Environment : Japan Island’s Ecosystem Endangered : Isolated Anijima is far from paradise but many consider it the ‘Galapagos of the northwest Pacific.’ Now, plans are under way to put an airstrip on the island to increase tourism.

Isolation saved this small subtropical island from the kind of relentless development that has systematically obliterated natural seacoasts and virgin forests throughout the Japanese archipelago.

At first glance, dry and scrub-covered Anijima is hardly the stuff of picture postcards. But for those who appreciate the subtlety of unique subtropical grasses or exotic varieties of snails, it is the “Galapagos of the northwest Pacific” and an ecology fieldworker’s dream.

Nobody has lived on the island--part of the Ogasawara chain about 600 miles south of Tokyo--since a contingent of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers dug in their defenses here 46 years ago. Most of its shoreline became a protected zone in a new national park when the United States returned the Ogasawaras’ 103 islands and islets to Japan in 1968.

But now, bureaucrats plan to flatten the craggy hilltops, bury the thickly vegetated valleys and pave part of this nature preserve with Tarmac.

The plan is to build a 5,900-foot airstrip that would accommodate daily flights by mid-sized passenger jets and bring battalions of tourists to the Ogasawaras. There is no commercial airport here now, leaving would-be tourists with the prospect of a 28-hour ship ride from Tokyo.

Scientists familiar with the fragile Ogasawaran ecosystem reacted with astonished indignation when Tokyo authorities first proposed the airport.

“A big airstrip will ruin Anijima,” said Yoshikazu Shimizu, associate professor of natural sciences at Tokyo’s Komazawa University.

“It’s the sole island in the entire Ogasawara chain where the unique, endemic environment has been well preserved,” said Shimizu, who has done extensive research in the Ogasawaras and represents a nationwide group of scholars opposed to the project. “This is the closest Japan has to a Galapagos.”

At stake is far more than the rare flora and fauna on uninhabited Anijima, a speck in the Pacific Ocean measuring about 3 3/4 miles by 1 1/4 miles.

Many residents of neighboring Chichijima, the main island in the chain, are eager to have an airport after decades of government neglect, but many also fear a large-scale project will spark a tourism boom that would overwhelm them with resort hotels, burden limited water supplies and drive up already inflated land prices.

Island opinion on the government’s Anijima airport proposal is ambivalent and contradictory. It is difficult to speak against the plan, both because of peer pressure and because the convenience of air travel would dramatically improve the quality of life. But at the same time, many residents find it hard to accept the jarring changes that jet airplanes would be sure to bring.

Although Chichijima and nearby Hahajima have sustained a partial shock of civilization, losing much of their tall forests to loggers, they retain a degree of wildness and natural beauty that is extremely rare in contemporary Japan.

At a southern latitude about the same as Florida, the warm waters of the Ogasawara National Park are a paradise for scuba divers, who make up about a third of the tourists currently visiting the islands. Recent research suggests as many as 200 kinds of coral thrive on Ogasawaras’ reefs, rivaling the diversity found off Ishigaki Island in Okinawa prefecture (state).

With intensive agricultural development on Ishigaki threatening to destroy the coral ecosystem there with red clay runoff, as marine biologists say it did elsewhere in Okinawa, the Ogasawaras may someday harbor Japan’s last living coral reefs.

Still, critics say a large and poorly conceived airport could doom the Ogasawaras’ marine sanctuary as well. Ominously, construction plans call for a bridge connecting Anijima and Chichijima, which appears likely to smother with silt the pristine coral reef in Anijima Strait, one of Ogasawaras’ most brilliant.

In preparation for the project, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which administers these remote islands, has commissioned an environmental survey of the entire Ogasawara chain. It will also conduct a separate environmental impact study on the $260-million airport program before construction begins, possibly in four to five years.

“Local opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of building the airport as soon as possible,” said Kiyoshi Hosoguchi, in charge of regional development for the metropolitan government. “We’ll do everything possible to minimize its effects on the environment, such as limiting flights to once a day. But commercial air service has got to use jets to be profitable.”

The tug of war between progress and preservation in the Ogasawaras echoes a fundamental schism in nation’s environmental policy. Japan has been an enlightened leader in the fight against air pollution and more recently added its voice to those warning about global warming. But at the same time it adheres to a tradition of sacrificing its dwindling natural resources to big development projects that often reek of the pork barrel.

“In Japan, environmental assessments don’t stop projects, they endorse what’s already been decided by the bureaucrats,” said Hiroyuki Tachikawa, a researcher specializing in coral at the Ogasawara Marine Center. “In this case, we’re afraid it may already be too late.”

Tachikawa is a member of a group of about 100 local residents who advocate scaled-down alternatives to the Anijima plan. They wonder, for example, why islanders’ needs cannot be met by a smaller airport for propeller planes on Chichijima, or commercial service by amphibious aircraft in Futami Harbor.

Few who have visited Ogasawara would argue against the need for some sort of airport.

The only regularly scheduled transportation link between Tokyo and Chichijima is a grueling 28-hour voyage aboard a relatively Spartan passenger ship that sails once in five days.

“In 28 hours, you can board an airplane in Tokyo, fly to Brazil and get yourself deep into the Amazon jungle,” said Masahiro Moriki, who opened a minshuku lodge on Chichijima four years ago after burning out in his management job at a Tokyo cosmetics company. “If you think about it, it’s absurd how long it takes to get here.”

Amphibious aircraft are periodically called in to the marine Self-Defense Force base on Chichijima to evacuate residents in medical emergencies, but otherwise people are marooned until the 3,500-ton Ogasawara Maru pulls up anchor. This quirk in navigation has safeguarded the environment from wanton developers, but it also sustains a mood of island melancholia.

“My heart is very heavy whenever I see people off at the wharf,” said Sakae Nakanishi, who moved to Chichijima last year with her husband and two children. “Part if it is sadness because our friends are leaving, but I also have this panicky feeling that I’m being left behind.”

About two-thirds of Ogasawaras’ approximately 2,000 residents migrated here over the past 20 years to escape the rat race of Tokyo and other overcrowded cities on the main Japanese islands. The newcomers sought out Ogasawaras’ protected nature, and many have deep reservations about the Anijima airport plan.

“We didn’t come here because it was convenient,” said Akihito Koga, a former riot policeman who moved to Chichijima to open a dive shop 18 years ago. “A lot of us think the very meaning of coming to Ogasawara will be lost if you can get here in 1 1/2 hours and the place crawling with tourists.”

Yet, the local political scene and the construction industry are dominated by more established residents with pre-World War II island roots. These community leaders have spent decades lobbying Tokyo for an airport, and they understandably are not happy about the prospect of further delays.

The pressure of island society surrounding the airport issue is so intense that when a science teacher at Ogasawara High School wrote a letter criticizing the Anijima project, he was summoned before the village council and publicly denounced.

In what Takaya Yasui recalls as a painfully humiliating experience, he was told he would be ejected from the island if he continued to oppose the airport. Yasui said he received menacing phone calls for several months after that, but that the anonymous harassment has since stopped.

“A lot of people around here have doubts about this airport,” said Yasui, 59, a mild-mannered biologist who conducts his own research classifying plant species on Anijima. “But it’s been very difficult to speak out.”

Unlike the widely publicized struggle against the government’s plans to build a landfill airport--atop a rare stand of blue coral--off Shiraho, on Okinawa prefecture’s Ishigaki Island, the Ogasawaras’ preservationists find themselves working in a vacuum.

Nozomu Ikeda, pub-keeper and a leader of the anti-airport campaign on Chichijima, said he has repeatedly sent appeals to Japanese reporters in Tokyo, but so far the media have ignored him. Although international environmental groups intervened and gave strategic support to opponents of the Shiraho airport, scant attention has been paid to Anijima from abroad.

A visit to the island, about 20 minutes from Chichijima aboard a chartered motorboat, is a journey to a landscape frozen in time.

Scrap iron from World War II patrol boats rusts in the shallow cove where a government meteorological team, studying weather conditions at the runway site, has built a makeshift dock. The shore is littered with more iron debris, most apparently from a long-abandoned whale processing station built here early this century. The Imperial Army left its mark with a series of small concrete reservoirs, now filled with sludge.

It is a challenging 50-minute hike up a steep ridge to the rugged, undulating plateau on the east side of the island where Boeing 737-class jets would land. All along the route, Yasui, serving as an experienced guide, pointed out rare plants and grasses. Some, like the “octopus tree,” with its long exposed roots, can still be found throughout the Ogasawaras. Other species flourish only on Anijima, or are believed to be extinct everywhere but here, Yasui said.

Caves and bunkers carved out of the volcanic rock by soldiers nearly a half-a-century ago still pock the island. So do numerous barren patches of gravely dirt, ringed by grass and chaparral, which according to Yasui are the remnants of Imperial Army pumpkin patches--scars left by soldiers who tried to feed themselves off the arid earth.

“This shows how fragile the island ecology is, that even after all these years the indigenous vegetation hasn’t grown back,” Yasui said. “Just think what cutting roads and building an airport would do.”

Fortunately, Anijima has been spared the much-loathed Giant African snail, which was taken to the Ogasawaras before the war for medicinal purposes and has since run amok, ravaging plants and gardens on Chichijima. Instead, Anijima has its own snails, including 10 species regarded as endemic, or unique to the island, and designated “Japanese natural monuments.”

“It’s really unusual, anywhere in the world but especially in Japan, for such a large expanse of land to be so close to its natural state,” Yasui said. “But to the bureaucrats who come here from Tokyo, it looks like wasteland. The hardest challenge we face is making people understand why this island is so special.”