Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

The piece de resistance was the following interview with a section chief at the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW):

Interviewer : Does the Ministry of Health and Welfare have any policy for dealing with dioxin?

Section chief : There is no policy whatsoever.

Interviewer : Has the MHW conducted any investigation concerning dioxin?

Section chief : No idea.

Interviewer : Do you have any idea how much dioxin is out there?

Section chief : No, we have not.

Interviewer : Have you set any guidelines for dioxin?

Section chief: No, we have not.

Interviewer : Do you plan to?

Section chief : No.

Interviewer: Do you have controls on dioxin emissions?

Section chief : No.

It is remarkable that the section chief gave this interview at all. The interview was granted before public concern over the dioxin situation became so strong that the Ministry of Health and Welfare was forced to listen to it. If the section chief had had any inkling that the dioxin situation was embarrassing or scandalous, the television crew would never have gotten in the front door. The MHW was so unconcerned about dioxin that the section chief exuded an air throughout of «Why are you asking me this stuff – how should I know?»

Only scattered accounts give a shadowy sense of the scale of the vast, unstudied problem of toxic dumping in Japan. In September 1997, the media revealed that the city of Tokorozawa and its prefecture had colluded in concealing data on dioxin discharges from local incinerators and that the levels for 1992-1994 were more than 150 times the legal limit. In one notorious case, the Yatozawa Waste Water Cooperative, a public agency representing twenty-seven municipalities in the Tama area outside Tokyo, continues to withhold data on water conductivity, a measure of contamination, despite being ordered by a court to release the data. In December 1995, the Environment Agency announced that spot surveys had found carcinogenic substances exceeding allowable levels in well water in forty-one of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Among the serious cases was a well in Tsubame, Niigata Prefecture, that contained trichloroethylene (a metal solvent) at 1,600 times the safe level. Although trichloroethylene is a known carcinogen and has turned up in 293 sites across the nation, no regulations to control its use or disposal existed at the national level.

The issue of toxic waste brings up the larger issue of «modern technology,» in which Japan is reputed to be a world leader. Unfortunately, the cutting-edge techniques studied by the experts have almost exclusively to do with manufactured goods. In the meantime, Japan has missed out on a whole world of modern technology that has been quietly developing in the West since the 1960s.