Abstract
In this article, I consider forestry households that are faced with financial difficulties from the viewpoint of the New Economic Sociology in order to demonstrate the structural backgrounds of forest devastation in Japan.
First, I discuss recent studies on forest devastation in sociology and point out that it is insufficient to explain the background of the problem on the basis of the price difference between imported logs and domestic logs or the decline of villages. Further, I examine that the New Economic Sociology considered in this paper is useful in providing an account of how forest devastation has spread in Japan in the last 20 years.
Next, I focus on the changing social networks within the wood industry to examine how the type of crisis that forestry households presently experience has changed from that in the 1980s. This change in the type of crisis indicates that the severance in the social interrelations between forestry households and sawmills came about because sawmills were disembedded from the traditional networks of wood trade, and forestry households were unable to tackle financial difficulties with the existing practices. I then show that Japanese forestry households were inevitably involved in cutthroat price competition and were forced to overproduce.
Finally, from the abovementioned analysis, we may reasonably conclude that the viewpoint of the New Economic Sociology is the most effective framework to analyze the current mechanism of forest devastation.
