Reviewed by:

• Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea by David Fedman
• Wybe Kuitert

As many of us are spending our days behind a screen rather than in a forest or a field, we tend to forget that plants are immensely fundamental to human beings: they harvest solar energy and turn it into things that support us for free. It follows that any civilization thrives when it is in control of its vegetal resources. Countries progress durably when their plants prosper. Japan, after abandoning its feudal society that closely and frugally had tried to manage the vegetal wealth of its limited lands—including colonized Hokkaido—was inventing ways to harvest trees from its expanding new colonial empire in Korea, before the collapse that came with war. It is this fascinating story of trial and error that forms the topic of David Fedman’s book Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea.

Forestry as “a vital element of state power” gets the attention that it deserves in this book. This is a most important point that Fedman makes: that forestry in colonial Korea was crucial and fundamental and that it came in tandem with many other things. Harvesting trees brought with it the necessity to invest in nationwide governance with legal systems and infrastructure, which in turn brought roads, settlements, and cities, and enticed mining companies into exploration. In the case of the Yalu River, it even brought in border security efforts. We learn how forestry further south brought similar control and imperial indoctrination—disguised as social discipline—and efforts were much [End Page 228] more tuned to educating and mind-controlling local actors and governments through newly set-up associations and clubs, all with proper forest management as a strategy for imperial control. Modernizing the society of Korea was not only a colonial and imperial strategy of oppression, it was also redoing society for the value-free purposes of the global money economy. As a social and political historian therefore, Fedman shows, with a strong understanding of government administrator psychology, many parallels with events taking place today, when governments all over the world tune power in order to soak their people in ideas of consumerism, wherein local realities suffer and disappear, together with their sustainable practices. In so doing, they forget that it is vegetal resources in the end that sustain our world. This was just one of my many personal takeaways from Seeds of Control.

The book is divided into three parts: “Roots,” “Reforms,” and “Campaigns,” which detail the emergence of a thoroughly planned and quite successfully managed forestry in colonial Korea. The first part, “Roots,” begins with the question of how forestry was modernized after the collapse of Japan’s own feudal society to become a social, cultural, and administrative construct that supported the new nation and legitimized political and administrative control by the state over remote inland, colonies included. Another root in understanding colonial forestry is the psychology of the imagery that was spread in which Korea was seen as a landscape of barren, denuded hills in desperate need of reforestation, while the northern primary forests of the Yalu region were waiting as mouth-watering resources to be exploited.

The second part, “Reforms,” tells the story of the insecure start of forestry under the Japanese colonial government and how it developed through strategy, trial, and error into a consolidated and thorough administration. Ownership had to be registered and controlled, while growing trees became the subject of government concern through its research and experiment facilities. Taking the Yalu region as a case, the book details how the timber industry geared up in a regional context; however, the last chapter of this part turns to the efforts to compel local farming communities to contribute to the greater goal of forestry for the empire.

Moving on chronologically, the third part, “Campaigns,” looks at how forests and their resources were used to aid the Japanese war effort, starting from 1937. On the one hand, propaganda persuaded people to tend forests...

审核人：

• 控制的种子：大卫·费德曼（David Fedman）在朝鲜殖民时期的日本林业帝国
• 韦伯·奎特

由于我们中的许多人都在屏幕后面而不是在森林或田野中度过一天，因此我们往往会忘记植物对人类至关重要：它们收集太阳能并将其转化为免费支持我们的东西。因此，任何文明在控制其植物资源时都会蓬勃发展。国家在植物繁荣时取得持久进步。日本在放弃了封建社会之后，该社会曾试图严密而节俭地管理有限土地（包括被殖民的北海道）的植物财富，但在战争带来的崩溃之前，日本正在发明从朝鲜不断扩张的新殖民帝国中收获树木的方法。大卫·费德曼 (David Fedman) 的著作《控制的种子：朝鲜殖民地的日本林业帝国》( Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Korea)正是以这个引人入胜的反复试验故事为主题。

林业作为“国家权力的重要组成部分”在本书中得到了应有的关注。这是 Fedman 提出的最重要的一点：殖民朝鲜的林业是至关重要和基础的，并且它与许多其他事情相辅相成。采伐树木带来了投资于具有法律体系和基础设施的全国治理的必要性，这反过来又带来了道路、定居点和城市，并吸引了矿业公司进行勘探。在鸭绿江的情况下，它甚至带来了边境安全的努力。我们了解到更南边的林业如何带来类似的控制和帝国灌输——伪装成社会纪律——并且付出了很多[End Page 228]通过新成立的协会和俱乐部，更加注重教育和控制当地行为者和政府，所有这些都将适当的森林管理作为帝国控制的策略。韩国社会的现代化不仅是一种殖民和帝国的压迫战略，也是为了全球货币经济的无价值目的而重新改造社会。因此，作为社会和政治历史学家，费德曼凭借对政府行政人员心理的深刻理解，展示了许多与当今发生的事件的相似之处，当时世界各地的政府都在调整权力，以使他们的人民沉浸在消费主义的思想中，其中地方现实受苦和消失，以及他们的可持续做法。这样做时，他们忘记了最终是植物资源支撑着我们的世界。控制种子。

这本书分为三个部分：“根源”、“改革”和“运动”，详细介绍了在殖民朝鲜时期，经过周密计划和成功管理的林业的出现。第一部分“根源”开始于日本自己的封建社会崩溃后林业如何现代化成为支持新国家并使国家对国家的政治和行政控制合法化的社会、文化和行政结构的问题。偏远的内陆，包括殖民地。理解殖民林业的另一个根源是所传播的意象心理，在这种意象中，韩国被视为一片荒芜、光秃秃的山丘，迫切需要重新造林，而鸭绿江地区的北部原始森林则是令人垂涎的资源。被利用。

第二部分“改革”讲述了日本殖民政府下林业起步不稳的故事，以及它如何通过战略、试验和错误发展成为一个统一而彻底的政府。所有权必须进行登记和控制，而种植树木通过其研究和实验设施成为政府关注的主题。本书以鸭绿江地区为例，详细介绍了木材产业在区域背景下的布局；然而，这一部分的最后一章转向迫使当地农业社区为帝国的更大林业目标做出贡献的努力。

按照时间顺序，第三部分“战役”着眼于从 1937 年开始如何利用森林及其资源来帮助日本的战争努力。一方面，宣传说服人们照料森林……