Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [31]
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 Kyoto City Guide, says, «In the States there is a negative buzz to litter. If you drop a cigarette pack or a can out the window, there is a good chance of having a guy or girl next to you saying 'Hey, man!' » Not so in Japan. Discarded bottles and old refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, and plastic bags filled with junk line country roads. Plastic bottles clutter the beaches. As Mason says, «Drive through the hills of Kitayama [north of Kyoto], and you see garbage everywhere. It would be unthinkable, for example, in Colorado.» Or in the countryside of most nations of Europe. Or in Singapore or Malaysia.
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.