Putting The Heat on Japan

By EUGENE LINDEN TOKYO

The Penan, an aboriginal tribe of hunters and gatherers on the island of Borneo, are a people under siege. They have watched in horror as logging companies inexorably cut down the forests that supply the tribe with food, medicines and even the poison for blowgun darts used to kill monkeys and hornbill. Outraged at seeing their way of life destroyed, the Penan have periodically blockaded roads leading into the forest in a losing effort to keep the loggers out. Says Penan headman Asik Nyelit, who has twice been arrested by Malaysian authorities for his role in the blockades: "If we just sit, we are going to die."

While the Penan are fighting the local loggers, the tribe's real antagonists are some 2,600 miles away, in Japan. Most of the trees cut in the Malaysian part of Borneo (the rest of the island is controlled by Indonesia and Brunei) are shipped to Japan, where the lumber is most often made into throwaway plywood construction forms used to mold concrete. Nor is the situation in Borneo unusual. Japan's heavy demand for wood has led to the deforestation of vast tracts in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Last April the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network, a small but feisty environmental group based in Tokyo, presented the giant Marubeni Corp., one of the world's largest importers of tropical hardwoods, with a mock award: a cardboard chain saw for winning the Grand Prix for Tropical Forest Destruction.

The lumber business is only one of many Japanese industries that have had far-reaching impact on the global environment. A combination of traditional crafts and consumer tastes for the exotic makes Japan the world's largest market for many threatened species and the products created from them. Over the years, elephants by the thousands have been slaughtered so that their ivory can be used, for example, in Japanese signature seals, and wedding ornaments are fashioned from the shells of endangered hawksbill turtles. Japanese fishermen have drawn impassioned criticism for their use of huge drift nets across vast expanses of the Pacific. The nets, which are up to 40 miles wide, are intended to catch squid and tuna, but also entangle many other kinds of fish as well as seabirds and marine mammals. Roger McManus, president of the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, has gone so far as to call the Japanese "environmental terrorists."

That charge may be unfair, but it indicates the rising anger toward the Japanese. Until recently, environmentalists focused most of their attention on the U.S. and Western Europe, which are far and away the biggest polluters in the free world. But as Japan has developed into a leading economic power, its impact on the global environment has come under more intense scrutiny. While * Japan has begun to clean up domestic pollution problems, it has not shown the same regard for nature outside the home islands.

The country, however, is now beginning to respond to complaints from abroad, even though its own environmental movement is still tiny by Western standards. Last month the Japanese government imposed new curbs on ivory imports, surprising and delighting environmentalists worldwide, who fear that the African elephant faces extinction in the wild. Japan is also preparing a new multibillion-yen program of environmental aid for developing countries. Government insiders promise the new emphasis on the environment will bring results. "Once Japan decides to do something, it can move very quickly," says Takashi Kosugi, a Diet member and the leading environmentalist in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The question is whether the policy shifts signify genuine change or skillful public relations. Tom Milliken, who heads TRAFFIC (Japan), part of the international organization that monitors the wildlife trade, gives Japan measured praise for its attempts to control commerce in endangered species. Says he: "Japan has gone from being the worst of the worst to being on a par with the worst of the European countries -- Italy and France." But on the issues of tropical logging and drift-net fishing, environmentalists are much more skeptical. Observes Japan's Yoichi Kuroda, co-author of a study titled Timber from the South Seas: "The government is simply talking about the rain forests. There is no plan and no thought to regulate the timber trade."

Tropical-forest destruction has become an urgent international issue because, as scientists point out, if the trees go, millions of different animal and plant species will become extinct, and the information encoded in their genes will be lost forever. Moreover, deforestation can lead to local disruptions of rainfall patterns and possibly even global climate changes because there would be fewer trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

Logging is only one cause of deforestation, but in Southeast Asia it is an important one. And Japan is the world's largest consumer of tropical timber: in 1986 it imported 15.7 million cubic meters, approximately equal to the imports of the entire European Community. Tokyo has begun to finance programs aimed at replanting trees in Southeast Asia but has not yet tried to limit wood imports.

Nearly 90% of the lumber now comes from Sarawak and Sabah, the two Malaysian states on Borneo. On paper at least, Malaysia, a well-off country with a relatively small population (17.4 million), has a model plan for the "sustainable development" of its forests. The reality is that neither the overall plan nor specific regulations have had much impact, and logging operations continue essentially uncontrolled. "In theory everything is fine," says S.C. Chin, a Malaysian forestry expert. "But 20 years ago, Thailand and the Philippines said everything was fine too, and now they have largely been stripped."

Environmentalists fear that the same thing will happen in Sarawak and Sabah, which contain some of the oldest rain forests on earth. Chin estimates that careless, wholesale cutting will denude the remaining forests of their commercial timber within as little as seven years. Local officials have given loggers access to an estimated 95% of Sarawak's forests that are outside existing or proposed parks and protected areas. Even those tracts are coveted by corrupt politicians. According to Harrison Ngau, a Sarawak native being held under house arrest for taking part in antilogging protests, some forests have been excised from protected lands to open them up to the lumbermen.

Many of the tribal blockades have been set up on the Limbang road, which is one of the main logging arteries in Sarawak. Construction of the road during the mid-1980s was partly financed with a 200 million yen ($842,000) low- interest loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency ostensibly to benefit the very people who are today fighting the logging traffic. Since JICA is not supposed to give funds to support Japanese commercial ventures abroad, the road has provided ammunition for those who argue that increased foreign aid by the Japanese will only further jeopardize the global environment. Kiyoshi Kato, director of JICA's Institute for International Cooperation, admits that his agency has learned a lesson from the Limbang road: "We must survey local opinion more thoroughly before starting future projects."

Many conservationists are worried that Japan will try to hide its financing of projects that damage the environment. One method would be to make unrestricted loans to foreign banks. The banks could then lend money to controversial projects, but Japan would not be blamed. One fear is that Japan will use such "two-step" loans to fund a major road that would open up the western Amazon to logging. Says Alex Hittle, international coordinator of | Friends of the Earth, U.S.: "It's in general loans that disturbing things might be lurking."

Environmentalists give Japan its highest marks for its turnaround on trade in endangered species, but they question whether the new reforms are too little and too late. While Japan has greatly reduced its whaling, whale lovers are concerned that the country still kills hundreds of minke whales for "scientific research." The Japanese feel maligned by the West on the whaling issue, since they view cetaceans as food the way Americans see cattle.

For the moment, the slaughter of African elephants by poachers has pushed the whales' plight from the headlines, and in the case of the ivory trade, Japan has a better record of reform. In the mid-1980s, Japan accounted for as much as 70% of the final market for ivory products. In 1983 and 1984 alone, more than 135,000 elephant tusks were imported, mostly to be carved into signature seals called hanko. Then, as international complaints about the ivory trade mounted, Japan's dealers reversed their aggressive import policies. By 1988 ivory imports had been reduced by 75% from the peak years.

Unfortunately, the Japanese ivory traders delayed too long. Unrelenting poaching has cut Africa's wild elephant population by more than half in the past decade, to an estimated 625,000. In October the 102 nations that subscribe to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species are expected to declare the African elephant endangered, which would make the ivory trade illegal in those countries. Not waiting for a worldwide ban, the U.S. and the E.C. decided last month to stop ivory imports immediately. Japan followed suit with a partial ban that would reduce its ivory imports to a trickle.

This action shows how much Japan has changed its policies concerning threatened animals. As recently as 1987, the country had partly exempted itself from the CITES treaty in order to maintain imports of 14 endangered species, more than any other nation. Since then, Japan has reduced this number to eleven by agreeing to ban trade in the green sea turtle, musk deer and desert monitor lizard.

Such changes have been slow in coming, in part because responsibility for controlling the trade in endangered species rests with the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which is also charged with protecting and promoting Japanese commercial interests. For instance, MITI delayed limiting imports of endangered hawksbill turtles because the agency did not want to allocate quotas among different industries that used the shells. Finally, with both the turtles and the turtle-consuming industries facing extinction, MITI has taken the small step of limiting imports to traditional craftsmen who carve the carapaces into traditional hair combs. Says Toru Takimoto, MITI's point man on endangered species: "There is a dawning realization that we must protect these animals for the industries to survive."

Japanese timidity about interfering with domestic industries is perhaps most pronounced when it comes to fishing, which provides a staple of the country's diet. Japan is currently embroiled in a dispute with the U.S. and several Pacific nations about the charge that the Japanese squid fishermen inflict untold damage on marine life with their drift nets. Taiwan and South Korea also have extensive drift-net operations, but Japan's are the largest. And though U.S. fishermen, as the Japanese are quick to point out, use drift nets, they tend to be much smaller than the Asian variety.

Sam LaBudde, a biologist with Earthtrust, a Honolulu-based wildlife protection group, describes drift nets as "the single most destructive fishing technology ever devised by man." Drift nets work by entangling sea life in their nylon mesh. Ships later reel in the nets, taking out the squid or fish and discarding unlucky marine bystanders. It is like hunting for deer by poisoning every animal in the forest.

In addition to enraging environmentalists, the drift netters have drawn protests from commercial fishermen around the world. Americans and Soviets complain that the nets kill large numbers of sea trout and salmon, a charge the Japanese deny. Australia and New Zealand, concerned that Japanese and other Asian fishermen were catching too many albacore tuna in the South Pacific, recently outlawed drift nets within 200 miles of their shores. The two countries have offered the services of their navies to smaller Pacific nations that support the ban.

Given their history, it is surprising that the Japanese should be branded environmental outlaws. Although the nation embraced Western materialism in this century, one of the strongest threads in its more than 2,000 years of cultural traditions has always been a deep love of nature. Typical is the story of the monk Ryokan who slept under mosquito netting in the summer not to prevent being bitten by an insect but to avoid squashing one inadvertently while he slept. The Japanese, though, have never been passive conservationists. Consider the bonsai, the tiny trees that are shaped over generations into living pieces of sculpture. The bonsai represent the landscape architect's respect for nature, but also the notion that nature is at its best when shaped by the hand of man.

Perhaps indicative of modern Japanese attitudes is a question posed by a member of the Japanese contingent to a Smithsonian Institution symposium on the ethics of whaling. The representative asked how a whale differed from a mosquito, not to argue that both should receive protection but that both are expendable. "The Japanese don't seem to accept the concept of sustainable development," contends conservationist McManus, "((the idea)) that there can be a middle ground between total exploitation or total protection."

Still, there are many heartening signs of change in Japan. Miwako Kurosaka, a longtime environmental activist, says with some awe that she has been invited to address a prestigious Keizaikai study group for senior executives that ordinarily devotes its sessions to business and politics. Diet member Kosugi points out that meetings of his environmental subcommittee, which used to draw five or six legislators to a small room, now draw 40 or more, forcing a move to larger quarters.

If anything will hold back progress, it will be Japan's lack of environmental activists and experts. Only about 15,000 Japanese -- most of them bird watchers -- belong to conservation groups, and the country does not have an extensive network of environmentalists, like those who monitor policies in the U.S. and Western Europe. The government's foreign aid programs, which can have a major effect on the global environment, are administered by roughly the same number of people who ran them when they were giving out one-tenth as much money.

Yet Japan has shown the capacity to deal forcefully with problems when the national will is clear and strong. When the people became alarmed in the 1970s about the dangers that air pollution and toxic wastes pose to human health, Japan developed antipollution policies and technologies that in many cases surpass U.S. standards. The country's extensive program of garbage recycling is a model for all industrial nations. If Japan decides to guard the environment around the world with this kind of care, then the island nation might turn its critics into admirers.