The woodsmen depicted on the cover of HJAS lived five or six hundred years after the mountain villagers Morten Oxenboell discusses in his article in this issue, “Mountains, Woodsmen, and Village Conflicts in Japan, ca. 1200–1400.” Whether in the thirteenth century or the nineteenth, people who exploited forests were simultaneously vital and marginal to Japanese life—vital because of the need for wood, charcoal, green manure, and other forest products; and marginal because mountain dwellers did not fit comfortably into premodern social and political structures that privileged agricultural communities. The basic technology of felling trees did not change much before the advent of power tools, but by the late eighteenth century a sophisticated lumber industry had developed to get timber to market, while government-sponsored afforestation schemes helped to keep Japan a “green archipelago” despite all the logging.¹

The image comes from a pair of illustrated scrolls (emaki 絵巻) entitled Felling Timber in Mountain Forests, Illustrated and Described (Sanrin batsuzai zukai 山林伐材図解), which the Harvard-Yenching Library recently acquired. The scrolls take the viewer through the process of transforming standing trees in the forests of the Kiso 木曽 and Hida 飛騨 districts into logs ready for lading onto oceangoing vessels for transport to market in Edo and other major cities. Our cover image comes from the fifth scene, which depicts woodsmen chopping with axes using the “tripod cutting” (kanaegiri 鼎伐り) technique, which allowed them to fell large, valuable trees without damaging the harvested logs. The technique is still used in the ritual “first cutting of trees” (misomahajimesai 御杣始祭) for the periodic rebuilding of the Ise 伊勢 Shrines.² Accompanying text states that, before cutting, the lumberjacks “strike the tree. It is said that if birds, squirrels, or the like fly out, they will not fell the tree that day” (木を擲て鳥或栗鼠など飛 出れバその日其木ハ不伐といへり).

The scrolls in the Harvard collection are neither dated nor signed. According to the vendor, at some point in the early twentieth century the set came into the possession of a Francophone owner who added transliterations and brief explanations of each painting in a neat hand. The scrolls are part of a cluster of similar materials produced during the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, all illustrating the forestry practices prevalent in central Honshu. Both Kiso and Hida included significant tracts of high-quality trees designated as imperial forests (goryōrin 御料林) after 1889.³ Moreover, the districts were major sources of lumber used for rebuilding the Ise Shrines every twenty years, an undertaking that severely taxed the regional environment.⁴ The eighteenth scene in the Harvard scroll depicts foresters carrying a log intended as an offering to the shrines (jinnōboku 神納木).

The source text for the scrolls is Kanzai gafu 官材画譜, an illustrated work in two woodblock-printed volumes published around 1852. The author, Tsuchiya Hideyo 土屋秀世, was an official in the employ of the shogunate’s Takayama 高山 intendency in Hida, in which capacity he would have been deeply familiar with forestry practice. The monochrome illustrations by Matsumura Kan’ichi 松村寛一 are identical to those rendered in color in the Harvard scrolls, but whether Matsumura himself painted the scrolls is impossible to say.⁵ If he did, he was a busy man: Hokkaido University holds, under a different title, an identical set of scrolls to Harvard’s.⁶ Moreover, a pair of Meiji-period scrolls clearly modeled on Kanzai gafu but painted in a different style is held by the Chūbu Regional Forest Office in Nagano City. Inoue Hiroto speculates that scrolls such as these were produced during the 1870s and 1880s as illustrated guides to forestry in central Japan that could be displayed at industrial expositions, during imperial tours, and sent overseas as gifts.⁷ HJAS thanks the Harvard-Yenching Library for its kind permission to reproduce the image.

1. Conrad D. Totman, The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995); Conrad D. Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
2. Inoue Hiroto 井上日呂登, “Kiso-shiki batsuboku unzai zue no kaisetsu” 「木曽式伐 木運材図会」の解説 (Nagano: Chūbu shinrin kanrikyoku, 2020–2021), p. 4, https://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/chubu/koho/attach/pdf/kisosikibatuboku-1.pdf.
3. See Conrad Totman, Japan’s Imperial Forest Goryōrin, 1889–1946: With a Supporting Study of the Kan/Min Division of Woodland in Early Meiji Japan, 1871–76 (Folkstone, UK: Global Oriental, 2007).
4. Jordan Sand, Hakai to saisei no Ise jingū 破壊と再生の伊勢神宮 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2023).
5. Tsuchiya Hideyo, Kanzai gafu, illus. Matsumura Kan’ichi, 2 vols. (n.p: n.d., ca. 1852); National Diet Library, Tokyo, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2578094. According to the National Diet Library’s catalog, Tsuchiya Hideyo died in 1847. The book includes a preface by Tsuchiya Aritada 土屋有忠 dated autumn of the fifth year of the Kaei 嘉永 period, or 1852. For the specific source illustration of the image featured on the cover, see Kanzai gafu, v. 1, seq. 15, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2578093/1/15.
6. Kanzai kawakudari no zu 官材川下之図; Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, https://www2.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/cgi-bin/hoppodb/record.cgi?id=0D024080000001000.
7. Inoue, “Kiso-shiki batsuboku unzai zue no kaisetsu,” p. 2.