COLUMN ONE : A Lust for Trees, a Love of Wood : Japan’s demand for timber is decimating rain forests. Yet efforts to conserve sometimes only add to the dilemma.

Twenty-five years ago, Kenji Kawada used to hike through mountain forests to handpick the hinoki cypress trees that he would use to build shrines and temples, without nails, the same way it has been done for centuries.

Now, Japan’s best cypress is almost gone--or so expensive Kawada usually can’t even dream of working with it. He made do with Taiwanese cypress for a while, but now exports of those trees have been banned. This third-generation temple carpenter is running out of wood.

So Kawada, 56, learned how to build shrines with concrete.

“It’s cheaper,” he said, “and the priests don’t seem to mind.”

The same jarring switch in materials has taken place in Japan’s home-building industry. Housing starts have risen sharply--1.67 million units were built last year--but the Japanese are finding themselves confined in shrinking spaces inside ferroconcrete structures, separated from the wood they once worshiped.

And with all this concrete pouring comes an ironic allegation: that Japan is wantonly destroying tropical rain forests in Southeast Asia.

The corpus delicti is a thing called kon-pane , a sheet of tropical plywood that Kawada and his more mundane counterparts use to mold concrete slabs.

About one-third of the approximately $2 billion worth of tropical hardwood that Japan imports each year goes into these kon-pane (pronounced “cone-panay”), which are typically used once or twice, maybe three times, then thrown away.

“You could say Tokyo housing is swallowing tropical timber,” said Yoichi Kuroda, an environmental activist and coordinator of the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network.

Kawada, the temple carpenter, bemoans the wastefulness of using the plywood forms, most of which he discards after a single use because he must cut them to fit his custom designs.

“When you think of how we have to protect our natural resources, it’s a shame to throw them away,” he said. “People are losing their respect for wood. We don’t realize how much we need it.”

Yet many Japanese regard their archipelago as having a “wood culture”--as opposed to the “stone culture” of the West.

Those who can afford it still build wooden houses, and they lavish their interiors with the finest grains of native zelkova, red pine and cryptomeria. Paints and stains are an anathema. The wood must breathe, discolor--and eventually decay--to attain its aesthetic potential.

Kawada once had to argue at great length to make this point with city officials in San Francisco. They wanted to apply a coat of varnish to the traditional Japanese gate he was restoring with hinoki cypress in Golden Gate Park four years ago.

“It just isn’t done,” Kawada said. “It would have ruined the texture of the wood--and the meaning of the gate.”

The oldest wooden structure in the world, Horyuji, a Buddhist temple in the historic capital of Nara, has withstood the elements since the early 7th Century--unpainted. One explanation for Horyuji’s endurance is that the lumber used to build it was cut from ancient trees.

Why, then, does a nation with such deep reverence for wood stand accused of having a blatant disregard for trees, particularly when they stand in foreign lands?

Japan is the leading rain forest consumer, currently taking nearly one-third of all the tropical hardwood exported worldwide, environmentalists say. Its insatiable appetite for timber was widely blamed for accelerating deforestation in the Philippines in the 1960s and 1970s. Japanese general trading companies are depicted as villains for financing and encouraging intensive logging operations in northern Borneo, an impoverished region of Malaysia where native tribes have attempted to blockade timber roads in a seemingly futile protest.

Environmentalists like Kuroda fear that in seven to 12 years, the primary forests in northern Borneo will be gone and that Japanese timber traders will move on to Papua New Guinea or Brazil and repeat the cycle.

Activists in Europe have started a campaign to boycott Mitsubishi Corp., a general trading firm that sells automobiles, electronic goods and a range of other consumer products made by members of the Mitsubishi business group.

Mitsubishi doesn’t have the worst record for importing tropical timber, but it owns part of a logging operation in Malaysia and “it has a famous brand name that’s easy to target,” Kuroda said.

The trading house responded to international criticism by forming an environmental committee that has so far met with Kuroda and representatives of the World Wildlife Fund, which advocates conservation in the rain forests. Its officials, however, say slash-and-burn agriculture by native tribes, not irresponsible logging, accounts for most of the destruction of the rain forests in northern Borneo.

“The real problem with tropical forests isn’t demand for wood by industrial countries, it’s pressure on the ecosystem from local populations,” said Michimasa Yoshida, manager of Mitsubishi’s tropical wood team. “Tell me, why is it that only Japan is being blamed?”

Yoshio Miyagi, president of a small trading company importing hardwood from West Africa, has a theory about that. First, he thinks the big trading companies are overly aggressive in timber transactions because of internal competition, which pits various departments against each other in a contest for sales results that can boost corporate careers.

Secondly, international criticism focuses on Japanese hardwood consumption, he said, much in the way the country has been attacked for daring to hunt whales to eat despite environmentalist censure.

“It gets emotional when culture is involved,” Miyagi said. “Japanese culture has a different concept of wood than in Europe or America. . . . Our soul is in the wood.”

The furor over chopsticks is a telling example. Though they are generally made of softwood--not from the tropics--Japan’s habit of using waribashi , or throwaway chopsticks, has become a symbol of wastefulness. Critics estimate that the Japanese consume more than 11 billion pairs of waribashi every year, disposing of them after one use.

Kuroda and other devout environmentalists carry their own set of chopsticks to restaurants. But to Miyagi, the notion of wooden chopsticks existing for only one meal has deep cultural meaning, going back to a traditional Buddhist concept that all things in life are transitory.

“With chopsticks, the beauty of the soul of the wood is that it’s momentary,” he said. “You experience it once and then it’s gone.”

Some argue, however, that Japan’s addiction to disposable chopsticks, and even kon-pane , actually represents a rational use of timber resources, not a waste.

Chopsticks are generally made of branches that are unsuitable for lumber, and plywood for concrete forms is pressed from inferior cuts of tropical timber that would otherwise rot at the sawmills, said Akira Taniguchi, manager of the lumber department at Marubeni Corp., another trading firm under fire for its tropical hardwood trade.

Kuroda’s Tropical Forest Action Network honored Marubeni in April with its “Rain Forest Destruction Award,” a giant mock chain saw made of cardboard.

Marubeni officials say they are considering cutting back on rain forest trade and finding replacements for hardwood kon-pane , such as soft timber plywood from North America coated with special resins that allow multiple use.

“Rather than think of ourselves as victims of social criticism, we’ve decided to reflect on how we might be assaulting the environment,” said a philosophical Ryuzo Toyoda, manager of Marubeni’s forest products division. “We love trees. The last thing we’d want to do is destroy the forests.”

Marubeni, Mitsubishi and 85 other members of the Japan Lumber Importers’ Assn. have reacted to criticism by contributing to a $70,000 fund aimed at promoting environmental research. That represents a commitment of about $800 per company--”kind of a joke,” said Kuroda.

The anti-logging lobbyists, meanwhile, have proposed a number of measures that would slow down irresponsible cutting, such as tagging timber to verify its source in areas under sustainable logging, or levying a surcharge on imports to finance proper forest management.

Japan’s $11-billion-dollar-a-year foreign aid program also is under scrutiny--and criticized for funding timber roads and sawmill plants in the past that helped intensify ecological damage. The lack of environmental impact assessments for Japanese aid projects is pointed to as a major policy flaw on the part of the government.

At home, the Japanese have a commendable record for sustainable forestry, but largely owing to geographic and economic constraints on logging, not environmental consciousness.

About 68% of Japanese territory is covered with forests, and the Forestry Agency estimates there are now about 25 million acres of second-growth cypress, pine and cryptomeria forests that are mature and ready to be cut. Indeed, the countryside has taken on a peculiar look, with large stands of tree plantations aligned in perfect geometric patterns, the aftermath of extensive clear-cutting and replanting decades ago.

But nearly all the trees are in rugged, mountainous terrain, where mechanized logging is impossible. High wages and competition from relatively cheap imports make harvesting the trees an uneconomic proposition for now.

“If it weren’t for those mountains, this would all be city,” said Tomo Aoyagi, of the Japan Forest Agency. “That’s the pressure of economic development.”