Coping With Gaizai: Japanese Forest Cooperatives and Imported American Timber

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, foreign timber-gaizai to the Japanesecaptured an increasing share of Japan's rapidly growing market for wood products. Although it is one of the world's most forested countries, the nation's timber producers faced a host of problems and found it difficult to compete with this unwonted competition. By the early 1970s imports had captured more than 60 percent of Japan's domestic softwood market' and small holders, who made up the bulk of the nation's forestland owners, were hard hit. Responsibility for coping with their plight fell largely upon forest owners' cooperatives, or shinrin kumiai. Forest owners' cooperatives belong to prefectural and national federations which have played a major part in shaping Japan's responses to foreign timber imports. The Forestry Agency, various other governmental entities, and trade associations also have influenced policies. But it is at the level of individual kumiai that the most immediate responses have been shaped and where the impact of foreign imports has been most evident.2 Japan's shinrin kumiai vary tremendously because their leadership, economic and social conditions, and above all their environmental circumstances differ markedly. This essay will suggest the scope of the responses of kumiai to softwood imports by discussing four of them in detail: Higashi-Agano Shinrin Kumiai in Saitama prefecture; Okutamacho Shinrin Kumiai in the Tokyo administrative district (located about two hours west of the city proper); and Izumo-shi Shinrin Kumiai and Nita-cho Shinrin Kumiai, both in Shimane prefecture.3 Despite the problems plaguing them and their many differences, all four have devised strategies that seem to promise continued profitable forest production, albeit at levels and in ways that differ sharply from those of earlier years.4 Higashi-Agano lies in low mountains at the edge of the Kanto Plain, the large lowland surrounding the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. The community has limited farmland that provides supplemental income and a source of food for home use; forests traditionally have been the