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, which means «it hurts, it hurts,» was a bone disease contracted by farmers who ate rice from cadmium-tainted paddies in Toyama Prefecture. The buildup of cadmium made the bones so brittle that they disintegrated inside the body, causing excruciating pain.
Industry and government collaborated for forty years to hide the damage and prevent compensation from being paid to the victims of these disasters. At the outset of the Minamata scandal, Chisso hired gangsters to threaten petitioning victims; goons blinded Eugene Smith, the pioneering photographer who documented the agony and twisted limbs of the Minamata sufferers. Doctors investigating at Kumamoto University had their research money cut off. As recently as 1993, the Ministry of Education told a textbook publisher to delete the names of the companies responsible for Minamata, Itai-itai, and other industrial poisonings, even though they are a part of the public record.
Despite harassment, groups of victims managed to file their first suit for compensation in 1967, yet it was in the courts that the government had its ultimate victory. As has been eloquently described by Karel van Wolferen, Japan does not have an independent judiciary. The secretariat of the supreme court keeps judges strictly in line, and they dare not rule against the government; the police have broad powers to imprison without trial and to elicit confessions with methods verging on torture. An incredible 95 percent of lawsuits against the state end in rulings against the plaintiffs.
The primary tool of the government is delay. Legal cases in Japan, especially those filed against the government, take decades to resolve. A citizen suing the government or big industry stands an excellent chance of dying before his case comes to a verdict. This is precisely what happened at Minamata. In July 1994, the Osaka District Court finally passed judgment on a later suit filed in 1982 by fifty-nine plaintiffs. In the meantime, sixteen of them had died. The verdict: the court found no negligence on the part of either the national government or Kumamoto Prefecture for failing to stop Chisso from discharging mercury into the bay. The court turned down twelve of the surviving plaintiffs because the statute of limitations had, due to the long court case, run out. The judge ordered Chisso to pay surprisingly small damages of ¥3-8 million to each of the remaining plaintiffs. Only in 1995 did the main group of Minamata sufferers, representing two thousand plaintiffs, accept a mediated settlement with the government – almost forty years after doctors detected the first poisonings.
In two separate cases, in October 1994 and December 1996, courts resolved air-pollution suits that were more than ten years old by stipulating that damages should be paid to nearby residents, while rejecting demands that the responsible companies be required to halt toxic discharges. In other words, according to Japanese law, you may – after a lapse of decades – have to pay for the pollution you are causing, but the courts rarely require you to stop.
One might be tempted to put down what happened in the 1950s or the 1960s to haste and ignorance on the part of a newly developing country. But Japan enters the new millennium with only the most primitive regulation of toxic waste.
There are more than a thousand controlled hazardous substances in the United States, the manufacturing and handling of which fall under stringent rules that require computer monitoring and free public access to all records concerning storage and use. In Japan, as of 1994, only a few dozen substances were subject to government controls – a list that has changed only slightly since it was established in 1968 – and there is no computerized system in place to manage even these. In July of that year, the Environment Agency announced that it was considering creating a registration system like the American one-but computer monitoring and public access to records were not on the agenda. And it would be too much to ask companies to stop dumping these materials. They would merely be required to report to the agency the amount of these chemicals they are disposing of.
Japanese laws do not call for environmental-impact studies before towns or prefectures approve industrial projects. In having no environmental-impact assessment law, Japan is alone among the twenty-eight members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), though such assessments have been proposed eight times during the past quarter century. In October 1995, the U.S. air base at Atsugi complained to Tokyo about cancer-causing emissions from nearby factory incinerators, only to find that there are no cancer-risk regulations in Japan. «It's difficult to deal with the case if there is no violation of Japanese legislation,» an Environment Agency official said.
Despite serious incidents such as the arsenic poisoning of hundreds of farmers in the 1970s in Miyazaki Prefecture, the government has no controls for arsenic, either. The few toxic-waste regulations that do exist have hardly been revised since 1977, and the new regulations have no teeth. Only in 1990 did