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
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
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
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'
