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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
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In April 1997, the Maritime Self-Defense Force discovered a giant oil slick forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide that threatened to reach the west coast of Tsushima Island within two days. Two destroyers rushed to the scene-carrying, according to the newspapers, «a large number of blankets used to soak up oil, as well as plastic buckets and drums.» In technologically advanced modern Japan, this is how you clean up an oil spill: with old ladies using wooden ladles, blankets, and plastic buckets. This raises a fundamental question of what we should include in our definitions of modern technology. In general, economists have used a very limited definition, judging a nation's technological level by its ability to manufacture cars or memory chips, or by its academic resources in advanced science. But many more fields of human endeavor with high degrees of sophistication are qualified to be called technologies. What types of skills and knowledge are really essential for a modern state, and how high is the price for ignoring them?
Consider the simple example of forest management. In the United States, thousands of people study its fine points, and tens of millions of dollars are poured annually into numerous disciplines of forest science. In Japan, all the effort – billions of yen every year – goes into supporting the tired old scheme of cedar monoculture. While Canada supports 4,000 forest rangers, Japan has only 150, with no professional training; while the United States spends the equivalent of ¥190 billion on public-park management and Canada ¥50 billion, Japan devotes only ¥3.6 billion. Forestry management is only one technology that Japan has failed to master; there are hundreds more.
From a strictly economic point of view, Japan has not calculated the cost of environmental cleanup. For an environmental mess that may be close to impossible to remedy, the next generation of Japanese will face an unpaid bill of trillions of yen. Or maybe not. Solving such problems is very low on Japan's list of priorities, which is now a century and a half old and is set as hard as concrete. When we find the Environment Agency itself taking the attitude that it doesn't matter that ground water is contaminated because, after all, «few people drink the water,» we can predict that environmental cleanup is one unpaid bill Japanese industry may never have to settle.
Yet recently there has been talk of strengthening controls over waste disposal, because the government is beginning to realize that this is an industry with growth potential.
In April 1997, the Maritime Self-Defense Force discovered a giant oil slick forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide that threatened to reach the west coast of Tsushima Island within two days. Two destroyers rushed to the scene-carrying, according to the newspapers, «a large number of blankets used to soak up oil, as well as plastic buckets and drums.» In technologically advanced modern Japan, this is how you clean up an oil spill: with old ladies using wooden ladles, blankets, and plastic buckets. This raises a fundamental question of what we should include in our definitions of modern technology. In general, economists have used a very limited definition, judging a nation's technological level by its ability to manufacture cars or memory chips, or by its academic resources in advanced science. But many more fields of human endeavor with high degrees of sophistication are qualified to be called technologies. What types of skills and knowledge are really essential for a modern state, and how high is the price for ignoring them?
Consider the simple example of forest management. In the United States, thousands of people study its fine points, and tens of millions of dollars are poured annually into numerous disciplines of forest science. In Japan, all the effort – billions of yen every year – goes into supporting the tired old scheme of cedar monoculture. While Canada supports 4,000 forest rangers, Japan has only 150, with no professional training; while the United States spends the equivalent of ¥190 billion on public-park management and Canada ¥50 billion, Japan devotes only ¥3.6 billion. Forestry management is only one technology that Japan has failed to master; there are hundreds more.
From a strictly economic point of view, Japan has not calculated the cost of environmental cleanup. For an environmental mess that may be close to impossible to remedy, the next generation of Japanese will face an unpaid bill of trillions of yen. Or maybe not. Solving such problems is very low on Japan's list of priorities, which is now a century and a half old and is set as hard as concrete. When we find the Environment Agency itself taking the attitude that it doesn't matter that ground water is contaminated because, after all, «few people drink the water,» we can predict that environmental cleanup is one unpaid bill Japanese industry may never have to settle.
Yet recently there has been talk of strengthening controls over waste disposal, because the government is beginning to realize that this is an industry with growth potential.