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At the end of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th, the Shogunate governors of Japan, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, had nearly all of Japan's best old-growth trees cut down for construction of monumental temples and images of the Buddha. Ieyasu also built a new capital city called Edo, which later became Tokyo. After 100 years of rampant harvesting, the forests of Japan were beginning to give out. The soil was eroding off of the mountainous land at an alarming rate, and rivers were becoming polluted with increasing loads of silt. By the late 17th century, the country's governors had resolved to set aside large swathes of forestland as national assets, and not allow any cutting within these areas. Anyone caught poaching the trees was put to death.

Today, almost 70% of the land area of Japan is forested. (In comparison, only 33% of the United States is forested although it may be comparing apples and oranges, since not all of the U.S. is suitable for growing trees.) How does a modern, high-income, high-consumption society maintain such a high proportion of its forest? Simple: Japan exports deforestation, by importing the massive amounts of wood it uses from other countries.

Eighty percent of the material that goes into housing frames, chopsticks, Hello Kitty stationery, and all the other wooden products in Japan comes from abroad. British Columbia, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, Chile, Ghana, New Zealand the forests of the world pour onto ships, cross every ocean, and end up in the hungry mills of Japan.

Before the Second World War, Japan supplied itself the lumber it needed through colonial expansion. First, the northern island of Hokkaido, home of the indigenous Ainu people, was raided and cleared of softwood. As Japan expanded into parts of Siberia, Korea, Manchurian China, and Taiwan in the 1910s and 1920s, the colonial governments built wood and paper mills as one of their first acts in each new land.

After the Empire of the Rising Sun was defeated in World War II, the American occupation government helped the nation to rebuild by encouraging lumber imports from Philippines, which had also come under U.S. "protection." The result was the decimation of Philippine forests, a process which is on-going to this day. Between 1951 and the mid-1990s, Japan also imported wood from Alaska's Tongass National Forest, as well as western Oregon and Washington State. Nevertheless, the country had to cut into its own forests during the post-war reconstruction era.

As Japan recovered

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