You can hardly pick up a major magazine without coming across this sort of thing – the public-relations barrage is nearly overwhelming. In contrast, scattered citizens' groups bravely take on the government or companies in certain isolated cases, but there is no strong movement on a national scale.
Japan's schools are instilling a mind-set in children that accepts every dam as glorious, every new road as a path to a happy future. This locks Japan permanently into its «developing country» mode. When the U.S. Department of the Interior ordered the dismantling of Maine's Edwards Dam (which was more than a century old), church bells chimed and thousands cheered at the sight of their river regaining its freedom. In Japan, where civic organizations continue to raise flags and beat drums to announce the latest civil-engineering monuments, such a reaction would be unthinkable. «Welcome to Hiyoshi Dam!» proclaims Ninomachi, the local citizens' magazine of my town of Kameoka. We see glossy photos of concrete-flattened mountainsides, and learn that Hiyoshi is a «multipurpose» dam providing not only flood control but a visitors' center that allows the public to learn and to play: «We expect that it will play a large role in improving local culture and activity not only in the hometown of Hiyoshi but also in the surrounding regions.»
Dams like Hiyoshi are precisely where Japanese children go to learn and play, and they certainly contribute to culture-indeed, they are rapidly becoming the culture, with schools, courts, and industry all functioning as one closely knit whole. Allan Stoopes, who teaches environmental studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, told me that his students want to subscribe to journals published by «green» groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but they dare not, for fear universities and companies will learn of it and turn them down when they apply for jobs. Citizens' groups such as those that fought the Minamata and Itai-itai cases for four decades truly deserve to be called heroic.
Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonetheless grieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around me about the sorts of things discussed in your book, I found I was speaking to people who had no idea of these things. While the place I live in is not Iya Valley, it is still a rural village. And yet here too, I've seen that what was ugly already is becoming increasingly ugly.»
People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, said, «Whenever I find a small village I rush to it on my bad legs. It's not quite that the scenery is running away from me, but I feel, 'I've got to capture this quickly or it will disappear. When I find a wonderful place, I worry that someone will come and take it away from me.' »
The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to «narrow their focus» that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it.
While human beings may color in what we want to see and leave the rest in black and white, this is not an easy task for a camera. Photographers and moviemakers in Japan must carefully calculate how to frame each shot to preserve the illusion of natural beauty. The Japanese are surrounded by books and posters that feature precisely trimmed shots of nature – mostly close-ups of such details as the walkway into an old temple grounds or a leaf swirling in a mountain pool – with accompanying slogans praising the Japanese love of nature, the seasons, and so forth. Often the very agencies whose work is to resculpt the landscape have produced and paid for such advertisements.
Well-selected words and photos remind the Japanese daily that they live in a beautiful country. They also impress upon foreigners who buy books on gardens, flowers, architecture, and Kyoto that Japan is blessed above all nations in the world with its exquisite «love of the four seasons.» No country in the world has so rich a heritage of symbols and literature extolling nature. Signs for restaurants and bars read «Maple Leaf,» «Firefly,» «Autumn Grasses»; a major bank, formerly Kobe Taiyo Mitsui Ginko (Kobe Sun Mitsui Bank), even changed its name to Sakura Ginko (Cherry Blossom Bank). Myriad ceremonies such as Mizutori, the Bringing of Spring Water, at the Nigatsu-do Temple in Nara, survive from traditional culture, and people perform such rituals in private homes and at temples or watch them broadcast in some form or another almost daily on television. From the emperor's ceremonial planting of spring rice on the palace grounds in Tokyo to moon-viewing parties in autumn, millions of people celebrate the passing of the seasons. Shopping arcades hang branches of plastic cherry blossoms in the spring and plastic maple leaves in the fall. But this wealth of seasonal reminders obscures the devastation taking place throughout Japan. It is easy to forget, or never even to notice, that the Forestry Agency is replacing Japan's maples and cherries with sugi cedar, that fireflies no longer rise from concrete-encased riverbanks.
It is impossible to get through a single day in Japan without seeing some reference-in paper, plastic, chrome, celluloid, or neon – to autumn foliage, spring blossoms, flowing rivers, and seaside pines. Yet it is very possible to go for months or even years without seeing the real thing in its unspoiled form. Camouflaged by propaganda and symbols, supported by a complacent public, and directed by a bureaucracy on autopilot, the line of tanks moves on: laying concrete over rivers and seashores, reforesting the hills, and dumping industrial waste. Advancing as inexorably as the «Moving Finger» of Omar Khayyam, the bureaucracy carves its «concepts» upon the land, and neither our Piety nor our Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all our Tears wash out a Word of it.
3. The Bubble
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.
(If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back).
– Horace
We are ready to take a look at the long financial travail Japan has been experiencing since 1990, the aftermath of wild speculation known as the Bubble. The meltdown of the stock market and property prices has wiped away assets worth $10 trillion, with another $3 trillion likely yet to go. These vanished assets are not trivial, for they make up one of the most grievous declines of wealth experienced in human history, the sort of loss that usually happens in war or at the fall of an empire. To see how Japan could have got itself into this incredible situation, we must go back to the heyday of Japanese financial power more than a decade ago.