Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman Robert Winstanley-Chesters Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 292. $40.00 hardcover, $40.00 e-book. "The mountain ranges in Korea cover more than half the total area of the country. Owing to indiscriminate felling of trees without public supervision, which was practiced for a long time past, most of the mountain slopes … have become denuded of trees."1 Traditionally, academic histories of Korean forests almost inevitably start with the assertions of the Japanese colonial authorities, such as this quotation from a report published by Tokyo's famous precolonial Resident-General Itō Hirobumi 伊藤博文 in 1907. In this colonial narrative, Korean forest history, in comparison with Japan's, was not auspicious. The Chosŏn dynasty bequeathed only degraded forests and mountains, covered not in trees but in vividly red soil. Japan has a long history of appointing forest wardens (yamamori 山守) and timber magistrates (zaimokuishi bugyō 材木石奉行) to quantify and survey national, regional, and local [End Page 158] timber resources. In comparison, "the ownership of forests" in Korea was historically ambiguous.2 When it comes to environmental history, these colonial presumptions became commonsense knowledge globally; they have been both internalized by Koreans and projected onto postcolonial Korean narratives about the peninsula's own forests. This intellectual inheritance from the colonial period means that to most academic readers, Park Chung-hee's 박정희 efforts at greening South Korea, through the New Village movement (K. Saemaŭl undong 새마을운동) and other projects in the 1960s and 1970s, are a huge surprise and feel in some way counter to the grain of Korean history. The barren slopes close to population centers in North Korea, with their damaged and depleted ecologies, are what we expect when it comes to Korean forest spaces. This unbalanced narrative inherited from pre-1945 prejudices is of course not true. It was never true. But academic writing is only recently beginning to find a more nuanced and empirical direction. While Conrad Totman's masterful 1989 book outlines in beautiful, intricate detail the minutiae of pre-Meiji Japanese forestry, we have waited until now for a piece of work that does the same in Korean history in English.3 David Fedman's Seeds of Control aims for a historical frame closer to our present time than Totman's, but it shares similar ambitions. It is worth saying at the outset that Fedman's work is the first in an emergent body of work in Korean environmental history. John Lee's doctoral work on Chosŏn's "kingdom of pines" sets the tone for a complete reconfiguration of Korea's forest history: Lee illuminates the reality that Korea had a long history of coherent forest management revolving around red pine (Pinus densiflora) and black pine (Pinus thunbergii), which were perhaps not as practically attractive as the hardwoods most important and traditional to Japan.4 Fedman's book beautifully plays off colonial horror on Korea's alien red soil, as much as it plays on James Scott's words for its title: if states have to see in a particular way to assert political claims and their legitimacy, then they have to seed in a similar way, both agriculturally [End Page 159] and arboreally.5 Seeds of Control explores the various processes by and through which Japanese imperialism constructed a particular vision of modernity on Korean forest landscapes. As with most developmental narratives related to colonial Korea, the approach Fedman describes does not apply to the later period of total-war mobilization, when all the peninsula's resources, including its trees, served Tokyo's military strategy. Fedman's work is most fascinating for the unexpected glitches in the colonial system it describes. Just like the colonial administration, Japanese scientists were unimpressed by Koreans' love for red pine. Pine associations (K. songgye 松契), Korea's traditional institutions for local forest management, were regarded with suspicion and deemed ripe for modernization. According to the Japanese, "Songgye had failed to curb deforestation on a national scale … precisely because of their parochialism. Their legacy was atomized pockets of protected...