A period of internal strife and warfare during the following centuries which left forest interest in the background, led, in 1192, to the establishment of the rule of the shoguns, the hereditary military representatives of the mikado, who made him a mere figurehead, and exercised all the imperial functions themselves, until the revolution of 1868 restored the mikado to his rights.
The effort at conservative forest use was renewed with increased harshness when, after a period of warfare and devastation, the great shogun family of Tokugawa (1603) assumed the rule of the empire, enforcing the restrictive edicts with military severity. Even at that early age, the protective influence of forest cover on soil and waterflow was fully recognized, and a distinction of open or supply forest and closed or protection forests seems to have been made, the latter being placed under the ban of the emperor or shogun, and withdrawn from utilization. The extensive forests of the province of Kiso, the best remaining, owe their preservation to these efforts. The daimios, 260 in number, each in his district, enforced the edicts in their own way, giving rise thereby to great differences in forest administration; yet in the absence of technical knowledge, deterioration continued. The severity of punishments for depredations etc., reminds us of those of the German Markgenossen, a hand or finger being the penalty for theft, death by fire that for incendiaries.
The idea of protecting or reserving certain species of trees, which was practiced in India by the rajahs, we find here again in the beginning of the 18th century, the number of such protected species varying from one to seven and even fifteen in different districts. Another unique and peculiar way of encouraging forest culture was to permit peasants who made forest plantations in the State forests, to bear a family name, a right which was otherwise reserved to the knights or samurli, or to wear a double-edged sword like the latter. Arbor days were also instituted, memorial days and festivities, as at the birth of children, being marked by the planting of trees.
While in Germany the love of hunting had led to the exclusion of the people from the forests, in Japan it was a question of conserving wood supplies that dictated these policies.
It is claimed that to these early efforts is due the preservation of the remaining forests. But, while this may be true in some instances, as in the province of Kiso, more probably their distance from centers of consumption and their general inaccessibility preserved those of Hokkaido and of the northern mountains. Certainly the brush forests south of Tokyo do not testify to great care.
The detested shogunate was abolished in 1867 by a revolution which brought the mikado to his rights again and crushed the power of the daimios, whose fiefs were surrendered, and their acquisitions of forest property, as well as (a few years later) those of the priests, were declared State property, with the exception of some which were recognized as communal properties.
Similar to the experiences of France, the disturbances in property conditions, which implied instantaneous loss by the people of all rights of user in the State property as well as removal of all restrictions from private and communal properties, led to wholesale depredations from the State domain, and to widespread deforestation and devastation, an area of a million acres of burnt waste near Kofu, west of Tokyo, testifying to the recklessness of these times.
Without any force to guard property rights, stealing on an extensive scale, similar to past experiences in the United States, with the accompanying wastefulness, became the order of the day, and is even now not uncommon.
A first provisional administration of State forests was inaugurated, and a forest reconnaissance ordered in 1875 in order to secure insight into the mixed-up property relations, and restore to their rightful owners such portions as had been wrongly taken by the State.