When you look at the mountains in Japan, you often see large areas covered with cedar and cypress. The scenery is so familiar that many people do not think much about it, but a large part of these forests did not grow naturally. They were planted by people.
The background lies in the heavy logging around World War II and the rebuilding that followed. Large amounts of timber were used during the war, and even more was needed afterward for houses and other buildings. Japan needed both to reforest heavily logged areas and to secure enough timber for the future, so large-scale planting programs were carried out across the country.
Cedar and cypress were planted in especially large numbers. Cedar grows relatively quickly and tends to grow straight, making it useful for construction. Cypress also has high value as a strong, high-quality building material. Both trees were seen as important sources of timber for future housing and construction.
Another change came from everyday life. From the 1950s onward, Japanese households gradually shifted from firewood and charcoal to gas and oil for fuel. Broadleaf forests that had once been used to supply firewood and charcoal became less important for that purpose. In many areas, these forests were then replaced with plantations of cedar and cypress in a policy known as expanded afforestation.
That is why large plantation forests still remain across Japan today. Yet when people simply look at the mountains, they often do not think of them as landscapes created after the war. For someone who has seen the same mountains since childhood, even a plantation forest is simply “the usual mountain.”
One thing that does make many Japanese people notice how much cedar was planted is spring pollen. Cedar trees planted after the war eventually matured and began producing large amounts of pollen, which is closely connected to Japan’s widespread hay fever problem. Because the pollen reaches cities far from the mountains, the question “Why did Japan plant so much cedar?” is now familiar to many people.
Still, it is too simple to look back and say that planting so many trees was simply a mistake. At the time, Japan had practical reasons for doing it: the country needed to restore forests and secure timber for reconstruction and housing. Later, cheaper imported wood became more common, and the conditions surrounding Japanese forestry changed dramatically. The people making those decisions at the time could not have predicted every change that would come decades later.
The cedar and cypress mountains that now seem like an ordinary part of Japan are not just products of nature. They are also the result of what postwar Japan needed, and what people at the time chose to prepare for the future.
