TOWARD A NEW ASIAN ORDER : A WORLD REPORT SPECIAL SECTION : Environment : Japan Seeks Leadership Role in Preserving Planet : The onetime world-class polluter is pushing its neighbors to be environmentally aware. But its own record remains spotty.

During the 1960s, Japan’s economic miracle brought the nation to the brink of environmental disaster. Thousands of Japanese were poisoned by mercury, arsenic and other toxic substances that found their way into the air, water and food. Tokyo’s skies were a smelly yellow haze.

An explosion of public anger late in the decade, however, initiated a flurry of legislation in 1970 that forced Japanese industry to become among the cleanest in the world.

Now the rest of Asia has its own economic miracle--and its own environmental Armageddon. And Japan, long criticized for evading its world responsibilities, believes it may have finally found an issue on which it can play a leadership role.

“When it comes to defense (spending), there is no consensus on what our overseas role should be,” says Nobutoshi Akao, a roving ambassador on overseas environmental affairs. “But on the environment, we feel we can make a contribution. Public opinion is united on this point.”

In April, Noboru Takeshita, former prime minister and ruling party heavyweight, was host of a meeting of influential world leaders searching for ways to finance environmental projects that will be discussed at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil in June.

“Unless a politician can talk about environmental issues, he is perceived as a man of no intellect, no culture and no courage,” Takeshita said in a recent speech. Partly as a result of Takeshita’s involvement, Japan may soon impose a new tax to help finance environmental projects overseas.

For obvious geographic reasons, Japan sees its role focusing primarily on Asia. But tackling Asia’s environmental problems will be far more difficult than cleaning up Japan. In Asia, 3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, are squeezed into a quarter of the planet’s landmass. From the terraced foothills of the Himalayas to the rain forests of the Philippines and Malaysia, tree-cutting for fuel and timber has caused soil erosion and flooding and contributed to the steady expansion of Asia’s deserts.

In Taiwan, petrochemical factories pour so many chemicals into waterways that one ecologist said certain rivers could be set afire. Containers full of toxic waste stored in Bangkok ports have been known to explode into flames. The containers are sent by Thai companies to nonexistent addresses in Bangkok as a way of unloading unwanted waste.

In China, power and steel plants burning low-quality coal spew out clouds of harmful sulfur oxides into the air, causing acid rain throughout the region and bringing pollution levels in major cities far above internationally established danger levels.

Asia is “a victim of its own success,” says Gautam S. Kaji, vice president of the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific Region. “No other group of developing economies has achieved more economically and has more to lose from failing to deal decisively with environmental damage.”

Kaji estimates that East Asia alone must invest roughly $20 billion a year on environment-related projects.

Part of Asia’s problem is simply a question of trade-offs: How far must the region’s countries sacrifice growth in order to protect their environment? Japanese officials say they have the experience, the technology and the money to help Asian nations find and implement solutions to this difficult question.

But before Japan can play doctor to its Asian neighbors, it must come to terms with the damage being done in its own interests. Rain forests in Indonesia and Malaysia are being cut down to make plywood that is used to mold concrete at construction sites in Japan. Mangrove forests in Indonesia that provide critical habitats for wildlife are being felled to build shrimp farms to feed Japanese consumers.

Japan has rid itself of its worst pollutants, in part, by moving some operations to poorer Asian nations.

In the 1970s, for example, Japan imposed tight restrictions on the production of a rare material that is critical to manufacturing televisions but that generates, as a byproduct, the highly toxic chemical thorium. While Japanese producers phased out domestic production of the material, Mitsubishi Chemical established a joint venture to produce it in Malaysia.

Now residents around the Malaysian plant complain they are seeing more birth defects among their newborns and are suffering miscarriages at a rate three times higher than the national norm.

Wherever Japanese interests have conflicted with those of environmentalists--including debates over the preservation of whales and sea turtles and the use of large squid-catching drift nets that also trap birds and sea mammals--Japan has resisted change to the bitter end. Environmentalists complain that Japan lobbied hard against a Swedish proposal to restrict catches of an endangered breed of Pacific tuna at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species held in Kyoto in March.

And Japan continues to be singled out by international agencies as a leading illicit trafficker in endangered wildlife and ivory.

Japan’s foreign aid tends to favor large construction projects such as major dams and access roads as opposed to more modest, but often equally effective, energy-conservation measures combined with smaller hydroelectric power projects. Environmentally damaging dam projects, for example, have been financed by Japan in countries such as Indonesia, not primarily to raise living standards there but to furnish electricity to aluminum producers that supply Japanese industry.

“It is difficult to take a program that focuses on infrastructure and reconcile it to the environment,” says Robert Orr, an expert on Japanese foreign aid. “They want to create strong economies that can buy Japanese products; unfortunately, the environment is a victim to that.”

Growing environmental awareness in Japan, however, could help create support for more enlightened policies. In recent public opinion surveys, Japanese respondents have rated the environment as the most important social issue. Americans put the environment third after crime and prices in similar surveys.

“Ecological ideas and words like ‘Earth’ have become so popular it is easier to inspire people to be globally conscious,” says Jun Hoshikawa, an environmental activist who is working to end the logging of one of this nation’s few remaining virgin forests.

Corporations are getting into the act, advertising their Earth-friendly, recyclable products and boasting new manufacturing processes that do not use atmosphere-damaging chemicals and gases.

At the Tokyo motor show last fall, Japanese auto makers showed off their environmental consciousness with energy-efficient, light engines as well as with models running on such alternative clean fuels as hydrogen and methanol. Keidanren, Japan’s big-business group, introduced a new charter last year that calls on its member companies to be more vigilant in protecting the environment at home and overseas.

Japan is gradually shifting its foreign aid spending to reflect a new focus on the environment. Government spending on environment-related foreign aid totaled $1.2 billion in 1990, four times what it was in 1986. Environmental spending makes up 12% of the aid budget now, and the government hopes to raise that proportion to as much as 30%.

In the Philippines and Thailand, Japan has built environmental research and training centers that will teach local government officials how to draft and implement pollution-control measures.

Japanese officials say one lesson they are trying to teach their Asian neighbors is the economic benefits of pollution control. Japan’s Environmental Protection Agency has conducted a study showing that pollution-related damage has cost Japan 10 times what it would have cost to impose pollution-control measures in advance. The agency has circulated the study at recent international conferences.

“Many of us felt the laws were too strict, but the country forced us to change,” says Toru Sasa, manager of the Environmental Protection Department at Kubota, a manufacturer of small tractors. “Now we realize that if we had done it earlier, we could have saved money on legal and insurance costs.”

But Japan has a long way to go before it can translate its own experience into solutions for the rest of Asia. Japanese desulfurization units helped reduce sulfur oxide emissions in Japan to one-sixth their level of three decades ago. But few developing countries can afford to buy the units at their current price of about $2 million per smokestack. You Jishou, vice chairman of the Electric Power Committee in China’s Ministry of Energy Resources, which has a major sulfur oxide problem, says, “There is no fully effective desulfurization technology that is inexpensive to operate.”

One company’s effort to portray itself as an environmentally conscious company shows Japan has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously as an environmental leader, critics say.

In a “true-story” comic book widely distributed to the nation’s high schools, the hero, a Mitsubishi Corp. employee, discovers that the destruction of the rain forests now being blamed on Japan is actually the fault of local farmers who slash and burn trees to make space for farmland. The hero launches a program to save the rain forests of Southeast Asia by replanting local varieties of trees.

The comic book was recently taken out of school libraries after environmentalists in Japan and Malaysia complained. They pointed out that the logging programs of companies such as Mitsubishi build roads and make initial cuts that open the way for the eventual destruction of the forests.

Kyosuke Mori, general manager of environmental affairs at Mitsubishi Corp., admits that the project described in the comic as an attempt to regenerate rain forests with slow-growing, local varieties of trees is not a serious effort to restore rain forests but “just a scientific experiment.” He says that in cases where the company does reforestation work, it plants faster-growing commercial varieties that will never recreate the unique conditions that enable rain forests to support multitudes of animal and plant species.

“Our lumber department does things that take 10 years; we can’t do things that take 50 to 100 years,” Mori says.

Adds Tetsuro Handa, Mori’s subordinate in Mitsubishi’s environmental affairs department, reflecting the sentiment of many Japanese businessmen, “If you want to keep nature as it is, there is no way but to get rid of humanity from the Earth.

“Advanced countries say they want to make these forests like museums,” Handa says. “But the countries want education and development too. They have a right to civilization.”