Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [27]
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