When timber grows wild: the desocialisation of Japanese mountain forests

This chapter is concerned with how a specific productive initiative has come to be experienced locally as a negative form of environmental change. In post-war upland Japan much mixed natural woodland has been turned into monocultural timber plantations in an attempt to make the mountains a space of domestication able to support modern rural livelihoods. Although a transformation of the mountains has indeed taken place, the new forest that has emerged is not what was promised. Far from extending human control over the natural environment, this industrial forest actually makes for a new, more radical environmental disorder.