Yakushima: Who Could Use the Mountain?

In 1921, the government offered Yakushima's residents access to designated state forests for firewood and charcoal production, preferential employment in forestry, and improvements to island infrastructure. The document became known locally as the “Yakushima Constitution.” It followed a failed attempt to recover ownership of the forests through the courts.^[1]

The nickname can obscure the nature of the settlement. The island had not acquired a constitution for independent government, and the state had not returned all the disputed land. It had offered particular uses and opportunities within land it continued to own. To understand what that distinction meant, the forest has to be followed beyond its oldest trees: into a cooking fire, a village budget and the journey home from a logging settlement.

Yakushima rises steeply from the sea south of Kyushu. Evergreen broadleaf woods occupy lower ground; higher elevations contain forests in which conifers grow among broadleaf trees, while shrubs cover exposed mountain heights. The Forestry Agency's account distinguishes yakusugi, the conventional term for naturally grown island cedars more than a thousand years old, from younger kosugi. These are categories used to describe a varied landscape, not ages that can be read from every trunk's girth.^[2]

The distinction between lower woods and high cedar country matters to the island's human history. A household gathering fuel and an enterprise seeking a large cedar were looking for different things. The wood burned to process another product could be economically important without ever becoming an impressive beam or a celebrated ancient tree. Access to the mountain involved several resources, at different distances from the settlements around its coast.

During the Edo period, when the Shimazu house governed the island from Satsuma in southern Kyushu, cedar shingles became a means of paying tribute. Islanders also exchanged them for grain and other necessities. The shingles, called hiragi, connected work in the mountains with supplies that the island obtained through a wider trading system.^[3]

A traditional account associates the expansion of cedar cutting with the seventeenth-century scholar-monk Tomari Jōchiku. In that story, he obtained the mountain deities' permission before promoting extraction. It is a transmitted explanation of an undertaking in a sacred landscape, not an independently verified conversation with the gods. Its significance is the permission the story considers necessary: the forest's usefulness did not make its religious associations irrelevant.

The physical traces explain another part of the undertaking. Producing a roof shingle required more than identifying a tree with enough wood in it. The grain and shape of the material determined what the worker could make—and what would remain on the mountainside.

Straight-grained wood could be split into the thin pieces needed for roofing. Knotted portions and the spreading base of a trunk were less suitable. The Yakushima Environmental Culture Foundation's interpretive account connects this selectivity with the high stumps and discarded wood left by earlier logging.^[4] A felled tree was therefore not necessarily a tree removed in its entirety.

Making smaller products also addressed the problem of carriage. Shingles could be carried down by people; moving a complete trunk demanded another means of transport. Cutting and splitting in the mountains reduced a large, irregular object to loads that could leave the forest. The useful product and the route available to it were connected before either reached the shore.^[5]

This helps explain why a worked forest could still contain so much wood. A stump marked an act of cutting, while other material remained because it did not fit the product being made. The presence of old wood is not, by itself, evidence that nobody had worked there. Nor does a cut surface establish that every neighboring tree was felled during the same campaign.

The material left behind would later acquire other uses. For the shingle maker, however, the immediate task was selective: obtain pieces that could be split, counted, carried and accepted. A tree's size alone did not settle its value for that task. A smaller quantity of suitable grain could be more useful than a larger quantity that could not produce the required pieces.

The exchange system made the completed load consequential beyond forestry. Once shingles served both tribute and the acquisition of provisions, access to suitable timber affected what households could obtain elsewhere. Restricting entry to the forest would consequently change more than an occupation. It could interrupt a connection between mountain work and the supply of everyday life.

In his history of the forest dispute, Narihisa Nakashima dates the decisive government–private boundary survey to 1889. About four-fifths of Yakushima became national forest. Restrictions affected the supply of fuel used by households and by activities such as fish processing, sugar making and camphor production. The contested mountain included working woods close to village needs, not only remote stands of ancient cedar.^[6]

The island's two municipalities sought the return of land, then pursued their claim in court. They lost at the highest level in 1920. Nakashima summarizes a crucial distinction in the decision: earlier use of cedar was acknowledged, but was not accepted as establishing ownership. The inhabitants' history of obtaining things from the forest and the legal title to the forest were treated as different questions.

That difference explains the form of the 1921 response. The management outline made roughly seven thousand hectares available as delegated forests for fuelwood use. Employment preferences and infrastructure commitments addressed additional ways in which state forestry could support island life.^[1] These provisions could matter materially while leaving the ownership decision intact.

The arrangement also divided opportunity into several forms. A household might obtain fuel; someone might earn wages in forest work; a settlement might benefit from a road. None was automatically equivalent to owning the underlying ground. Each required a rule or an institution through which the promised use could be carried out.

The distinction is easily lost when the dispute is summarized as either a complete exclusion or a complete restoration of village rights. What emerged was a set of permitted uses under state ownership. Its practical meaning depended on how village organizations used the designated woods, arranged labor and handled the proceeds. Records from Koseda give that process a scale smaller than the island-wide settlement.

Nakashima examined a record of delegated-forest operations in Koseda covering 1933–1937. The work involved cutting, charcoal making, hauling with horses and making sacks. Payments for labor exceeded the cost of the raw material. In one cutting category employing both men and women, the recorded daily rate for men was higher. A collective enterprise did not produce an identical wage for everyone participating in it.^[7]

The accounts distinguish several stages between a woodland and income available to a household. Material first had to be obtained; people then worked and moved it; the product could be sold. Gross receipts were not all money available for distribution. Part paid for the labor and other expenses that made a sale possible.

A surplus could nevertheless remain with the organization. Nakashima, citing the folklorist Miyamoto Tsuneichi, reports that accumulated profits helped pay for rebuilding Koseda's school. Forestry thus produced two different returns: wages received through particular work and funds available for a collective undertaking. A household could be connected to both, but through different decisions.

The school connection helps explain the reach of the forest settlement. The benefit did not have to remain in the form of wood taken home. A product sold outside the household could become money used for a building that many households shared. The village organization stood between the resource and that later use of its proceeds.

Elsewhere, the form of production changed with markets. At Kurio, prewar uses included charcoal, camphor and railway sleepers. Postwar cutting supplied wood for pulp. Nakashima's account describes an association arranging work through local contractors who employed workers. The lower broadleaf forests entered an industry quite different from the production of cedar roof shingles.^[8]

These examples caution against treating all island forestry as the removal of ancient trees. Different woods supplied different products, and those products required different labor. They could still converge in the same kind of practical question: how much income would remain after production, and who would decide what to do with it?

The answer became visible at Kurio in the 1970s. From 1973, the forest association paid its members' district fees collectively. By 1975, its account anticipated renewed personal contributions as the industry's prospects weakened. Forest earnings had taken the place of a payment otherwise expected from households. A contraction could therefore reappear in a village bill, even for someone who was not cutting wood that day.^[8]

State forestry developed another mountain landscape around transport and residence. The forest railway and settlements associated with Kosugidani connected cutting areas with the coast. The Japanese Forestry Society's heritage record identifies the remains of offices, housing and a school alongside the transport works. Families, not only crews temporarily sent uphill, had lived within this system.^[9]

Moving timber through steep ground required several linked methods. A wooden chute could guide logs down a slope. An incline used two cable-linked trolleys: a loaded car descended under braking while drawing an empty one upward. Joined to forest tracks, these arrangements connected extraction sites with storage grounds by the sea.^[5]

Each section addressed part of a journey. A means of lowering a log did not by itself deliver it to the port; the material had to pass onward. The settlements supplied people close to the work, but those people required a connection in the other direction, bringing food, possessions and family members into the mountains.

A former worker's recollection makes that second requirement concrete. Interviewed during research in 2004, the man identified as T described life at Ishizuka, farther uphill from Kosugidani. At first, its residents could not use a powered trolley for the last part of the return from shopping. They carried purchases—and children—on foot. He recalled asking the forestry office to provide passenger transport to Ishizuka and eventually obtaining permission.^[10]

The railway's presence had not automatically given every household the same usable route home. It had been organized around work, while residence created additional demands. Getting permission changed the relationship between the transport system and the families it helped sustain.

The recollection concerns one man's intervention, recorded decades later. It nevertheless supplies an action missing from a railway map: a request to carry people on a line serving production. The mountain's industrial geography was adjusted through such decisions, not simply imposed once by laying tracks. Living near the forest could shorten the way to work while lengthening the way to everything else.

The high-volume logging landscape did not last unchanged. The Forestry Society dates the closure of the last forest settlement to 1970. T's recollection describes helping households move their possessions down to Anbō as the settlement system ended. He subsequently worked on construction associated with Yakusugi Land, a forest area prepared for visitors, and later in the recovery of old logging remnants.^[9][10]

His work changed while his accumulated familiarity with timber and the mountain remained useful. This is one documented career, not evidence that everyone leaving the settlement found an equivalent livelihood. Closing a settlement removed a place of residence as well as a workplace. A household's next arrangement had to be made somewhere else, whether or not one of its members continued in forest-related employment.

Conservation developed through a series of decisions rather than one switch from cutting to tourism. Forest scientist Takashima Atsushi traces a 1969 investigation to proposals for smaller cutting areas, protected forests and places where the cedars could be appreciated. An ecosystem reserve was established in 1992, followed by World Heritage inscription in 1993. The protected property covers part of the island, extending from central mountains to the western coast; it is not a designation of every village and plantation as the same kind of forest.^[11][12]

Meanwhile, the connection between forest earnings and local institutions continued to change. In 1989, Kurio combined its district and forest-association accounts. The arrangement brought management of association property into the village's budget process.^[8] Revenue from the woods had become embedded in local administration, even as the earlier basis for earning it weakened.

The dates resist an explanation in which World Heritage recognition alone ended a stable island economy. Settlement closure, altered production, village finances and new protection measures had different sequences. Their intersection changed the choices available to people around the forest. Preserving old growth and sustaining household income were related tasks, but neither automatically accomplished the other.

The wood once rejected by shingle makers became useful to a later craft industry. Resin-rich cedar remnants could survive for long periods; their irregular grain and forms offered material for objects quite unlike roof coverings. Known as domaiboku, such old stumps and logging remnants were prepared, dried and worked into craft products. The term does not mean that every piece had lain buried, or that every remnant dated from the same period.^[4]

The change was in the requirements of the product. A knot that interrupted a straight shingle could interest a maker seeking patterned wood. What one undertaking left behind could become another's starting material. That reuse depended on an inherited stock: it did not make centuries of tree growth immediately replaceable, and it did not authorize anyone to remove wood from a protected forest.

Another undertaking kept trees in place and returned to measure them. In 1973–1974, the regional forestry bureau and Kyushu University established permanent study plots in the cedar forests. Takashima describes repeated measurements of the stems within them, allowing researchers to follow growth and changes in the forest community. An individual measurement became useful through comparison with records made before and afterward.^[11]

This work addressed a different question from how much timber could leave the mountain. It examined what was happening among the trees that remained. Its timescale also required continuity: a plot needed to stay identifiable, and later researchers needed to be able to return to it.

Yakushima's forest history is held in these different arrangements of access. Shingle makers sought particular grain. Village associations turned woodland products into wages and shared funds. Families negotiated use of an industrial railway. Craftspeople worked material left by earlier cutting, while researchers made repeated visits to standing forests. None describes the whole island on its own. Together they show why the old trees and the evidence of work belong in the same history—and why deciding who may use the mountain has involved much more than deciding who owns it.