Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition by Jared Diamond

Author:Jared Diamond [Diamond, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

An outside observer who visited Japan in 1650 might have predicted that Japanese society was on the verge of a societal collapse triggered by catastrophic deforestation, as more and more people competed for fewer resources. Why did Tokugawa Japan succeed in developing top-down solutions and thereby averting deforestation, while the ancient Easter Islanders, Maya, and Anasazi, and modern Rwanda (Chapter 10) and Haiti (Chapter 11) failed? This question is one example of the broader problem, to be explored in Chapter 14, why and at what stages people succeed or fail at group decision-making.

The usual answers advanced for Middle and Late Tokugawa Japan’s success—a supposed love for Nature, Buddhist respect for life, or a Confucian outlook—can be quickly dismissed. In addition to those simple phrases not being accurate descriptions of the complex reality of Japanese attitudes, they did not prevent Early Tokugawa Japan from depleting Japan’s resources, nor are they preventing modern Japan from depleting the resources of the ocean and of other countries today. Instead, part of the answer involves Japan’s environmental advantages: some of the same environmental factors already discussed in Chapter 2 to explain why Easter and several other Polynesian and Melanesian islands ended up deforested, while Tikopia, Tonga, and others did not. People of the latter islands have the good fortune to be living in ecologically robust landscapes where trees regrow rapidly on logged soils. Like robust Polynesian and Melanesian islands, Japan has rapid tree regrowth because of high rainfall, high fallout of volcanic ash and Asian dust restoring soil fertility, and young soils. Another part of the answer has to do with Japan’s social advantages: some features of Japanese society that already existed before the deforestation crisis and did not have to arise as a response to it. Those features included Japan’s lack of goats and sheep, whose grazing and browsing activities elsewhere have devastated forests of many lands; the decline in number of horses in Early Tokugawa Japan, due to the end of warfare eliminating the need for cavalry; and the abundance of seafood, relieving pressure on forests as sources of protein and fertilizer. Japanese society did make use of oxen and horses as draft animals, but their numbers were allowed to decrease in response to deforestation and loss of forest fodder, to be replaced by people using spades, hoes, and other devices.

The remaining explanations constitute a suite of factors that caused both the elite and the masses in Japan to recognize their long-term stake in preserving their own forests, to a degree greater than for most other people. As for the elite, the Tokugawa shoguns, having imposed peace and eliminated rival armies at home, correctly anticipated that they were at little risk of a revolt at home or an invasion from overseas. They expected their own Tokugawa family to remain in control of Japan, which in fact it did for 250 years. Hence peace, political stability, and well-justified confidence in their own future encouraged Tokugawa shoguns to invest in and to plan for the

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