The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
– Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát
In the construction frenzy described in the previous chapter, we can see that Japan's economic woes are linked with deep cultural trouble. The sterility of Japan's new landscape, so far from everything the nation once stood for, denotes a true crisis of the spirit. Something has driven this nation to turn on its own land with tooth and claw, and simplistic reasons like «modernization» do not explain it.
In seeking the roots of today's crisis, we need to take another look at what happened in the nineteenth century, when Japan first encountered the West. Japan woke from centuries of isolation to find itself a poor and weak nation in a world where many ancient kingdoms were rapidly being swallowed up by European colonial powers. Shocked at the nation's precarious position, Japan's new rulers set out on a crash program to build up the economy and the army, first to resist the Western powers and later to challenge them for dominance. From the beginning, this meant making industrial output a top priority to which almost everything else had to be sacrificed.
Japan's defeat in World War II had the effect of intensifying the emphasis on manufacturing, for it burned into the national memory the desire to build power so that Japan could never be defeated again. In the process, the environment, quality of life, legal system, financial system, traditional culture-everything – suffered. It was all part of a «poor people, strong state» policy, which gave Japan's economy tremendous competitive strength. However, the sacrifice of all to achieve an ever-expanding GNP spawned policies that in many ways harmed the country's mountains, rivers, and seas. One such policy is the state-sponsored stripping of native forest cover and the planting of commercial cedar; another, which has had even more serious effects, is the deliberate turning of a blind eye to industrial pollution.
Foreign analysts have admired a population trained to obey bureaucracies and large corporations as the source of Japan's industrial might. But it also means that the country has no brakes. Once the engine of policy begins to turn, it moves forward like an unstoppable tank. One might say this inability to stop lies at the root of the disaster of World War II, and it is also behind the environmental destruction of postwar Japan.
Soon after the end of the war, Japan's Forestry Agency embarked on a program to clear-cut the mountainsides and plant them with commercial timber. The aim was to replace the native broadleaf forest with something more profitable that would serve Japan's industrial growth. Tens of billions of dollars flowed to this ongoing project, with the result that by 1997 Japan had replanted 43 percent of all its woodland with a monoculture of coniferous trees, mostly sugi, or Japanese cedar.
In the process, Japan's rural landscape has been completely transformed. Today, across the country, tall stands of cedar planted in regimental rows encroach upon what remains of the bright feathery greens of the native forest cover. It is nearly impossible to find an undamaged view of the scenery that for millennia was the essence of traditional Japanese art and literature: a mix of maple, cherry trees, autumn grasses, bamboo, and pines.
Apart from the aesthetic and cultural damage, the cedar monoculture has decimated wildlife, since the cedars' dense shade crowds out undergrowth and destroys the habitat for birds, deer, rabbits, badgers, and other animals. Anyone who has hiked these cedar plantations will know how deathly silent they are, empty of the grasses, bushes, and jungly foliage that characterize Japan's native forest. Stripped of ground cover, the hillsides no longer hold rainwater, and mountain streams dry up. In Iya Valley, droughts have affected streams in my village so severely that many of them are dry for months at a time. The villagers call this «sugi drought.» Erosion from the cedar plantations also leads to landslides and to the silting up of rivers, bringing these slopes and streams into the fatal purview of the Construction Ministry.
That is not all. Allergy to sugi pollen, an ailment almost unknown a few decades ago, now affects 10 percent of all Japanese. Dr. Saito Yozo, an allergy specialist at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, observes that there is no medical treatment to eliminate pollen allergy, though he recommends wearing protective gear such as masks and goggles. And, indeed, masks and goggles are what you see on streets in the springtime in Tokyo. Some of the mask-wearers are trying to avoid contracting or spreading the common cold, but hundreds of thousands of others are trying to protect themselves against the man-made plague of sugi pollen.
The final touches in this picture are the roads that the Forestry Agency builds to bring the cedar plantations within easy reach of vehicles for harvesting. The agency has spent billions of dollars on forestry roads in every remote wilderness, including national parks-and they have involved a degree of damage to steep hillsides that one must see to believe. In Ya-magata Prefecture, the government-backed Forestry Development Corporation put forward a plan in 1969 to build 2,100 kilometers of roads in the mountains, costing ¥90 billion. Residents and environmental groups opposed the project, and engineering problems plagued it for decades. «If we had this kind of money at our disposal,» says the mayor of Nagai, a town in Yamagata, «we'd do something else with it – but if the national government insists [on building forestry roads], we're happy to cooperate.» Fat government subsides drive the program on.
All this for an industry that contributes less than a fraction of 1 percent to the GNP! For economically, reforestation has been a total washout. The Forestry Agency is about ¥3.5 trillion in debt as the result of decades of its subsidies to support reforestation and to build roads. Lumber prices have been declining for years, and Japan's dependence on foreign wood is now 80 percent (up from 26 percent three decades ago). Back in the 1940s, when the reforestation policy was set in motion, planners expected mountain dwellers to prune and log the sugi trees, but today nobody wants to do the backbreaking labor required to harvest timber on Japan's hillsides. Villages are depopulated, and the Forestry Agency has reduced its workforce from a peak of 89,000 in 1964 to only 7,000 by March 2001. A recent survey found that the few Japanese mountain villages that have not suffered severe depopulation are those with a low percentage of cedar plantations, where villagers can make a living from harvesting shiitake mushrooms, collecting wild herbs, firing charcoal, and hunting the wildlife of the native broadleaf forest.
One might expect the Forestry Agency to have second thoughts. This is what happened in China after a similar reforestation program: in 1996, its Forestry Ministry made a dramatic U-turn, requesting that the State Council lay out new logging and timber regulations to make conservation «more important than production.» But in Japan the program goes on. Today, logging of virgin forest and replanting with cedar continue at a heightened pace. The Forestry Agency has promised to develop a new «low pollen» cedar, although even with such an innovation it will be decades, perhaps centuries, before pollen levels begin to drop. And in place of human labor, the government is introducing mammoth «all-in-one deforestation machines» that fell, log, and haul out lumber. Eight hundred of these are already at work.
What is in store for the future is mechanized mountains – with giant machines marching across the land via concrete strips of forest roads that have been gouged through the hillsides. It is a scene from the movie The War of the Worlds. The social critic Inose Naoki comments, «We've passed into another dimension altogether. It hardly matters what people say: so long as the present system remains unchanged, the forests will disappear, like rows of corn mowed down by bulldozers.» Shitei Tsunahide, a forestry expert and the former president of Kyoto Prefectural University, adds, «The reforestation policy was a failure. During the high-growth years of the economy, the Forestry Agency was dragged into this fast-growth atmosphere and focused only on commercial concerns... They completely ignored the fact that a forest involves considerations other than business. A tree does not exist just for economic gain.» Alas, Professor Shitei has put his finger on the very crux of Japan's modern cultural malaise: not only forests but everything was sacrificed for economic gain.
The story of Japan's poisoning of its environment is not a new one. It dates to the two famous cases of Minamata and Itai-itai disease in the 1950s and 1960s. Minamata disease takes its name from a bay near Kumamoto, Kyushu, where more than a thousand people died from eating fish that were contaminated with mercury discharged into the bay by the Chisso Corporation. Itai-itai, which means «it hurts, it hurts,» was a bone disease contracted by farmers who ate rice from cadmium-tainted paddies in Toyama Prefecture. The buildup of cadmium made the bones so brittle that they disintegrated inside the body, causing excruciating pain.
Industry and government collaborated for forty years to hide the damage and prevent compensation from being paid to the victims of these disasters. At the outset of the Minamata scandal, Chisso hired gangsters to threaten petitioning victims; goons blinded Eugene Smith, the pioneering photographer who documented the agony and twisted limbs of the Minamata sufferers. Doctors investigating at Kumamoto University had their research money cut off. As recently as 1993, the Ministry of Education told a textbook publisher to delete the names of the companies responsible for Minamata, Itai-itai, and other industrial poisonings, even though they are a part of the public record.
Despite harassment, groups of victims managed to file their first suit for compensation in 1967, yet it was in the courts that the government had its ultimate victory. As has been eloquently described by Karel van Wolferen, Japan does not have an independent judiciary. The secretariat of the supreme court keeps judges strictly in line, and they dare not rule against the government; the police have broad powers to imprison without trial and to elicit confessions with methods verging on torture. An incredible 95 percent of lawsuits against the state end in rulings against the plaintiffs.
The primary tool of the government is delay. Legal cases in Japan, especially those filed against the government, take decades to resolve. A citizen suing the government or big industry stands an excellent chance of dying before his case comes to a verdict. This is precisely what happened at Minamata. In July 1994, the Osaka District Court finally passed judgment on a later suit filed in 1982 by fifty-nine plaintiffs. In the meantime, sixteen of them had died. The verdict: the court found no negligence on the part of either the national government or Kumamoto Prefecture for failing to stop Chisso from discharging mercury into the bay. The court turned down twelve of the surviving plaintiffs because the statute of limitations had, due to the long court case, run out. The judge ordered Chisso to pay surprisingly small damages of ¥3-8 million to each of the remaining plaintiffs. Only in 1995 did the main group of Minamata sufferers, representing two thousand plaintiffs, accept a mediated settlement with the government – almost forty years after doctors detected the first poisonings.
In two separate cases, in October 1994 and December 1996, courts resolved air-pollution suits that were more than ten years old by stipulating that damages should be paid to nearby residents, while rejecting demands that the responsible companies be required to halt toxic discharges. In other words, according to Japanese law, you may – after a lapse of decades – have to pay for the pollution you are causing, but the courts rarely require you to stop.
One might be tempted to put down what happened in the 1950s or the 1960s to haste and ignorance on the part of a newly developing country. But Japan enters the new millennium with only the most primitive regulation of toxic waste.
There are more than a thousand controlled hazardous substances in the United States, the manufacturing and handling of which fall under stringent rules that require computer monitoring and free public access to all records concerning storage and use. In Japan, as of 1994, only a few dozen substances were subject to government controls – a list that has changed only slightly since it was established in 1968 – and there is no computerized system in place to manage even these. In July of that year, the Environment Agency announced that it was considering creating a registration system like the American one-but computer monitoring and public access to records were not on the agenda. And it would be too much to ask companies to stop dumping these materials. They would merely be required to report to the agency the amount of these chemicals they are disposing of.
Japanese laws do not call for environmental-impact studies before towns or prefectures approve industrial projects. In having no environmental-impact assessment law, Japan is alone among the twenty-eight members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), though such assessments have been proposed eight times during the past quarter century. In October 1995, the U.S. air base at Atsugi complained to Tokyo about cancer-causing emissions from nearby factory incinerators, only to find that there are no cancer-risk regulations in Japan. «It's difficult to deal with the case if there is no violation of Japanese legislation,» an Environment Agency official said.
Despite serious incidents such as the arsenic poisoning of hundreds of farmers in the 1970s in Miyazaki Prefecture, the government has no controls for arsenic, either. The few toxic-waste regulations that do exist have hardly been revised since 1977, and the new regulations have no teeth. Only in 1990 did
Japan begin to draw up standards concerning dioxins, which are among the most lethal poisons on earth. In August 1997, driven by a popular outcry after the discovery of shockingly high concentrations of dioxin around incinerators, the government finally approved new regulations to monitor dioxin, adding it to the list of controlled substances. However, so unprepared were officials that the first study, made in 1996, had to rely on foreign data to judge toxicity, and the new regulations affected only steel mills and large-scale incinerators. Operators of small incinerators (the vast majority) would need to control dioxin only «if necessary,» according to the Environment Agency. The situation in Japan is especially urgent because, unlike other developed countries, Japan burns most of its waste rather than burying it. In April 1998, researchers found that the ground near an incinerator in Nosecho, near Osaka, contained 8,500 picograms of dioxin per gram, the highest recorded concentration in the world. It was only in November 1999 that Japan brought its dioxin soil-contaminant regulations in line with those of the rest of the developed world – and the nation is still years away from putting them into practice.
Why the long delay on dioxins? «To single out dioxin as a toxic substance, we needed more data,» a manager of air-pollution control at the Environment Agency claims. Yet it's hard to see why the agency needed more data when research worldwide has so clearly established dioxin toxicity that in 1986 the state of California ruled that there is no safe threshold for dioxin emissions, and state law there requires incinerator operators to reduce emissions to the absolute lowest level possible, using the best technology available. The real reason for the delay in Japan was simple: the dioxin problem was a new one, and Japan's bureaucrats, as we shall see, are woefully ill equipped to deal with new problems. Dioxin disposal had not been budgeted within the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and there were no officials profiting from it or business cartels pushing for it, so the ministry felt no urgency to pursue the matter.
The Japanese tradition of hiding disadvantageous facts means that it is impossible to discover the true extent of toxic waste in Japan. On March 29, 1997, Asahi Television did a special report on dioxin contamination in the city of Tokorozawa, outside Tokyo. Studies had shown that dioxin levels in the milk of mothers there were twelve to twenty times the level that even Japan considers safe for infants. The news team showed a videotape of waste-disposal techniques there to experts in Germany, who were aghast. One commented that the techniques were «pre-modern,» and the program made it clear that these were standard across Japan. A study in Fukuoka revealed similar levels of dioxin, and there is every reason to believe that the situation is the same throughout the country.
The piece de resistance was the following interview with a section chief at the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW):
Interviewer: Does the Ministry of Health and Welfare have any policy for dealing with dioxin?
Section chief: There is no policy whatsoever.
Interviewer: Has the MHW conducted any investigation concerning dioxin?
Section chief: No idea.
Interviewer: Do you have any idea how much dioxin is out there?
Section chief: No, we have not.
Interviewer: Have you set any guidelines for dioxin?
Section chief: No, we have not.
Interviewer: Do you plan to?
Section chief: No.
Interviewer: Do you have controls on dioxin emissions?
Section chief: No.
It is remarkable that the section chief gave this interview at all. The interview was granted before public concern over the dioxin situation became so strong that the Ministry of Health and Welfare was forced to listen to it. If the section chief had had any inkling that the dioxin situation was embarrassing or scandalous, the television crew would never have gotten in the front door. The MHW was so unconcerned about dioxin that the section chief exuded an air throughout of «Why are you asking me this stuff – how should I know?»
Only scattered accounts give a shadowy sense of the scale of the vast, unstudied problem of toxic dumping in Japan. In September 1997, the media revealed that the city of Tokorozawa and its prefecture had colluded in concealing data on dioxin discharges from local incinerators and that the levels for 1992-1994 were more than 150 times the legal limit. In one notorious case, the Yatozawa Waste Water Cooperative, a public agency representing twenty-seven municipalities in the Tama area outside Tokyo, continues to withhold data on water conductivity, a measure of contamination, despite being ordered by a court to release the data. In December 1995, the Environment Agency announced that spot surveys had found carcinogenic substances exceeding allowable levels in well water in forty-one of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Among the serious cases was a well in Tsubame, Niigata Prefecture, that contained trichloroethylene (a metal solvent) at 1,600 times the safe level. Although trichloroethylene is a known carcinogen and has turned up in 293 sites across the nation, no regulations to control its use or disposal existed at the national level.
The issue of toxic waste brings up the larger issue of «modern technology,» in which Japan is reputed to be a world leader. Unfortunately, the cutting-edge techniques studied by the experts have almost exclusively to do with manufactured goods. In the meantime, Japan has missed out on a whole world of modern technology that has been quietly developing in the West since the 1960s. This world includes the science of ecological protection. Although it flies in the face of the established image of an «advanced Japan,» the nation limps along at a primitive level in this science, decades behind the West.
From 1987 to 1989, I was involved in a joint development between Trammell Crow, a real-estate company based in Dallas, Texas, and Sumitomo Trust Bank in building a fashion mart in Kobe. The designers from the United States were astounded to find that the local contractor's plans called for asbestos-containing plastic tiles for the hallways. «There is no law against asbestos flooring,» the architect said. «In fact, these tiles are standard. Most buildings in Japan use them.»
The results of continued use of asbestos materials became evident after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, when the collapse of tens of thousands of buildings released asbestos and other carcinogens into the environment. Waste-removal operators rushed to Kobe to sign lucrative contracts, which encouraged them to dispose of the rubble quickly – without shields or other health safeguards. Although the national and Kobe governments provided much of the money for cleanup, they offered almost no guidance. A Kobe city official recalls that he approved a thousand disposal contracts in a single day. «We were in a great hurry, because we thought that removal of the rubble would lead to reconstruction,» he said.
While the cleanup continued during the next two years, the amount of asbestos in the air rose to fifty times the normal level, and more than two hundred grams of cancer-causing dioxin (enough to kill millions of people in concentrated form) entered the soil and atmosphere in quake-hit areas. The Geological Survey of Japan set up a task force that found carcinogenic chemicals in 55 of the 195 Kobe sites studied. «We are astonished at the results. The situation is very bad,» said Suzuki Yoshikazu, the chief of the task force. Yet the official survey of the quake-hit area, made by the Hyogo prefectural government, found carcinogens in only six sites; Kawamura Kazuhiko, in charge of soil protection at the Environment Agency, dismissed Suzuki's concerns about chemical seepage into the soil with the comment, «Even if underground water in Kobe is contaminated by chemicals, few people drink the water.»
It's time to take a little tour of the countryside, as reported by the weekly journal Friday in May 1995. We begin at the small town of Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, with a pile of 30,000 oil drums rusting and leaking behind a sign that says Anzen Daiichi, «Safety First.» In 1989, this cheap disposal facility had reached the point where it had a seven-year backlog, after which the operators began dumping excess sludge into an abandoned mine south of town in the dead of night. By 1992, when the illegal dumping ended, the waste pile came to more than 48,000 drums. The owner could not pay the $6 million bill for the cleanup, and the prefecture, unwilling to set a precedent, has cleared away only 17 percent of the mess. Near the mine, only a few yards from the closest house, a landfill contains radioactive thorium. In response to residents' complaints, the company responsible spread a thin layer of dirt over the landfill; after this there were no government studies or legal follow-up.
From Iwaki, we travel to the mountains of Nara, where we can see Showa Shinzan, «The New Mountain of Showa.» This fifty-meter hill takes its name from its origin in the late Showa period (1983-1989), when an Osaka construction company illegally dumped refuse there. The president of the company later sold the land and disappeared, and since then neither Nara Prefecture nor the national government has dealt with it. Recently, farmers have noticed a strange orange ooze on their rice paddies. Friday reported that in 1992 the police uncovered 1,788 cases of illegal dumping amounting to 2.1 million tons of waste in Japan. Even so, the arrest rate for illegal dumping is no better than 1 percent, with as much as 200 million tons going undetected each year. Fines are ludicrously small, as in the case of Yoshizawa Tamotsu, who was found guilty of cutting down 3,000 cypress trees and then dumping 340,000 cubic meters of construction-site wastes in a state-owned forest. Although Yoshizawa made about $6 million from the business, he paid a fine of only $5,000.
Scenes like these are repeated by the thousands across the length and breadth of Japan. Ohashi Mitsuo, the executive director of the Japan Network on Waste Landfills in Tokyo, notes that cities have been dumping industrial wastes in rural areas for decades. «If this continues, local areas will be turned into garbage dumps for big cities,» he cautions.
In one celebrated case, the Teshima Sogo Kanko Kaihatsu company dumped half a million metric tons of toxic waste on the island of Teshima, in the Inland Sea. For this the company paid a fine of only $5,000, and the island's inhabitants were left to deal with fifteen-meter-high piles of debris filled with dioxin, lead, and other toxins. As is the common refrain in such cases, for a decade Kagawa Prefecture refused to take responsibility for or dispose of the waste. Suzuki Yukichi, the managing director of the National Waste Association, said, «Almost all waste disposal facilities are very small-scale operations. Enterprises are not prepared to foot the bill for proper waste treatment. If consumers are not prepared to pay for waste disposal, then the job won't get done.»
It is not consumers who are to blame, of course, for in Japan they have little say in national industrial policy. The problem lies with government policy that favors industry at all costs. «Why do we have to shoulder the cost of removing illegally dumped waste while the government seems to go easy on licensed agents who dump illegally?» asks Ohta Hajime, the director of the industrial affairs bureau of Keidanren, the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations. «Japan's economy is supported by illegal dumping,» the operator of one disposal facility concludes. And it is true that central and local governments consistently support industrial polluters by means of cover-ups and lies. A typical example is the town of Nasu, near Utsunomiya (the site of ninety-four landfills for supposedly nontoxic waste). When animals started dying in Nasu, the villagers requested a survey, and the government insisted there was no problem with the water. A private research firm then found high levels of mercury, cadmium, and lead in the water supply.
This accumulated mess – and the lack of expertise to deal with it – arose because those in charge of framing national industrial policy factored waste treatment out of the equation. There are few legal or monetary costs for poisoning the environment, and Japanese companies have consequently felt no need to develop techniques for handling wastes. And they weren't the only ones who overlooked this problem. Foreign commentators, as they lauded Japan's «efficient economy,» never stopped to ask where the factories were burying sludge or why the government couldn't – indeed wouldn't – keep track of toxic chemicals. One would think that waste disposal and management of industrial poisons have an intimate bearing on the true efficiency of a modern economy; and the evidence of runaway pollution was there to see. It's a case of what some economists call «development on steroids,» for a high GNP achieved without strict controls on toxic waste is fundamentally different from one that has such controls.
Unquestioned at home, and basking in the praise lavished on them abroad, the bureaucrats in Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Environment Agency have sat back and taken it easy. They have only the haziest idea of the many techniques for testing and controlling hazardous waste that have become the norm in many advanced countries. The central and local governments simply have no idea how to test for or dispose of toxic chemicals. The reason that waste disposal after the Kobe earthquake took place in such confusion was that the agencies in charge didn't know anything about waste incineration; they didn't know about shields; they didn't know how to monitor toxic discharges.
In September 1994, the Environment Agency announced tightened regulations on industrial-waste-disposal sites. Current rules, unchanged since 1977, did not cover chemicals produced in the 1990s, and disposal sites were still mostly unprotected holes in the ground, without waterproofing, and with no devices to process leachate. There are 1,400 such unprotected disposal pits, representing more than half of all reported industrial-waste sites in Japan. (There are tens of thousands of unreported sites.) What were the Environment Agency's «tightened regulations»? A study of twenty sites over several years.
This lack of environmental technology became vividly clear on January 2, 1997, when the Russian tanker Nakhodka, carrying 133,000 barrels of oil, ran aground and split in half off the coast of Ishikawa Prefecture, west of Tokyo. Although bioremediation (using microbes to break oil down into water and CO2) has been in standard use as a means of cleaning up oil spills in other parts of the world since the 1980s, the Japanese government had not yet approved its use. The Environment Agency therefore did not apply microbes to the 300-meter oil slick, and untold damage to marine life in the region resulted. Finally, a group of fishermen took matters into their own hands and used a small supply of American-manufactured microbes on what they said was «an experimental basis.»
Besides bioremediation, another common technique to contain oil spills is to have surfactant sprayed by airplanes and vessels or to have the oil that reaches the surface burned. Neither of these technologies was available in Japan. Although the tanker ran aground in an established tanker lane, there were no disaster plans in place and no large oil-recovery vessels stationed in the Sea of Japan. One had to sail all the way from Japan's Pacific coast, which took days. The actor Kevin Costner was moved to donate $700,000 of high-tech cleanup devices to the affected areas. And in the end farm women scooped oil off the beaches with hishaku, old-style wooden ladles. As Yamada Tatsuya reported in the Asahi Evening News, «This time the old-fashioned hishaku ladles – something of a museum piece in our modern society – suddenly became a symbol of the cleanup effort.»
In April 1997, the Maritime Self-Defense Force discovered a giant oil slick forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide that threatened to reach the west coast of Tsushima Island within two days. Two destroyers rushed to the scene-carrying, according to the newspapers, «a large number of blankets used to soak up oil, as well as plastic buckets and drums.» In technologically advanced modern Japan, this is how you clean up an oil spill: with old ladies using wooden ladles, blankets, and plastic buckets. This raises a fundamental question of what we should include in our definitions of modern technology. In general, economists have used a very limited definition, judging a nation's technological level by its ability to manufacture cars or memory chips, or by its academic resources in advanced science. But many more fields of human endeavor with high degrees of sophistication are qualified to be called technologies. What types of skills and knowledge are really essential for a modern state, and how high is the price for ignoring them?
Consider the simple example of forest management. In the United States, thousands of people study its fine points, and tens of millions of dollars are poured annually into numerous disciplines of forest science. In Japan, all the effort – billions of yen every year – goes into supporting the tired old scheme of cedar monoculture. While Canada supports 4,000 forest rangers, Japan has only 150, with no professional training; while the United States spends the equivalent of ¥190 billion on public-park management and Canada ¥50 billion, Japan devotes only ¥3.6 billion. Forestry management is only one technology that Japan has failed to master; there are hundreds more.
From a strictly economic point of view, Japan has not calculated the cost of environmental cleanup. For an environmental mess that may be close to impossible to remedy, the next generation of Japanese will face an unpaid bill of trillions of yen. Or maybe not. Solving such problems is very low on Japan's list of priorities, which is now a century and a half old and is set as hard as concrete. When we find the Environment Agency itself taking the attitude that it doesn't matter that ground water is contaminated because, after all, «few people drink the water,» we can predict that environmental cleanup is one unpaid bill Japanese industry may never have to settle.
Yet recently there has been talk of strengthening controls over waste disposal, because the government is beginning to realize that this is an industry with growth potential. In 2000, the government began to institute a new law requiring that household electric goods such as television sets and refrigerators be recycled when discarded; the recychng will be paid for by consumers, who will buy recycling coupons at the post office. It's a great step forward, but it leaves open the question of who will pay for cleaning up the sort of pollution that doesn't involve consumers directly. Japanese business built its global competitiveness partly thanks to the free ride it got on issues of environmental destruction. Now that the Japanese economy has slowed to a crawl and exports face threats from newly industrialized Asian countries, it will be very difficult suddenly to force industry to pay the costs.
The best the Environment Agency has done for soil pollution is to set up a secret panel in 1992 to study the merits of establishing something similar to the United States' Super Fund Act, whereby industry would foot the bill for cleaning up toxic-waste sites. But powerful business leaders and bureaucrats opposed the scheme as being too expensive, so the agency quietly put the idea to sleep. The panel still meets, but its discussions go nowhere. One panelist has said, «If we dig up landfills, it's clear that they're contaminated. But if safety measures were to be applied to all such landfills, an enormous amount of money would be needed. It just wasn't realistic.»
The Japanese public exerts very little political pressure on the government to address issues of industrial pollution, and the few lawsuits are mostly ineffectual, mired in decades of delay. The central and local governments, deeply in debt after decades of funding massive construction boondoggles, cannot afford the responsibility for monitoring or disposing of toxic wastes. The Environment Agency gave up before it even started. There will be no cleanup.
One could view this runaway waste problem itself as a toxic by-product of Japan's vaunted schoolrooms. Students in Japanese schools are made to memorize huge numbers of facts, far more than is required of students in other countries, and they also learn to be docile and diligent workers. The system that teaches students so many facts and such unquestioning obedience has been the wonder and envy of many writers on Japan. But there are huge liabilities. Items of low priority on the national list for manufacturing success, such as environmental consciousness, do not appear in the Japanese curriculum. And what is the result? Mason Florence, an American resident of Kyoto and the author of Kyoto City Guide, says, «In the States there is a negative buzz to litter. If you drop a cigarette pack or a can out the window, there is a good chance of having a guy or girl next to you saying 'Hey, man!' » Not so in Japan. Discarded bottles and old refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, and plastic bags filled with junk line country roads. Plastic bottles clutter the beaches. As Mason says, «Drive through the hills of Kitayama [north of Kyoto], and you see garbage everywhere. It would be unthinkable, for example, in Colorado.» Or in the countryside of most nations of Europe. Or in Singapore or Malaysia.
Another subject that Japanese schools very definitely do not teach is social activism. Citizens' groups in Japan have pathetically low memberships and budgets. For example, Greenpeace has 400,000 members in the United States, 500,000 in Germany, and only 5,400 in Japan. The World Wildlife Fund has fewer than 20,000 members in Japan, versus millions in the United States and Europe. This adds up to powerlessness. As Professor Hasegawa Koichi of Tohoku University stresses, «Japan's nature conservation groups are not powerful enough to influence the policy-making process, unlike their Western counterparts.»
On the other side, government agencies keep up a barrage of propaganda, at public expense, to support their programs, as we have seen in the case of construction. In October 1996, newspapers revealed that the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry collected ¥47 million from ten nationally funded foundations under its own jurisdiction to pay for public relations that included magazine advertisements warning of the risk of massive rains and floods, a series of events commemorating the centennial of modern river-control methods in Japan, and two international symposiums on water resources and flood control. Needless to say, it was not revealed that retired River Bureau bureaucrats served on the boards of those foundations. Nor was it mentioned that the same officials hold stock in the companies that have the contracts to manage dams, channeling billions of yen directly into their own pockets.
A full-color advertisement sponsored by the Electrical Resource Development Company, in the popular weekly Shukan Shincho in December 1995, was typical of the propaganda effort. In front of a photograph of a large hydroelectric dam stands the attractive Ms. Aoyama Yoshiyo, who is traveling in the mountains of scenic Wakayama. «Ah,» says Ms. Aoyama in the text. «What lovely cedar trees. They're so nicely tended, and their trunks, shorn of branches, grow up tall and straight to the sky. And there is such abundant water here, of course, the result of this being a region of high rainfall. Why, it's just perfect for an electrical generating station!» When she reaches her destination, Ikehara Dam, she exclaims, «My, there's no water in the river on the other side of the dam. When I asked where the water went to, I found that it now takes a shortcut via a winding river on the other side of the dam. Where the old river was,» she cries with delight, «is now the area below the dam where there is a sports garden and places for relaxation.» One of these places for relaxation is a golf course, which the electric company kindly contributed to the village when it built the dam. "If I'd known about the golf course, I would have come a day earlier," Ms. Aoyama concludes.
You can hardly pick up a major magazine without coming across this sort of thing – the public-relations barrage is nearly overwhelming. In contrast, scattered citizens' groups bravely take on the government or companies in certain isolated cases, but there is no strong movement on a national scale.
Japan's schools are instilling a mind-set in children that accepts every dam as glorious, every new road as a path to a happy future. This locks Japan permanently into its «developing country» mode. When the U.S. Department of the Interior ordered the dismantling of Maine's Edwards Dam (which was more than a century old), church bells chimed and thousands cheered at the sight of their river regaining its freedom. In Japan, where civic organizations continue to raise flags and beat drums to announce the latest civil-engineering monuments, such a reaction would be unthinkable. «Welcome to Hiyoshi Dam!» proclaims Ninomachi, the local citizens' magazine of my town of Kameoka. We see glossy photos of concrete-flattened mountainsides, and learn that Hiyoshi is a «multipurpose» dam providing not only flood control but a visitors' center that allows the public to learn and to play: «We expect that it will play a large role in improving local culture and activity not only in the hometown of Hiyoshi but also in the surrounding regions.»
Dams like Hiyoshi are precisely where Japanese children go to learn and play, and they certainly contribute to culture-indeed, they are rapidly becoming the culture, with schools, courts, and industry all functioning as one closely knit whole. Allan Stoopes, who teaches environmental studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, told me that his students want to subscribe to journals published by «green» groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but they dare not, for fear universities and companies will learn of it and turn them down when they apply for jobs. Citizens' groups such as those that fought the Minamata and Itai-itai cases for four decades truly deserve to be called heroic.
Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonetheless grieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around me about the sorts of things discussed in your book, I found I was speaking to people who had no idea of these things. While the place I live in is not Iya Valley, it is still a rural village. And yet here too, I've seen that what was ugly already is becoming increasingly ugly.»
People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, said, «Whenever I find a small village I rush to it on my bad legs. It's not quite that the scenery is running away from me, but I feel, 'I've got to capture this quickly or it will disappear. When I find a wonderful place, I worry that someone will come and take it away from me.' »
The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to «narrow their focus» that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it.
While human beings may color in what we want to see and leave the rest in black and white, this is not an easy task for a camera. Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature – mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool – with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons, and so forth. Often the very agencies whose work is to resculpt the landscape have produced and paid for such advertisements.
Well-selected words and photos remind the Japanese daily that they live in a beautiful country. They also impress upon foreigners who buy books on gardens, flowers, architecture, and Kyoto that Japan is blessed above all nations in the world with its exquisite «love of the four seasons.» No country in the world has so rich a heritage of symbols and literature extolling nature. Signs for restaurants and bars read «Maple Leaf,» «Firefly,» «Autumn Grasses»; a major bank, formerly Kobe Taiyo Mitsui Ginko (Kobe Sun Mitsui Bank), even changed its name to Sakura Ginko (Cherry Blossom Bank). Myriad ceremonies such as Mizutori, the Bringing of Spring Water, at the Nigatsu-do Temple in Nara, survive from traditional culture, and people perform such rituals in private homes and at temples or watch them broadcast in some form or another almost daily on television. From the emperor's ceremonial planting of spring rice on the palace grounds in Tokyo to moon-viewing parties in autumn, millions of people celebrate the passing of the seasons. Shopping arcades hang branches of plastic cherry blossoms in the spring and plastic maple leaves in the fall. But this wealth of seasonal reminders obscures the devastation taking place throughout Japan. It is easy to forget, or never even to notice, that the Forestry Agency is replacing Japan's maples and cherries with sugi cedar, that fireflies no longer rise from concrete-encased riverbanks.
It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference-in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon – to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. Advancing as inexorably as the «Moving Finger» of Omar Khayyam, the bureaucracy carves its «concepts» upon the land, and neither our Piety nor our Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all our Tears wash out a Word of it.