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At the turn of the 20th century, Japan was in the throes of an industrial revolution. With factories being built in towns and cities and a shortage of housing for factory workers, there was increasing demand for timber. The enormous natural forests of todo fir, Hokkaido spruce, katsura and sennoki inland from the Sea of Okhotsk, said to contain more than 400 million trees, came to the attention of logging companies as a source of timber supplies. |
| Felling was carried out during the winter, when the logs could more easily be hauled over snow to the banks of the Abashiri and Tokoro Rivers. When the thaw came in April they were floated downstream, making use of the higher water level. | |
| Logs were landed at Nakanoshima in Kitami for trimming and then sent on down to the mouth of the Tokoro River, to Lake Abashiri, or to the entrance to Lake Saroma. There they were assembled into big rafts which were then towed out by small boats to freighters off shore. They were loaded and then shipped down to timber yards in the cities, such as at Fukagawa in Tokyo. | |
| Logs sent down the rivers from the hinterland of the Sea of Okhotsk were not made into rafts on the river but sent down singly, a practice known as kudanagashi. | |
| Loggers wearing sedge hats and baggy trousers rode on the logs, carrying hooked poles which they used for manoeuvring. They sang chants to help them keep working in rhythm, the leader beginning, the others taking up the chorus. "When I left my old home there were tears in my eyes, but now the ways of the old country have become hateful to me." "Wai waino, waisukeda." | |
| Even a skilled logger sometimes slipped and fell from a spinning log. If that happened, there was a rule that rescuers were not to try to reach him with their hands but should hold out instead a hooked pole for him to grab. Anyone who fell in was in immediate danger of being struck on the head by another big log coming down. Terrible accidents were frequent, with injured loggers being swept away and drowned. | |
| Many of the loggers who put their lives in constant danger had honed their skills on the swift flowing Kiso River in central Honshu or the Chikugo River in Kyushu. At a time in the 1920's when a farm labourer earned sixty sen a day, daily wages for loggers were two yen and fifty sen. However in those days concepts of fundamental human rights for workers were still unknown and no compensation was paid for injury or death from work accidents at work. Likewise for the men and women who laboured in factories in the cities. | |
| River loggers were not employed on the smaller rivers such as the Mukagawa. Temporary weirs, known as aba, were built to hold back the flow. When sufficient water had backed up, a wire rope was pulled to release it, thereby carrying the logs down. Such weirs were built at various points along the river. | |
| In the 1910's stop banks and bridges were built as settlements grew along the river and the area under cultivation increased. Logs released from the aba weirs damaged stop banks and their water flooded farm land, which caused fierce disputes between the logging companies and farmers. Angry riverside residents demanded compensation payments for inundations brought about by the weirs and demanded that the practice be prohibited. At times of heavy rain, people sometimes took it upon themselves to smash weirs in order to prevent disaster. | |
| In 1917 heavy rain caused floods on the Mukagawa River and a weir burst upstream of Mukagawa village, now the town of Rubeshibe. As the wall of water approached another weir at Mukagawa owned by Nashida Zengo, threatening to flood the streets of the village, Nashida triggered his weir. In that way he averted a catastrophe but at the sacrifice of several thousand of his own logs. | |
| His commendable act later became a favourite topic of conversation, but such chivalrous deeds were rare. | |
| From the 1920's light logging railways and special horse- drawn trailer sledges came into use to haul logs to the timber yards, so the practice of floating logs down the rivers was soon discontinued. After the Second World War, logging roads were built and trucks used to haul logs from forests, so both river transport and the light railways disappeared. | |
| (from the Kitami City Newsletter, June 1989) | |