Impacts of 150 Years of Modernization Policies on the Management of Common Forests in Japan: A Statistical Analysis of Micro Census Data

Abstract

After World War II, Japan's policy makers believed that common forests were underutilized because of their legal status and organization method under customary iriai-type ownership and that modern ownership in the form of group ownership, such as forest producers' cooperatives, or as individual, separate ownership, would improve the situation. Thus, the Common Forests Modernization Act of 1966 was enacted, following successive modernization policies since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. We evaluated the impacts of the past modernization policies on the management of common forests by statistically comparing the performance of modernized and non-modernized 19,690 common forests based on the World Census of Agriculture and Forestry 2000. The performance measures for comparison included planting, weeding, thinning, and harvesting activities. We found less modernized, customary holdings are more active in tending activities such as weeding and thinning, while modernized holdings may have an advantage in harvesting and timber sales.

Implementasi Desa Cinta Statistik (Desa Cantik) di Kabupaten Situbondo

“…Dengan adanya hal tersebut juga dapat membuat perbedaan standar dan metadata di desa, seperti perbandingan jumlah data penduduk yang diolah BPS dan desa. Perbedaan teknik pencatatan yang berbeda dapat mempengaruhi data (Takahashi, 2019). Desa mencatat jumlah penduduknya dengan berbasis registrasi kartu keluarga sedangkan BPS mencatat jumlah berdasarkan survei dan perhitungan.…”

Bundle of Rights Reversed: Anticommons in a Japanese Common Property Forest Due to Legalization

“…The fact that these ownership problems could make common forest use difficult was recognized more than 50 years back. In 1966, the Act for Modernization of Common Forest Rights was passed to convert the complex customary rights into the modern ownership of a cooperative that has a legal personality (Takahashi et al 2019). However, only 25% of villages have since modernized their customary rights.…”