Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

One mightexpect the Forestry Agency to have second thoughts. This is what happened in China after a similar reforestation program: in 1996, its Forestry Ministry made a dramatic U-turn, requesting that the State Council lay out new logging and timber regulations to make conservation «more important than production.» But in Japan the program goes on. Today, logging of virgin forest and replanting with cedar continue at a heightened pace. The Forestry Agency has promised to develop a new «low pollen» cedar, although even with such an innovation it will be decades, perhaps centuries, before pollen levels begin to drop. And in place of human labor, the government is introducing mammoth «all-in-one deforestation machines» that fell, log, and haul out lumber. Eight hundred of these are already at work.

What is in store for the future is mechanized mountains – with giant machines marching across the land via concrete strips of forest roads that have been gouged through the hillsides. It is a scene from the movie The War of the Worlds . The social critic Inose Naoki comments, «We've passed into another dimension altogether. It hardly matters what people say: so long as the present system remains unchanged, the forests will disappear, like rows of corn mowed down by bulldozers.» Shitei Tsunahide, a forestry expert and the former president of Kyoto Prefectural University, adds, «The reforestation policy was a failure. During the high-growth years of the economy, the Forestry Agency was dragged into this fast-growth atmosphere and focused only on commercial concerns... They completely ignored the fact that a forest involves considerations other than business. A tree does not exist just for economic gain.» Alas, Professor Shitei has put his finger on the very crux of Japan's modern cultural malaise: not only forests but everything was sacrificed for economic gain.

The story of Japan's poisoning of its environment is not a new one. It dates to the two famous cases of Minamata and Itai-itai disease in the 1950s and 1960s. Minamata disease takes its name from a bay near Kumamoto, Kyushu, where more than a thousand people died from eating fish that were contaminated with mercury discharged into the bay by the Chisso Corporation. Itai-itai, which means «it hurts, it hurts,» was a bone disease contracted by farmers who ate rice from cadmium-tainted paddies in Toyama Prefecture. The buildup of cadmium made the bones so brittle that they disintegrated inside the body, causing excruciating pain.