Grassy prairie and barrens due to natural conditions are not absent, and are due to excessive drainage through loose coarse-grained rock soil; they are found, not extensively, at the foot of volcanoes, and on highest elevations. The differentiation of land areas is not quite certain. In 1894, there was still 30.5% of grassy prairie reported, but some of this, no doubt, was forested, probably one-half.
The bulk of the forest area is owned by the State and the Imperial Household. Communal forests are estimated to aggregate, in 1904, somewhat over four million acres (7.5%), in 1910 reported as 11%, and private property some 18 million (26%; in 1910, 22%) leaving 30 million for the State and for Imperial or Crown forest (66%), the latter comprising some 5.5 million acres.
These figures are liable to variation, due to sales of the latter class, and to adjustments of the somewhat obscure property rights.
The ownership by the State and a conservative use of the mountain forest is necessitated by the protective value of the forest cover, the cultivation of the extensive rice fields being dependent upon irrigation.
2. Development of Forest Policy.
The history of Japan dates back to 660 B.C., when the empire was founded on the island of Kiushiu by the warrior king Jimmuteno. He established a kind of feudal government, with the daimios (knights or barons) holding their fiefs from the mikado, who was considered the sole owner of the soil, or at least all exercise of ownership rights emanated from him. Private property seems then not to have existed at all, the people having merely rights of user. Colonization of the islands brought under the mikado’s dominion progressed rapidly, and with it, not only arable portions but even mountains were denuded.
With the beginning of the Christian era, the need of better protection against floods seems to have been recognized, and, in 270 A.D., we find the first forest official appointed, a son of the royal house, who with assistants was to regulate the use of the forest property, which, under the rights of user granted by the mikado, was being excessively exploited and devastated.
In the fifth century, the feudal method of giving fiefs of land and forest to the deserving vassals had come generally into vogue, and later, with the rise of Buddhism, forests were assigned to the temples and priests, who, as in Germany the monks, were assiduous in cultivating and utilizing them.
Soon the daimios, similarly to the barons in Germany, began to assert exclusive property rights, and, notwithstanding various edicts, issued from time to time to secure free use to the people, more and more of the forest area was secured by daimios, and by priests as temple forests.
In the ninth century, deforestation and excessive exploitation had so far progressed that not only the need of protecting watersheds was recognized by edicts, but fear of a timber famine led even to planting in the provinces of Noto.