Battling the Monsters

The 30-minute expressway drive from Tokyo International Airport into the center of the city offers an unforgettable vision--mile after gray mile of squat, smoke-stained concrete and steel structures, punctuated now and then by smokestacks spewing black fumes. The 400-mile coastal strip from Tokyo to Osaka is the world's most densely industrialized tract of real estate: its factories produce more than half of Japan's $200 billion annual G.N.P. All this industry, says Michitaka Kaino, director of Tokyo's Research Institute for Environmental Protection, provided a kind of bestiary of kogai (pollution): "You name it; and from there I'll give you any kind of ecological monster known to man."

During Japan's 20-year surge toward its present position as the world's third greatest industrial power, most people ignored the "monsters." Now the scope of the environmental damage has been spelled out in a government-sponsored Environmental White Paper, the first ever published in Japan. It estimates the current cost of fighting kogai at nearly $4 billion a year, broken down into $1 billion spent by the government and $2.7 billion by major corporations for research and control of pollution (the equivalent U.S. spending is about $3.3 billion).

The White Paper emphasizes the dangers of rapid industrialization combined with congestion. It points out, for example, that each square kilometer of inhabited area contributes to the G.N.P. at the rate of $1.8 million, as against only $268,000 in the U.S. By similar measure, each inhabited acre in Japan has eight times as many autos as America--and air pollution has become so bad that Tokyo officials recently recommended a total ban on passenger cars downtown between 7 and 9 a.m. The nation's production of garbage and other trash has climbed to 35 million tons a year, up from 23.8 million tons five years ago, and Tokyo's few clumps of trees will be destroyed within 50 years if nothing is done to stop the fallout of sulfur dioxide (now 830,000 tons a year).

Not only the trees are sickening and dying. The pollution has also caused some frightening and hitherto unknown illnesses among humans. First came the so-called Minamata Disease, caused by a fertilizer plant dumping methyl mercury into a bay near the town of Minamata; it produced in its victims an appalling array of eye and brain damages. Another painful new disease called itai-itai (literally, ouch-ouch) derived from cadmium flowing into the Jintsu River from a mining and smelting factory. Its symptoms: a softening and finally a breaking of the bones. Then, two years ago, a wave of smog-associated complaints began afflicting Tokyo residents. So far, at least 30,000 victims have been reported in the capital. All in all, unofficial estimates place the death toll from various forms of pollution at about 1,000.

Under these circumstances, many Japanese have made a hero out of a machine toolmaker named Keiji Yamasaki, who plugged with concrete a waste conduit from a paper mill to a nearby river. Yamasaki and a co-plugger now are on trial for their deed, but all the unpleasant publicity forced the offending mill to shut down permanently.

The government is responding to increasing public demands for change, and the most seriously afflicted kogai victims are now allowed to sue for damages. So far, suits totaling $3,000,000 are under court consideration. The highest sum yet awarded was $750,000, allotted to a group of 77 Minamata Disease victims. The government has also enacted laws providing free medical treatment for the 7,000 kogai sufferers so far identified.

While official action has been relatively slight--as the White Paper makes clear--some sign of progress is reflected in the fact that government economists are taking steps to slow Japan's economic growth rate to about 7% a year, down from the 10% to 18% rate that has prevailed in the past. New Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka may well go even further. His recently published book, The Remaking of the Japanese Archipelago, calls for large-scale urban reforms aimed at shifting population away from the jam-packed Pacific coast. Said Tanaka in a recent TIME interview: "What is important now is to save the environment."

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