From the Meiji era to the 1970s, definitions and structures based on a certain common way of thinking were found in the textbooks and handbooks of Japanese forest policy studies. This way of thinking roughly regards forest policy studies as an academic discipline that (1) clarify the position and role of forests and forestry in a state and a national economy, and (2) clarify the measures that a state should take to achieve this. This forest policy studies (hereafter referred to as classical forest policy studies), which emphasize the state and nation as social and economic units, has become obsolete in the development of policies and research since the 1990s, and has disappeared from textbooks and handbooks since the 2000s. At the same time, however, the clarity of definition, its correspondence with the structure, and, including these points, the systematicity of explanations, which were seen in classical forest policy studies, have also faded. After surveying the history of Japanese forest policy studies as described above, this paper discussed the value of the systematic explanation, the methodological characteristics and significance of classical forest policy studies as forest policy research, and showed the possibility of generalizing and reconstructing the idea of classical forest policy studies according to the changes of the times.

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