Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [29]
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