Japan’s largest wildfire in more than 50 years has driven forestry cooperatives and timber businesses to form a single industry body, set up to return the cedar it scorched to the country’s supply chain while the wood can still be used. The blaze tore through about 3,370 hectares of plantation in the country’s north-east in February last year, leaving an unusual volume of fire-hit timber standing across the burn.
The new body, TEAM Shinrin Saisei Ofunato, brings together 17 entities from inside and outside Iwate Prefecture, including forestry cooperatives and timber businesses. Its launch comes as forest fires strike Japan with a frequency its timber sector has rarely had to confront.
Much of the burnt wood is still usable where the fire reached only the bark or spared the parts that never caught, but it must come down quickly, before moisture loss makes it difficult to use. By combining logging, milling, and construction into a single effort, the group hopes to expand the channels for salvaged wood and give forest owners a reason to fell and replant.
About 50 people attended the group’s inauguration in Ofunato on 12 June, where Kazuhisa Nakazaki, chairman of the Iwate Prefectural forest owners’ cooperative association, was named its representative. “I hope the organisation’s efforts will help revitalise the forestry industry,” Nakazaki said, with forest fires now striking across the country.
The group is already weighing similar work with officials in the nearby town of Otsuchi, where a forest fire in April became the second largest Japan has recorded since 1989. Both blazes struck the same stretch of Iwate coast, widening the salvage task well beyond the original Ofunato burn.
Before the ceremony, the body revealed a yard where felled cedar from the fire zone is sorted by how badly it burned and how far it has bent, then divided between construction-grade timber and biomass power. Prototype building materials cut from the damaged logs were also on display, an early sign of where the salvaged wood might end up.
