일제 식민지시기 산불대책 : 관리의 영역으로 들어온 산불

Abstract

Studies of the Colonial authorities’ forest policy, during the Japanese occupation period, have so far concentrated upon examining how the forest resources were managed and exploited. As it was important for the authorities to survey the overall size of Joseon forests (and who owned them as well) in order to manage and monitor forest resources efficiently and effectively, colonial authorities launched certain projects in such vein, and those projects have been well studied by today’s researchers.BR Yet how the authorities were endowed with such power over forests, as well as the right to manage forests in the first place, was somewhat absent from previous studies. With the intention to compensate for such absence, the issue of forest protection will be examined in this article, in terms of the authorities’ supposed plans for fire fighting, which the colonial authorities claimed as stemming from their will to protect and preserve forests. By doing so we may see how the issue of forest fires entered the realm of state management to begin with.BR Of course, forest fires were initially never the priority of concern for colonial authorities, as earlier they had no reason to deem the issue either worthy or necessary. It was only natural for them to turn their attention to such issue (forest fires) in times when the Bukseon reclamation project was launched and wartime mobilization was firing up full scale. The authorities had to monitor all those forest fires because they needed all the woods they could get, and that was how forest fires entered their range of interests. With a systemic preservation policy in place, at least some of the forest fires may have been prevented. But the effect such policy ultimately had upon the forests in general should be assessed from a more balanced point of view, as such policy was intent upon utilizing all the forest resources, just as much as it was claimed to be interested in preserving them. In that regard, forest fires should be considered as a topic that could reveal both the effects and shortcomings of the colonial authorities’ intentions and efforts.