The history of Japan dates back to 660 B.C., when the empire was founded on the island of Kiushiu by the warrior king Jimmuteno. He established a kind of feudal government, with the daimios (knights or barons) holding their fiefs from the mikado, who was considered the sole owner of the soil, or at least all exercise of ownership rights emanated from him. Private property seems then not to have existed at all, the people having merely rights of user. Colonization of the islands brought under the mikado’s dominion progressed rapidly, and with it, not only arable portions but even mountains were denuded. With the beginning of the Christian era, the need of better protection against floods seems to have been recognized, and, in 270 A.D., we find the first forest official appointed, a son of the royal house, who with assistants was to regulate the use of the forest property, which, under the rights of user granted by the mikado, was being excessively exploited and devastated. In the fifth century, the feudal method of giving fiefs of land and forest to the deserving vassals had come generally into vogue, and later, with the rise of Buddhism, forests were assigned to the temples and priests, who, as in Germany the monks, were assiduous in cultivating and utilizing them. Soon the daimios, similarly to the barons in Germany, began to assert exclusive property rights, and, notwithstanding various edicts, issued from time to time to secure free use to the people, more and more of the forest area was secured by daimios, and by priests as temple forests. In the ninth century, deforestation and excessive exploitation had so far progressed that not only the need of protecting watersheds was recognized by edicts, but fear of a timber famine led even to planting in the provinces of Noto. A period of internal strife and warfare during the following centuries which left forest interest in the background, led, in 1192, to the establishment of the rule of the shoguns, the hereditary military representatives of the mikado, who made him a mere figurehead, and exercised all the imperial functions themselves, until the revolution of 1868 restored the mikado to his rights.