This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman's widely acclaimed study of Japan's environmental policies over the centuries.
Professor Totman raises the critical question of how Japan's steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products. Mindful that in global terms this has been a rare outcome, and one that bears directly on Japan's recent experience as an affluent, industrial society, Totman examines the causes, forms, and effects of forest use and management in Japan during the millennium to 1870. He focuses mainly on the centuries after 1600 when the Japanese found themselves driven by their own excesses into programs of woodland protection and regenerative forestry.

By 1853 Japan had been transformed from a sparsely populated land of nonliterate tribal peoples into an elaborately structured commercial society sustaining massive cities and a varied array of sophisticated cultural production. In this authoritative survey, Conrad Totman examines the origins of Japanese civilization and explores in detail the classical, medieval, and early-modern epochs, weaving interpretations of the major themes in Japan's cultural and political development into a rich historical narrative.

This highly readable book offers a rich narrative of Japan's early modern - or Tokugawa - period (1568-1868). Drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, Totman weaves together political, economic, intellectual, literary and cultural history with imagination and skill, making this the only truly comprehensive and up to date study in English of these three centuries of Japanese history. The author broadens the context still further by bringing a unique ecological perspective to his subject, examining such topics as natural disasters, resource use and depletion, demographics, and river control. The book begins with the story of a century and a half of extraordinary growth that culminated in the urban cultural blossoming of the Genroku period (roughly 1680 to 1710). It then traces the complex pattern of political, cultural, and more fundamental environmental developments that brought Japan through the harsh decades of the eighteenth century into a period of renewed social and cultural dynamism in the 1790s. Finally, it follows the growing entanglement of these domestic trends and surging Euro-American imperialist activity that led to the Meiji Restoration and Japan's move into an era of active global engagement. Recognizing that Eurasian political boundaries are again in flux, the author devotes considerable attention to Japan's international relations during the decades after 1792 when its boundaries with Russia were gradually clarified. Totman enlivens his book throughout with biographical detail, forthright interpretation, and frequent quotations from primary sources. The extraordinary breadth of his sources and his remarkable ability to bring them together in a clear and engagingnarrative promise to make Early Modern Japan the standard work on the subject for years to come.

Every foreign traveler in Japan is delighted by the verdant forest-shrouded mountains that thrust skyward from one end of the island chain to the other. The Japanese themselves are conscious of the lush green of their homeland, which they sometimes refer to as 'the green archipelago'. Yet, based on its fragile geography and centuries of extremely dense human occupation, Japan today should be an impoverished, slum-ridden, peasant society subsisting on a barren, eroded moonscape characterized by bald mountains and debris-strewn lowlands. In fact, as Conrad Totman argues in this pathbreaking work based on prodigious research, this lush verdue is not a monument to nature's benevolence and Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, but the hard-earned result of generations of human toil that have converted the archipelago into one great forest preserve. Indeed, the author shows that until the late 1600s Japan was well on her way to ecological disaster due to exploitative forestry. During the Tokugawa period, however, an extraordinary change took place resulting in a system of 'regenerative forestry' that averted the devastation of Japan's forests. "The Green Archipelago" is the only major Western-language work on this subject and a landmark not only in Japanese history, but in the history of the environment.

The lush green mountainous archipelago of today supports a population of over 127 million people and one of the most advanced economies in the world. How has this come about? At what environmental cost? Conrad Totman, one of the world's foremost scholars on Japan, here provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the country's environmental history, from its beginnings to the present day. What makes the Japanese story particularly instructive is that the country's boundaries are uncommonly clear and the nature, timing, and extent of external influences on its history are unusually identifiable. The Japanese experience, therefore, not only yields important insights into the processes of environmental history, it offers important lessons for the wider environmental history of the planet.