Polishing Its Image : Environment Blossoms as Japan Issue

Deep in the range of small mountains north of Kyoto is a small Buddhist temple where for the past 11 centuries monks have been praying to assuage the capricious spirit of the Kamo River, protecting the ancient capital in the basin below from floods.

The modern successor to that tradition has taken on a new duty: fighting a flood control project he believes will devastate these wooded hills and fill the river with silt.

Shincho Tanaka, chief priest of Shimyoin Temple, accuses local officials of meeting in secret to plan an ill-advised and unnecessary pork-barrel dam that could be forced on residents before they have an opportunity to object.

Sees Money at Root

“They say they want to build a dam to prevent water damage and floods,” Tanaka said, “but the momentum is coming from money, and in the long run it is only going to make the flooding worse.”

Local opposition to public works development is nothing new in Japan, but until now environmentalists have often waged losing battles because they came into the picture only after decisions were made and funds allocated. Tanaka’s strategy is to intervene during the planning stages, before the project is set in concrete.

His cause may seem parochial, but on a symbolic level the Kumogahata dispute has an international dimension. The very mentality of the officialdom that Tanaka is fighting is starting to attract notice abroad, where Japan’s recent emergence as the world’s largest aid donor is accompanied by tough scrutiny of its environmental track record.

Foreign Aid Affected

Critics are charging that Japanese development aid is sometimes distributed under the same rules of patronage and pork barrel that have made an ecological nightmare out of much of the natural habitat in the home islands.

Most conspicuously, fragile rain forests in Southeast Asia are being seriously depleted by Japan’s hardwood-hungry trading companies and by aid projects that build roads and infrastructure to foster irresponsible logging, the critics say.

Moreover, conservationists denounce Japan for killing whales in a “scientific research” program, despite its agreement to abide by a worldwide ban on commercial whaling. The country also draws criticism for sheltering a lucrative import market for elephant ivory, hawksbill turtle shell and products from other endangered species.

A rare unspoiled coral reef off Ishigaki Island in the Ryukyu chain is all but doomed by a landfill airport that officials seem determined to build over the adamant protests of international environmental groups.

Lately, however, Japan has confided that it wants to put its environmental house in order--at least where foreign countries are concerned. Next month Tokyo will host its first international conference on the environment, having invited a cast of experts to advise it on matters such as how to administer foreign aid in a way that minimizes adverse environmental effects.

This comes after a Japanese pledge, made in July at the economic summit of the seven industrial nations in Paris, to spend about $2.2 billion on the environment over the next three years as part of a massive official development assistance program. The figure actually conceals a slight decrease on an annual basis from the amount already spent last year, but to the Japanese government it represents a commitment to something new.

A Question of Vision

“My fear is that the people of the world are going to be asking us what we plan to do with our money and technology, whether we have a philosophy or a vision,” said Kazuo Matsushita, the Environmental Agency official organizing the Sept. 11-13 World Conference on the Global Environment. “This forum is to discuss how to use the funds wisely.”

Some veteran observers are skeptical, however, about the government’s motives in jumping on the environmental bandwagon.

“Japan is still deeply involved in destroying the environment around the world, but they want to pose,” said Katsuichi Honda, a senior reporter for the Asahi newspaper who is a noted naturalist and mountaineer. “It’s not getting any better in Japan--things are getting worse. There’s no proof at all that (the conference) is the result of a serious effort to re-evaluate how we relate to the environment.”

The controversy over the flood control project in Kyoto cuts to the heart of the issue because its planners appear to be plodding ahead in the traditional Japanese approach, deliberating the alternatives in engineering without first pondering the environmental consequences.

Calls Protest Premature

Toshiaki Honjo, the official in Kyoto prefecture’s civil engineering department in charge of river projects, said the local protest movement is premature because an advisory council has not yet decided it is necessary to build a dam, as Tanaka and his fellow protesters allege.

But Honjo said an environmental assessment study will not be commissioned until after it has been decided whether or not to build the dam, which would choke the river a few miles down the valley from its source near Tanaka’s temple.

“There’s no such thing as an objective environmental assessment in this country--they always come up with the results the government wants,” said Tanaka, 49. “This isn’t just a problem for Kumogahata or Kyoto, it’s the world’s problem. The Kamo is a river of the world.”

To its credit, Japan has an enviable record for controlling industrial air pollution and has set exhaust emission standards that are among the world’s most rigorous. On that score, it can be expected to take a lead role in fighting the global warming trend and finding alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemical coolants and solvents believed to deplete the ozone layer.

But the Environmental Agency’s Matsushita concedes that when it comes to public works, Japan simply looks bad.

“We don’t have a good record on impact assessment,” he said, “especially in the planning stage.”

In fact, the agency has tried repeatedly to get a law through Parliament that would require environmental impact assessments for major works such as flood control projects. But hampered by a brief 18-year history, limited manpower and a budget about one-tenth that of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the agency lacks sufficient clout to take on the more powerful Japanese ministries with vested interests in unencumbered development.

What results is a pattern of guerrilla warfare, with residents and grass-roots environmental groups on one side and bureaucrats, local political bosses and agents of the construction industry on the other.

The situation on Ishigaki Island is typical. During a decade of controversy over the $240-million airport project, the Okinawa prefectural government reluctantly undertook several environmental impact studies, the scientific integrity of which remains under a cloud.

Offered Conciliatory Move

In a posture of conciliation, the prefectural government announced in April that it would move the site of the airport by a few miles to limit damage to protect a rare colony of blue coral, but critics say construction will still destroy the surrounding reef.

At the Nagara River estuary, near Nagoya in central Japan, environmental groups are fighting to halt the ongoing construction of another dam of disputed purpose--designed to fit heavy industrial water needs in the 1960s. On Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands, locals who say they were hoodwinked by the government into supporting an unneeded dam on the Shimanto River have begun a campaign to tear it down.

Amid these signs that the public is awakening to ecological concerns, however, the government has been pressing ahead in the spirit of the pork barrel.

Former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, who originally proposed hosting next month’s global environmental conference, introduced a sweeping “hometown development” program that foisted $740,000 “bonus” grants on about 3,200 rural municipalities during this fiscal year.

Used Aid to Buy Gold

While most recipients hatched a bridge or road project to soak up the largess, the fishing village of Tsuna on Awaji Island rebelled by using the cash to buy a 127.6-pound gold ingot.

“Ideas like environmental assessment and land use policy go against the grain of what this country has been based on,” said Tom Milliken, director of Traffic (Japan), a Tokyo conservation group affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund. “Traditional care for nature has been lost in postwar Japan. They’ve been bent on economic construction.”

The Japanese descend from a tribe that once worshiped rocks, rivers and trees, but one must stretch the imagination to see evidence of this today.

A furor erupted earlier this year when a staff photographer for the Asahi newspaper took a shocking underwater photo of a coral reef that had been defaced with the initials “KY.” It later was revealed that the photographer himself was the vandal. He was dismissed, and the newspaper’s president resigned to take responsibility for the incident.

In the Kumogahata area, the virgin forests were cut down centuries ago and in their place now stand perfect patterns of pencil-shaped cedar, cultivated like rows of lettuce. These are the forests that Tanaka fears will perish to the debilitating effects of soggy soil and erosion if a dam is built.

An almost perverse instinct to mold nature, rather than let it be, is demonstrated by the way that local timber men cultivate these trees, which are used for exposed pillars in the tokonoma --ceremonial alcoves of traditional houses. Small worm-like pieces of plastic are wrapped tightly onto their bark, giving them a mottled look that purportedly has an aesthetic appeal.

At the same time, Japan is the largest importer of tropical hardwood products, taking in about half such timber imported by industrialized countries, the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network said in a recent report. Much of the tropical wood is turned into plywood to mold concrete in the construction trade, and is thrown away when the cement dries.

Japanese aid has helped fuel the destruction of the tropical forests by funding, for example, logging roads in the Sarawak region of Malaysia, where the indigenous Penan people are opposing the timber trade, according to the forest network.

Advocacy Groups Snubbed

Matters such as these might not emerge at all during next month’s government-sponsored conference, however. Japan’s advocacy environmental groups, or “non-government organizations (NGOs),” have been snubbed.

“The bureaucrats don’t want to have inconvenient discussions at the conference,” said Fubomichi Kudo, an official with the Nature Conservation Society of Japan. “Talk of foreign aid, in particular, would hurt their ears.”

Having failed in attempts to pry open the government conference in Tokyo, the NGOs now plan to hold their own conferences in Kyoto and Osaka a few days earlier.

Whether the Japanese government’s interest in the environment is a fad or a publicity stunt, aimed at currying favor in the international arena, remains to be seen, Kudo said.

“The environment is a low risk cause to adopt--nobody is going to be against it in any country,” Kudo said. “But the real test will come when the conference is over, when we’ll see to what extent the government takes responsibility and carries out its obligations.”