quality, but about 80 yen per 100 cubic feet, equal to about is. 8d. per foot, is the price in Tokyo, and selected half-inch boards for ceilings and panellings cost from 2S. to 4s. each.
Rein, in Industries of Japan, p. 226, speaks of a Cryptomeria which he measured in 1874 having at 1½ metres high a girth of 9.41 metres, equal to about 30 feet. This grew on the Sasa-no-yama-toge, between Tokyo and Kofu, at about 750 metres above sea level.
Weston, in The Alps of Japan, mentions trees high up on the eastern side of the pass between Nakatsugawa and the Ina-kaido, called the Misaka-toge, on the northern slope of Ena-San, which measured at 3 feet from the ground no less than 26 feet in girth. It would not be supposed possible that in a country where neither machinery nor horse -power is used for the removal of timber such large trees could be utilised, but the Japanese are very ingenious in the handling of large logs in their mountain forests.
I was presented by Baron Kiyoura, Minister of Agriculture, with a most curious and interesting series of sketches, which I found in the Imperial Bureau of Forestry, showing the means adopted for felling and transporting large timber growing in rocky gorges and the most inaccessible situations. These I exhibited at a meeting of the Scottish Arboricultural Society at Edinburgh on 10th February 1905.
The modus operandi is as follows:—First men climb up the trees and lop off all the large branches, so that the tree may not lodge among its standing neighbours when felled. Ropes are then attached to the trunk and carried round a windlass, so that it may be pulled over in the right direction.
When the tree is felled it is cut into suitable lengths, often 20 to 30 feet long, and a hole cut in the end, to which a stout rope is attached. By this it is sometimes dragged, sometimes lowered, to the nearest slide, which is built up of smaller timber. Or, if the locality is too distant from a slide or from a stream large enough to float it, a platform is built on the mountain-side, on which it is sawn into boards, which are carried out of the forest on men's backs, or on sledges on the snow.
A most ingenious plan, which I have seen in no other country, is adopted where the slope of the mountain is too steep to let a log slide at its own pace.
The slide is built in a zig-zag form, and at each angle a bank is made and covered with earth and bark to check the impetus of the log, whose upper end when so checked is reversed by means of a strong pole laid across the slide, and then goes downwards till it reaches the next angle, where it is again checked and reversed by its own weight.
To see a large gang of men, all singing in chorus at their work, moving timber in a mountain forest under the direction of their foremen, is one of the most interesting sights beheld in Japan, and I could not sufficiently admire the pluck, activity, and ingenuity they showed in the very dangerous and difficult work which is necessary when logs get jammed, as they often do in these rapid mountain torrents; and when men, standing on small rafts fastened to boulders in a roaring rapid, or let down from above by ropes, have to dislodge the logs from where they have stuck fast.
