Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [28]
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