Jun 10, 2005. /Lesprom Network/. The volume of Japan's lumber exports came to 7,333 cubic meters in 2004, almost four times the volume in 1999, according to a Forestry Agency survey made available Thursday. Agency officials attributed the surge to efforts by forest owners' cooperatives to sell high-quality cedar and Japanese cypress in overseas markets, particularly China and South Korea, as luxury building material. ''These exports to burgeoning East Asian economies may help turn around flagging performances in the nation's forestry industry,'' said an official of the agency's lumber department. The 2004 export volume is equivalent to 95,000 tree trunks 3 meters in length and 16 centimeters in diameter. Still, the volume is a fraction of the 12.68 million cubic meters of foreign lumber Japan imported in 2004 from countries including Russia, Canada and the United States. Japan's timber exports had fallen sharply in the 1990s, when timber exporters took blows from a dive in demand mainly from South Korean fishermen who used to buy Japanese lumber as building material for their wooden-hull fishing boats. The overall export volume nosedived to 1,976 cubic meters in 1999. The federation of Miyazaki Prefecture-based forest owners' cooperatives started exporting cedar for use as condominium interior material to wealthy Chinese consumers in 2002. In April 2004, timber dealers in Kagoshima Prefecture began exporting cedar to South Korea as building material for resort cottages. The associations of timber merchants in Aomori, Yamagata, Ishikawa and Tottori have also started exporting products to China and Taiwan, the officials said.