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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 49 из 270In 2000, the government began to institute a new law requiring that household electric goods such as television sets and refrigerators be recycled when discarded; the recychng will be paid for by consumers, who will buy recycling coupons at the post office. It's a great step forward, but it leaves open the question of who will pay for cleaning up the sort of pollution that doesn't involve consumers directly. Japanese business built its global competitiveness partly thanks to the free ride it got on issues of environmental destruction. Now that the Japanese economy has slowed to a crawl and exports face threats from newly industrialized Asian countries, it will be very difficult suddenly to force industry to pay the costs.
The best the Environment Agency has done for soil pollution is to set up a secret panel in 1992 to study the merits of establishing something similar to the United States' Super Fund Act, whereby industry would foot the bill for cleaning up toxic-waste sites. But powerful business leaders and bureaucrats opposed the scheme as being too expensive, so the agency quietly put the idea to sleep. The panel still meets, but its discussions go nowhere. One panelist has said, «If we dig up landfills, it's clear that they're contaminated. But if safety measures were to be applied to all such landfills, an enormous amount of money would be needed. It just wasn't realistic.»
The Japanese public exerts very little political pressure on the government to address issues of industrial pollution, and the few lawsuits are mostly ineffectual, mired in decades of delay. The central and local governments, deeply in debt after decades of funding massive construction boondoggles, cannot afford the responsibility for monitoring or disposing of toxic wastes. The Environment Agency gave up before it even started. There will be no cleanup.
One could view this runaway waste problem itself as a toxic by-product of Japan's vaunted schoolrooms. Students in Japanese schools are made to memorize huge numbers of facts, far more than is required of students in other countries, and they also learn to be docile and diligent workers. The system that teaches students so many facts and such unquestioning obedience has been the wonder and envy of many writers on Japan. But there are huge liabilities. Items of low priority on the national list for manufacturing success, such as environmental consciousness, do not appear in the Japanese curriculum. And what is the result? Mason Florence, an American resident of Kyoto and the author of Kyoto City Guide, says, «In the States there is a negative buzz to litter. If you drop a cigarette pack or a can out the window, there is a good chance of having a guy or girl next to you saying 'Hey, man!' » Not so in Japan.
The best the Environment Agency has done for soil pollution is to set up a secret panel in 1992 to study the merits of establishing something similar to the United States' Super Fund Act, whereby industry would foot the bill for cleaning up toxic-waste sites. But powerful business leaders and bureaucrats opposed the scheme as being too expensive, so the agency quietly put the idea to sleep. The panel still meets, but its discussions go nowhere. One panelist has said, «If we dig up landfills, it's clear that they're contaminated. But if safety measures were to be applied to all such landfills, an enormous amount of money would be needed. It just wasn't realistic.»
The Japanese public exerts very little political pressure on the government to address issues of industrial pollution, and the few lawsuits are mostly ineffectual, mired in decades of delay. The central and local governments, deeply in debt after decades of funding massive construction boondoggles, cannot afford the responsibility for monitoring or disposing of toxic wastes. The Environment Agency gave up before it even started. There will be no cleanup.
One could view this runaway waste problem itself as a toxic by-product of Japan's vaunted schoolrooms. Students in Japanese schools are made to memorize huge numbers of facts, far more than is required of students in other countries, and they also learn to be docile and diligent workers. The system that teaches students so many facts and such unquestioning obedience has been the wonder and envy of many writers on Japan. But there are huge liabilities. Items of low priority on the national list for manufacturing success, such as environmental consciousness, do not appear in the Japanese curriculum. And what is the result? Mason Florence, an American resident of Kyoto and the author of Kyoto City Guide, says, «In the States there is a negative buzz to litter. If you drop a cigarette pack or a can out the window, there is a good chance of having a guy or girl next to you saying 'Hey, man!' » Not so in Japan.