Upside is I discovered the trick of just taking fexofenadine every single day which had the side effect of solving my chronic sinus infections.
I spent four days this fall hiking through a fairly remote part of Wakayama, and it was remarkable how much of that time was in new-growth monoculture forests. Places that I thought would be almost completely inaccessible to vehicles had been clear-cut and replaced with cedar within the last 30 years (based on the size of the trees). At the ridgeline of 2000 meter peaks -- places with no road for many kilometers in any direction -- you'd suddenly see a clear transition line from the plantation forests to whatever natural vegetation was at the top of the mountain, and there were even a few places where entire mountains had been clear-cut from bottom to top, in preparation for a new round of planting.
A major factor that the article doesn't discuss is that there simply aren't enough people to manage these forests anymore. Even if the money were allocated, the generation that did the forest management is now elderly, and there's not really replacement labor. Even with heavy machinery, I can't imagine how it could be accomplished today. Some of these plantations would probably require road construction to reach them by modern techniques.
> When the sugi and hinoki forests were first planted in the 1950s and 60s, they weren't meant to stand forever. At the time, it was assumed they would be gradually cut down and replanted over time, as had been the case before the war. But as Japan's economy boomed in the late 60s and 70s, major cities like Kobe and Tokyo grew rapidly, and it ended up being cheaper to import wood from other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.