Japan Spent Decades Buying the World’s Logs. Now It Sells Its Own.
- Aug 28
- 4 min read
The Finance Ministry's tables show a second straight year of net log exports, with the export strategy steering the trade toward lumber and markets beyond China.
A Hitachi machine stacks freshly cut sugi logs at a roadside landing at Kobaru in Oita, on the Kyushu island whose southern customs posts clear most of the 1.912 million cubic metres Japan shipped in 2025. (Photo Credit: John Steele / Alamy Stock Photo)
Tokyo sold the world 1.912 million cubic metres of logs in 2025 and bought only 1.71 million back, a second consecutive year in surplus and a record outbound volume. That is according to the Forestry Agency, whose export results published on 5 August show outbound trade at all-time highs in value and volume, and whose import tables show inbound trade down 4 per cent.
The data obtained and collated by Wood Central, using the same customs code on both sides, revealed a crossover in 2024, when 1.819 million cubic metres left, and 1.774 million came in, a 45,000-cubic-metre margin that tripled within 12 months to 202,000. As recently as 2023, imports of 2.016 million cubic metres ran 421,000 ahead of exports.
Japan’s log trade on the Finance Ministry’s own series, with exports passing imports in 2024, the surplus tripling in 2025, and the first half of 2026 running 150,000 cubic metres ahead. (Image Credit: Wood Central, from Ministry of Finance trade statistics via the Forestry Agency)
Japan paid ¥65 billion for the logs it imported in 2025 and earned 29.8 billion from the larger volume it sent out, or 38,000 yen a cubic metre coming in and 15,600 going out on Wood Central’s calculation from the same tables. American Douglas-fir makes up 59 per cent of the import volume and Canadian logs 26 per cent, while sugi accounts for 88 per cent of the logs shipped to China, which the Agency counts at 90 per cent of Japan’s log export value.
“It is risky to rely on only a few lumber-exporting countries,” Hisao Yamada told The Japan Times in 2024, with the chairman of the Japan Wood-Products Export Promotion Association charged with diversifying a trade that sent 53 per cent of its record 59.6 billion to China alone in 2025. Shibushi in Kagoshima cleared 451,000 cubic metres of logs on its own and Yatsushiro in Kumamoto a further 222,000, the southern Kyushu customs posts that carry the China trade.
Hisao Yamada at the Senbonyama Protected Forest in Kochi, where old-growth Yanase sugi stands among Japan’s three premier cedar varieties, and whose association now runs the strength testing and trade missions meant to move the country beyond raw log sales. (Photo Credit: Japan Wood-Products Export Association)
A shift from log-centred exports to high-value wood products such as lumber and plywood, and the opening of new export destinations,” runs the Agriculture Ministry’s export expansion strategy in its final May 2025 revision, tied to a Cabinet target of 166 billion in forest-product exports by 2030, up from the 73.5 billion recorded in 2025.
Lumber alone rises from 7.4 billion in 2024 to a targeted 85 billion, with 55.4 billion of it assigned to the United States, 17.3 to China, 4.3 to Taiwan, and 3 to Korea. India has 1.1 billion, though its plant quarantine rules still bar Japanese sugi outright.
“Japan’s lumber and plywood exports have moved sideways, failing to capture expanding world demand,” the Agency’s own situation paper reads, and the Agency counts Japan selling 1.3 per cent of its lumber production abroad compared with Canada’s 62.9 per cent. Lumber shipments rose 30 per cent to 199,000 cubic metres in 2025.
Sugi gained approval for two-by-four structural design values from the American Lumber Standard Committee on 3 April 2025, twelve months behind hinoki, and the National Design Specification now lists American structural framing for both species. Yamada’s association ran the Oregon State University strength testing that carried them through, and exhibited at February’s International Builders’ Show in Orlando.
Sugi already substitutes for declining western red cedar in American fences and decking, the paper finds, with part of the supply milled in China from logs Japan sells at the lowest price. “Competition is no longer only imported lumber from Europe or Russia,” Shawn Lawlor wrote in an April market report, with the Canada Wood Japan managing director counting domestic two-by-four production 33.9 per cent higher as Japanese builders swap imported spruce-pine-fir for home-grown sugi. It comes as the Basic Plan approved by Cabinet in June committed Japan to seven million more cubic metres of its own wood by 2035, with imports falling four million over the same period.
Australia took 96 million yen of the 59.6 billion total in 2025, eighteenth on the buyer table and the market Takaichi Sanae flagged to Anthony Albanese when the Japanese Prime Minister listed forestry among the exports her government intends to grow. Japan also ranks second among softwood log suppliers to a shrinking Chinese market, behind only New Zealand, with the Agency’s ITTO figures recording American volumes cut by Beijing’s quarantine ban.
Takaichi Sanae with Anthony Albanese at the Australia-Japan Summit Dinner reception in Canberra on Monday 4 May 2026, where the Japanese Prime Minister named forestry one of four export sectors Tokyo wants to grow with a market that bought 96 million yen of Japanese wood last year. (Photo Credit: Cabinet Public Affairs Office / Government of Japan)
Canadian log deliveries into Japan fell 29 per cent across the 2026 half and 92 per cent in June alone, while New Zealand radiata swung 16 per cent higher after falling 12 per cent through 2025. Australia’s woodchip trade dropped a further 19 per cent across the half, having fallen 14 per cent to 1.42 million tonnes in 2025, 30 per cent below its 2023 volume.
Container rates from American and European origins have climbed since February’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Agency notes. Vietnam moves the other way, with pellet shipments up 71 per cent to 5.68 million tonnes for biomass power stations and the country ranked first among Japan’s wood suppliers by value for a third straight year.
Exports for the first six months of 2026 reached 32 billion, up 4 per cent, with 1,003,000 cubic metres of logs shipped out and 853,000 brought in, a surplus of 150,000 cubic metres. Tokyo’s answer is new markets and higher-value products, and 53 per cent of everything Japan sold in 2025 still went to a single customer.
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