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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 38 из 270Allergy to sugipollen, an ailment almost unknown a few decades ago, now affects 10 percent of all Japanese. Dr. Saito Yozo, an allergy specialist at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, observes that there is no medical treatment to eliminate pollen allergy, though he recommends wearing protective gear such as masks and goggles. And, indeed, masks and goggles are what you see on streets in the springtime in Tokyo. Some of the mask-wearers are trying to avoid contracting or spreading the common cold, but hundreds of thousands of others are trying to protect themselves against the man-made plague of sugi pollen.
The final touches in this picture are the roads that the Forestry Agency builds to bring the cedar plantations within easy reach of vehicles for harvesting. The agency has spent billions of dollars on forestry roads in every remote wilderness, including national parks-and they have involved a degree of damage to steep hillsides that one must see to believe. In Ya-magata Prefecture, the government-backed Forestry Development Corporation put forward a plan in 1969 to build 2,100 kilometers of roads in the mountains, costing ¥90 billion. Residents and environmental groups opposed the project, and engineering problems plagued it for decades. «If we had this kind of money at our disposal,» says the mayor of Nagai, a town in Yamagata, «we'd do something else with it – but if the national government insists [on building forestry roads], we're happy to cooperate.» Fat government subsides drive the program on.
All this for an industry that contributes less than a fraction of 1 percent to the GNP! For economically, reforestation has been a total washout. The Forestry Agency is about ¥3.5 trillion in debt as the result of decades of its subsidies to support reforestation and to build roads. Lumber prices have been declining for years, and Japan's dependence on foreign wood is now 80 percent (up from 26 percent three decades ago). Back in the 1940s, when the reforestation policy was set in motion, planners expected mountain dwellers to prune and log the sugi trees, but today nobody wants to do the backbreaking labor required to harvest timber on Japan's hillsides. Villages are depopulated, and the Forestry Agency has reduced its workforce from a peak of 89,000 in 1964 to only 7,000 by March 2001. A recent survey found that the few Japanese mountain villages that have not suffered severe depopulation are those with a low percentage of cedar plantations, where villagers can make a living from harvesting shiitake mushrooms, collecting wild herbs, firing charcoal, and hunting the wildlife of the native broadleaf forest.
The final touches in this picture are the roads that the Forestry Agency builds to bring the cedar plantations within easy reach of vehicles for harvesting. The agency has spent billions of dollars on forestry roads in every remote wilderness, including national parks-and they have involved a degree of damage to steep hillsides that one must see to believe. In Ya-magata Prefecture, the government-backed Forestry Development Corporation put forward a plan in 1969 to build 2,100 kilometers of roads in the mountains, costing ¥90 billion. Residents and environmental groups opposed the project, and engineering problems plagued it for decades. «If we had this kind of money at our disposal,» says the mayor of Nagai, a town in Yamagata, «we'd do something else with it – but if the national government insists [on building forestry roads], we're happy to cooperate.» Fat government subsides drive the program on.
All this for an industry that contributes less than a fraction of 1 percent to the GNP! For economically, reforestation has been a total washout. The Forestry Agency is about ¥3.5 trillion in debt as the result of decades of its subsidies to support reforestation and to build roads. Lumber prices have been declining for years, and Japan's dependence on foreign wood is now 80 percent (up from 26 percent three decades ago). Back in the 1940s, when the reforestation policy was set in motion, planners expected mountain dwellers to prune and log the sugi trees, but today nobody wants to do the backbreaking labor required to harvest timber on Japan's hillsides. Villages are depopulated, and the Forestry Agency has reduced its workforce from a peak of 89,000 in 1964 to only 7,000 by March 2001. A recent survey found that the few Japanese mountain villages that have not suffered severe depopulation are those with a low percentage of cedar plantations, where villagers can make a living from harvesting shiitake mushrooms, collecting wild herbs, firing charcoal, and hunting the wildlife of the native broadleaf forest.