• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1190 0

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,