A Tokyo-based council that promotes Japanese forest protection and domestic timber use has launched an online marketplace to connect cedar and cypress smallholders with buyers nationwide, with the platform set to channel a wave of sugi and hinoki listings as Japan’s plan to cut 20 per cent of plantation forests over the next decade drives plantation harvest higher. That is according to a Jiji Press report on the launch, which says the marketplace is built to break the negotiated trades that typically see individual forest owners and small forestry co-operatives sell standing timber at depressed prices to logging firms with stronger financing and richer transaction experience.
The council, formed as a general incorporated association by six industry groups, runs the platform alongside the Japan Forestry Mechanisation Society (JAFTA), as Wood Central reported when the joint proposal was first floated. “A pioneering deal could create momentum for nationwide expansion,” said Satoshi Tachibana, the Kyoto University professor who chaired the study group behind the new market, with the council and JAFTA betting that the platform’s first transactions in 2026 will demonstrate that.
Standing timber is conventionally traded through bilateral negotiations between forest owners and logging contractors, with sale prices set after harvest once transportation expenses are factored in. That structure has long left small-scale forest owners — Forestry Agency data shows about 90 per cent of Japanese forest owners hold plots smaller than 100,000 square metres — without enough revenue to cover reforestation, with only 30 to 40 per cent of logged land subsequently restored.
The new platform allows forest owners to set asking prices for their cedar and cypress, provided they commit to reforestation after harvest, with the council modelling it as a flea market for timber. Wood Central understands the marketplace sits within a broader Forestry Agency push that aims to raise annual reforestation from about 30,000 hectares to 70,000 hectares by 2030, with the cumulative unrestored backlog already exceeding 2,560 square kilometres — an area greater than all of Tokyo — across the five years to fiscal 2018.
Japan’s plantation forests cover roughly 40 per cent of the country’s forested area and are now entering full-scale harvest after decades of low extraction, with the council expecting cedar and cypress listings to climb sharply through the second half of 2026 even as Japanese sawmills cut output by 8.8 per cent in January and ran short of buyers on a contracting domestic housing market.
