From Firewood to Coal: Deforestation and the Development of the Silk Reeling Industry in Modern Japan

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the link between deforestation and the development of the silk reeling industry in Suwa district in Nagano prefecture from the 1870s to the 1900s, and the subsequent shift from firewood to coal. Since the Tokugawa period, firewood for the silk industry had come from land held in common by several villages. From the late 1870s, the development of silk as the most important export industry produced a shortage of firewood; by the mid-1880s, traditional sources were being supplemented by the transfer to silk producers of trees on government land. An attempt by the prefectural government to encourage tree-planting was unsuccessful, and in the early 1890s it became necessary to transport firewood from neighbouring districts.

The steam boilers which had been used in the silk industry since the late 1870s were cheap to buy, but too weak for use with coal. Coal, therefore, did not become important until around the turn of the twentieth century, when steam boilers had become stronger and the gap in the relative prices of coal and firewood had been reduced.

This chapter is a revised version of S. Sugiyama and Izumi Yamada, “From Firewood to Coal: Deforestation and the Development of the Silk Reeling Industry in Modern Japan” in Yano (2008). It originally appeared in Shakai Keizai Shigaku 65(2) (July 1999), pp. 3–23, as a Japanese-language article entitled “Seishigyō no Hatten to Nenryō Mondai: Kindai Suwa no Kankyō Keizaishi” (The Problem of Fuel: an Economic History of the Environment with reference to the Nagano Silk Reeling Industry)