Fuji's Frightful Example

For centuries, the Japanese reverently visited the fabled village of Fuji. Set between snowcapped Mount Fuji and the shimmering Pacific, the place inspired poets and printmakers to create misty images of man's harmony with nature. Today Fuji is a small city (pop. 183,000), and tourists still come by the busload. Instead of beauty, they find man-made blight.

Ripped by two superhighways and three railway lines, the city is now a jumble of smoky factories whose fumes often shroud Mount Fuji in a brown pall. The port area of Tagonoura, once famed for its dazzling beaches, is a stinking cesspool. What has transformed Fuji is Japan's almost mythic urge for quick industrialization--with no environmental safeguards.

Death March. Each day Fuji's 150 paper mills pour 2,000,000 tons of raw waste into Tagonoura's waters. The catch of cherry-blossom prawns, a gourmet delicacy unique to the area, has been halved in recent years. Pulp sludge has settled on the floor of the port, reducing the depth of the channel from 30 ft. to 18 ft.--too shallow for even small freighters.

The Japanese call the foul brown sludge hedoro, combining the words for "vomit" and "muck." Like an indisposed pagan god, the port bottom belches huge bubbles of methane gas and alkaloid matter to the surface. In July, the hydrosulfide stench caused workers aboard a dredger to faint. Naked fishermen diving for abalone near by broke out in a mysterious rash attributed to the tainted water. As a result, Fuji's problems seized Japan's headlines.

Thousands of Japanese descended on Fuji for "rallies against hedoro" which a crusading local librarian called "the starting point of a death march of our civilization." Fuji's fishing boats flew bright banners that blazed messages of added disgust. Yukio Matsubara, a fishing association official, bluntly defined the root problem: "Hell bent on expanding our economic house, we have simply forgotten the need for building an honorable toilet for it."

Poison Gas. Other Japanese began to analyze the indirect costs of becoming the most productive nation in the world after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. One newspaper editorialized that G.N.P. "really means gross national pollution." Another paper investigated each of Japan's 46 prefectures and found that all but two suffer from kogai--environmental disruption. Cars in Tokyo cause an eye-stinging photochemical smog. Nearly every major city in Japan has its version of "Yokohama asthma," a wheezing caused by air pollution. Noxious industrial wastes wash around the bays of Tokyo, Osaka and Dokai in northern Kyushu. Amid the public outcry against kogai, a 15-year-old student recently scolded Premier Eisaku Sato for taking no action against pollution. "Isn't the government treating the people more or less like livestock?" he asked.

Though Fuji's example started the uproar, the city offers no solution. Mayor Hikotaro Watanabe confronts a familiar dilemma: "To stop paper production will prove too costly a step for the city. But to let the production go on will prove too dangerous a proposition to our citizens." The prefecture has been equally unsuccessful in banishing hedoro. A first suggestion, to dredge up the sludge and dump it 200 miles offshore in the Pacific, was quickly dismissed by scientists as ecological madness. When officials next proposed to pump hedoro into "temporary repositories," one outraged citizen spoke for many: "It's like asking us to live with poison gas." As things now stand, all 150 of Fuji's paper mills are conducting business as usual. But last week their trade association announced a 20% increase in the wholesale price of toilet tissue. Reason: "To raise funds for building kogai prevention devices at the mills."

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