shinichi and his neighbors take an active part in nurturing seedlings and maintaining the overall health of the forest.

Regenerative forestry as practiced so successfully relies on the application of agricultural knowledge, much of it derived from ancient practices refined over centuries and handed down by woodsmen, farmers, and gardeners, collated and supplemented with new knowledge and recent experience, and disseminated through printed texts. It builds on existing awareness of the role of healthy forests in maintaining viable watersheds, and on experience in using silviculture to control rivers, limit erosion, and protect arable land. Though the main purpose is to produce large quantities of construction material, the degree to which timber forests, broadleaf forests, grassland, waterways, and arable land form an integral whole whose parts must be kept in balance is reflected in the techniques adopted for germinating, nurturing, harvesting, and transporting the timber. It is an ongoing process of incremental adjustment, monitoring, accommodation, and readjustment, with ample provision for feedback from many sources. And this process, difficult and imperfect though it is, plays a tremendous role supporting a high-quality life for city dwellers and peasants alike.