JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 37 из 270It was all part of a «poor people, strong state» policy, which gave Japan'seconomy tremendous competitive strength. However, the sacrifice of all to achieve an ever-expanding GNP spawned policies that in many ways harmed the country's mountains, rivers, and seas. One such policy is the state-sponsored stripping of native forest cover and the planting of commercial cedar; another, which has had even more serious effects, is the deliberate turning of a blind eye to industrial pollution.
Foreign analysts have admired a population trained to obey bureaucracies and large corporations as the source of Japan's industrial might. But it also means that the country has no brakes. Once the engine of policy begins to turn, it moves forward like an unstoppable tank. One might say this inability to stop lies at the root of the disaster of World War II, and it is also behind the environmental destruction of postwar Japan.
Soon after the end of the war, Japan's Forestry Agency embarked on a program to clear-cut the mountainsides and plant them with commercial timber. The aim was to replace the native broadleaf forest with something more profitable that would serve Japan's industrial growth. Tens of billions of dollars flowed to this ongoing project, with the result that by 1997 Japan had replanted 43 percent of all its woodland with a monoculture of coniferous trees, mostly sugi, or Japanese cedar.
In the process, Japan's rural landscape has been completely transformed. Today, across the country, tall stands of cedar planted in regimental rows encroach upon what remains of the bright feathery greens of the native forest cover. It is nearly impossible to find an undamaged view of the scenery that for millennia was the essence of traditional Japanese art and literature: a mix of maple, cherry trees, autumn grasses, bamboo, and pines.
Apart from the aesthetic and cultural damage, the cedar monoculture has decimated wildlife, since the cedars' dense shade crowds out undergrowth and destroys the habitat for birds, deer, rabbits, badgers, and other animals. Anyone who has hiked these cedar plantations will know how deathly silent they are, empty of the grasses, bushes, and jungly foliage that characterize Japan's native forest. Stripped of ground cover, the hillsides no longer hold rainwater, and mountain streams dry up. In Iya Valley, droughts have affected streams in my village so severely that many of them are dry for months at a time. The villagers call this « sugi drought.» Erosion from the cedar plantations also leads to landslides and to the silting up of rivers, bringing these slopes and streams into the fatal purview of the Construction Ministry.
That is not all.
Foreign analysts have admired a population trained to obey bureaucracies and large corporations as the source of Japan's industrial might. But it also means that the country has no brakes. Once the engine of policy begins to turn, it moves forward like an unstoppable tank. One might say this inability to stop lies at the root of the disaster of World War II, and it is also behind the environmental destruction of postwar Japan.
Soon after the end of the war, Japan's Forestry Agency embarked on a program to clear-cut the mountainsides and plant them with commercial timber. The aim was to replace the native broadleaf forest with something more profitable that would serve Japan's industrial growth. Tens of billions of dollars flowed to this ongoing project, with the result that by 1997 Japan had replanted 43 percent of all its woodland with a monoculture of coniferous trees, mostly sugi, or Japanese cedar.
In the process, Japan's rural landscape has been completely transformed. Today, across the country, tall stands of cedar planted in regimental rows encroach upon what remains of the bright feathery greens of the native forest cover. It is nearly impossible to find an undamaged view of the scenery that for millennia was the essence of traditional Japanese art and literature: a mix of maple, cherry trees, autumn grasses, bamboo, and pines.
Apart from the aesthetic and cultural damage, the cedar monoculture has decimated wildlife, since the cedars' dense shade crowds out undergrowth and destroys the habitat for birds, deer, rabbits, badgers, and other animals. Anyone who has hiked these cedar plantations will know how deathly silent they are, empty of the grasses, bushes, and jungly foliage that characterize Japan's native forest. Stripped of ground cover, the hillsides no longer hold rainwater, and mountain streams dry up. In Iya Valley, droughts have affected streams in my village so severely that many of them are dry for months at a time. The villagers call this « sugi drought.» Erosion from the cedar plantations also leads to landslides and to the silting up of rivers, bringing these slopes and streams into the fatal purview of the Construction Ministry.
That is not all.