Each village developed its own way of enforcing the rules. Because people were allowed to remove materials from the forest only on specified dates, anyone seen in the forest during other times was obviously breaking the rules. Most villages hired guards (a prestigious job for young men), who patrolled the forest on horseback in groups of two. In some areas all the young men in the village served as guards on a rotational basis. In villages that did not use guards, any member of the village could report seeing someone in the forest at the wrong time.
Each village had its own penalties for breaking the rules. The forest guards usually handled occasional violations in a quiet and simple manner. It was accepted practice for guards to demand a small payment of money or sake from the rule-breaker. If a violation was more serious, the guards confiscated the illegal harvest and any equipment or horses that the rule-breaker was using. Rule-breakers had to pay a fine to the village to recover their equipment or horses. The amount of a fine depended upon the seriousness of the offence, the willingness of the rule-breaker to make rapid amends and whether the rule-breaker had a history of violations.
People sometimes broke the rules because they desperately needed material from the forest at a time during which they were not allowed to remove it. One effective strategy for breaking the rules was to send the family’s most beautiful daughter into the forest, because guards (being young men) were more lenient with young women. The punishment was not severe if people had a good reason for breaking the rules. For example, there is a story about a large number of villagers who entered the forest before the scheduled day to cut poles because they urgently needed the poles for vegetables on their farms. Otherwise the crop would be lost. These rule-breakers were given a light punishment because the village council realized that the date the council had scheduled for removing poles from the forest was too late. The rule-breakers were only required to make a small donation to the village school.
The social institutions for managing village forests in Japan were developed and refined over centuries, reaching their peak during the Tokugawa period (1600 - 1867). The management was successful because it was local. Even though Japan had a feudal and in many ways authoritarian social system, detailed rules for forest use were not imposed from outside the villages. It is also significant that forest access was based on households, not individuals. The share of wood and other materials that a household could remove from the forest did not increase if the household increased in number, and large households could not divide into two households unless they received special permission from the village. As a consequence, every household had a strong incentive not to have too many children, and there was almost no increase in the Japanese population during the Tokugawa period.
Japan’s traditional system of forest management began to decline during the years after the Meiji Restoration (1868), and it deteriorated substantially with land reform and other social, political and economic changes following World War II. Forests are still important as a source of water for household, agricultural and industrial use, but the role of forests changed as Japan became a highly urbanized society integrated with the global economy. The importance of forests as a source of essential materials declined as Japan met the same needs by importing fossil fuels for heating and cooking, timber from other countries for construction purposes and chemical fertilizers for farms. Large areas of forest are now cut each year to make way for urban expansion, and the remaining forests have become increasingly important as weekend recreation areas for large urban populations.