Scholarship on the colonial origins of environmentalism and “green imperialism” has burgeoned in recent years, and for good reason. Increasing concern about climate change has not only spurred new forms of environmental activism but also sharpened attention to the ways in which politics, geography, and economics overlap and intersect to produce forms of environmental governance that often acerbate socioeconomic unevenness. Seeds of Control is a welcome addition to this scholarship. Its careful historical assessment of Japan's “empire of forestry” offers two significant and timely interventions.
On the one hand, David Fedman's meticulously researched account of the central role played by forestry reforms in the Japanese colonization of Korea alters our understanding of both the lived reality and the legacy of Japan's imperial control exercised through multifarious bureaucracies across the Korean peninsula. Fedman aptly contests some of the facile binaries that have tended to misrepresent or conceal the actual impact of Japan's green imperialism in Korea, especially the stark image of an imperial plundering of resources. Yet his goal is not to downplay imperial violence but to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature of that violence. Indeed, Fedman continually highlights how the records of Japan's Bureau of Forestry tend to eliminate those who actually shouldered the burden of woodland-tenure reforms, namely, agrarian communities. Forest regeneration, then, operated in colonial Korea as a disciplinary framework or form of social control for industrial capitalism and agrarian development.
On the other hand, in pursuit of that deeper understanding of imperial violence, Seeds of Control makes a significant contribution to global forest history, which has largely ignored the Asia-Pacific region and the integral role of Japan's empire of forestry in shaping it. Especially sobering is Fedman's attention to how imperial violence, understood through its environmentalist ambitions, deterritorializes in at least two registers. First, as Korea's forests are reduced in various ways to “material inputs” (timber, rail ties, paper, fuel), those material inputs enter into transpacific networks of distribution. Second, removing forests from these networks through conservation efforts in one location is predicated upon exploitation in other locations. Fedman is especially attentive to how sustaining Japan's green archipelago in the postwar era exacted a toll on forests in Southeast Asia, as did the regeneration of South Korea's forests under Park Chung-hee. In other words, forest conversation and regeneration in one site cannot be held apart from forest destruction elsewhere.
In sum, the twofold contribution of Seeds of Control to global forest history comes of its pursuit of two interrelated lines of inquiry: forest regeneration-conservation as a form of social power (control or discipline), and forest regeneration-conservation as a mode of resource extraction. In effect, these two lines of inquiry delineate something like what Karl Marx called “relations of production” and “forces of production” in the context of industrial labor. For Marx, forces of production were constantly being revolutionized, while relations of production tended to conserve received social hierarchies, for ideological reasons. A similar vision emerges in Fedman's account around what might be dubbed “forces of forestry” and “relations of forestry.”
In part one of the study, “Seeds,” Fedman devotes two chapters to transformations in forestry practices in Meiji Japan, particularly in the decades straddling 1900, as a result of Japanese interaction with the emerging international conservation movement and with Western sciences and technology, which resulted in new ways of managing woodlands. Fedman does not highlight the radical character of this transformation. On the contrary, he tends to understate it, focusing on continuity, highlighting the hybridization of European techniques with long-standing Tokugawa practices, and ultimately stressing the invention of a tradition of “forest love” (airin). Yet his discussion of the emergence of rinseigaku, or the science of forest management, signals a profound shift in “the very meaning of the term resource (shigen): the disaggregation and objectification of ‘living’ ideas about interconnected local life forms into discrete material resources pools” (p. 37).
The study returns time and again to the problematic reduction of forests to resource pools, and at key junctures, Fedman reminds us that Japan's empire of forestry was more about trees than forests; it was more about silviculture for the management of resource production than about forests as holistic ecological systems. Arguably, however understated, this shift constitutes a revolutionizing of the forces of forestry production. It is one of the strengths of Seeds of Control that it does not situate this ongoing revolution in forces of forestry production in the urban metropole, in the West, or in Tokyo. Transformations arise through the encounter between inherited practices and modern sciences in Japanese countryside and “internal colonies” (Hokkaidō and the Sakhalin Islands), and innovations arise where imperial technicians in Korea adopt and adapt local practices, which are then implemented on the Japanese archipelago. Instead of reifying urban-rural or center-periphery relations, Fedman dives into zones of contact.
The early emphasis on ideology, on the invented tradition of a Japanese love for forests, is nonetheless a useful strategy. Across four chapters in the second part of the study, “Reforms,” Fedman provides such a detailed account of relations of forestry that readers might easily lose sight of the forest for the trees. As he uncovers the formation of interdisciplinary teams to ground the implementation of policies empirically as well as the emergence of thick network of hybridizing knowledges, administration proves so multifarious that it becomes increasingly difficult to define the exercise of power. Fedman notes how the knowledge of Korean scientists and technicians is as consistently denigrated as it is appropriated, but his concern lies more with the agrarian communities who at once shoulder the burden of the reforms and resist them. Thus, the study turns from policies and knowledges to the industrial region (the exploitation of old-growth forests in the Yalu River basin) and to the agrarian village where reforms, even when directed toward agricultural use forestry, remained out of touch with everyday rural life. Unable to patch over structural inequalities, environmental governance turned to ideological campaigns for sylvan patriotism. Calls for Korean subjects to love trees became increasingly strident as reforms failed.
Through its comprehensive evaluation of the successes and failures of Japan's environmental governance, Seeds of Control speaks to the current situation in an innovative and persuasive manner, for it reveals a new horizon or internal limit for the exercise of power. Ideally, it would be read in dialogue with Wendy Matsumura's brilliant monograph, The Limits of Okinawa. In both books, albeit in very different ways, the limits of empire appear in the encounter with two largely neglected sociopolitical actors, small producers (agrarian and woodland) and nonhuman producers (trees and animals), whose importance is today undeniable.
