Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 201, the Green Archipelago.

This week, we take a look at one of the most fundamental paradoxes of modern Japan, and one that is both evident almost everywhere

you look in the country, and tremendously easy to miss if you weren't thinking about it.

Japan, when you get down to it, is remarkably green, and I'm not just talking about beautiful

parks in cities like Tokyo, as fabulous as they are, but the

fact that once you get out of the cities, there are forests everywhere.

The natural world in Japan is still very close at hand.

So much so, in fact, that a rather old-timey but still occasionally used a name for the home

islands is Midori Nororeto, the green

archipelago. Which is great, but pretty surprising. After all, if you look around the world,

human civilization has a tendency to profoundly alter and often damage the environment around it.

That's true of industrial civilization, certainly.

One need look no further than the rampant desertification or air quality issues in China to see that.

But it's also true of pre-industrial civilization.

To take one example, the English devastated the yew tree supply of the British Isles out of a need to make

longbows during the Middle Ages, that centerpiece of the High Medieval English Army. Indeed,

that devastation was so complete that by the 1470s, the Statute of Westminster required ships

coming into England to bring four staves of U for every ton of goods shipped

into the country as a way of supplementing native stock with imports.

Richard III bumped that to ten staves per ton, and yes, it's that Richard III from the Shakespeare

play, who they found in a parking lot a few years back. Turns out that while he was

willing to offer his kingdom for a horse, all he had to do was wait 600 years and hop into the

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