The Yoshino forests are in a forestry district that has now been in use for some 500 years. A great deal of local expertise has been passed down over the generations. Forestry in Yoshino involves planting seedlings at densities of 10,000 trees per hectare (vs. 3,000 to 4,000 trees/hectare in customary forestry practice). The woods are subsequently improved by removing trees that aren’t growing well. This thinning is repeated several times based on the growth of the trees. Called “multiple thinning,” this process results in outstanding wide-trunked trees characterized by relatively uniform thickness from trunk to tip, few knots, dense growth rings, and straight wood grain.

In most places, final harvesting of trees that remain after thinning takes place after 40 to 50 years. At Yoshino, the trees are harvested after a much longer period of 80 to 100 years. Some trees are allowed to grow for 100 years or longer, depending on their condition. Because of this, Yoshino has maintained numerous thick-trunked trees that are 100 to 200 years old to this day.

That’s when I first suggested the idea of building forestry roads to Yoshino. I’d learned about forestry roads while studying forestry. My first attempts to build a road with my younger brother ended in failure due to a large-scale landslide. Since the mountains of Yoshino all have steep slopes, the sides of the mountains will collapse if we are not careful while building roads. One reason helicopter use was so common was that the numerous steep slopes made it too difficult to build roads for forestry. That’s when I met Keisaburo Ohashi, who had experience building high-density forestry road networks. When I saw the roads he was building, I felt they would be ideally suited to Yoshino. I became his apprentice immediately. We gave building roads another try. Since then, we’ve gradually completed a 78-kilometer network of roads on land we own. This took us about 30 years to accomplish.

I think it is now my turn to pass on the advantages of the road building methods I learned from Mr. Ohashi. Lately I’ve been giving lectures, training people, and providing hands-on experience for people who have expressed an interest in building forestry road networks. If even one of them actually begins building roads like I did when I was young, others who see them will start trying it themselves. I hope our approach will help protect the forests of Japan as this ripple effect spreads, making forestry healthier not just in Yoshino, but across the country.

Using timber harvesting by thinning trees is one way to solve this problem. If timber from thinning were profitable, it could cover the cost of caring for the forests. This would ultimately make it possible to harvest high-quality timber. I hear that some areas and local governments have already begun promoting the use of timber from thinning. They are using it for buildings and furniture, and are developing the technology to use wood chips in biomass power generation. Competition with imported lumber is still likely to remain a factor, but I think there’s a pressing need for the Japanese forestry industry as a whole to broadly communicate the need to thin forests and the importance of developing new uses for timber from thinning, despite this.