Oh, come now Doug. You know as well as I do that the free trade was if anything a symptom of the war, not a cause.
Right, but how did all this look from the early 1600s?
I mean, from a modern perspective there was much to like about the late 1500s. Not only free trade, but unprecedented freedom of religious practice and an astonishing level of social mobility, capped by the peasant-to-ruler career of Hideyoshi.
But the folks who lived through it, and went on to found the bakufu, saw it as one wave of chaos after another. As noted upthread, much of Tokugawa Japan only makes sense when you realize how appalling the earlier chaos was to the people who lived through it.
But it's a valid analogy; you've pointed out in response to the claim that there was a lumber shortage that the Japanese pioneered amazing silviculture as prices rose. This does not to me seem to imply an abundant resource.
At the end of the day, wood is a renewable resource and oil isn't. That seems a pretty basic difference to me.
Also, much of the price increase -- I'm speculating here, but it's speculation based on having hiked around Japan a bit -- may have been driven not so much by deforestation as by deforestation of the bits that were easy to reach. A lot of Japan's forests were (still are) inland, in rugged terrain without good roads or water access. Prices were rising, but they obviously weren't /out/ of wood.
-- Anyway, this is a digression, albeit an interesting one.
Doug M.