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Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 50 из 270Discarded bottles andold refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, and plastic bags filled with junk line country roads. Plastic bottles clutter the beaches. As Mason says, «Drive through the hills of Kitayama [north of Kyoto], and you see garbage everywhere. It would be unthinkable, for example, in Colorado.» Or in the countryside of most nations of Europe. Or in Singapore or Malaysia.
Another subject that Japanese schools very definitely do not teach is social activism. Citizens' groups in Japan have pathetically low memberships and budgets. For example, Greenpeace has 400,000 members in the United States, 500,000 in Germany, and only 5,400 in Japan. The World Wildlife Fund has fewer than 20,000 members in Japan, versus millions in the United States and Europe. This adds up to powerlessness. As Professor Hasegawa Koichi of Tohoku University stresses, «Japan's nature conservation groups are not powerful enough to influence the policy-making process, unlike their Western counterparts.»
On the other side, government agencies keep up a barrage of propaganda, at public expense, to support their programs, as we have seen in the case of construction. In October 1996, newspapers revealed that the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry collected ¥47 million from ten nationally funded foundations under its own jurisdiction to pay for public relations that included magazine advertisements warning of the risk of massive rains and floods, a series of events commemorating the centennial of modern river-control methods in Japan, and two international symposiums on water resources and flood control. Needless to say, it was not revealed that retired River Bureau bureaucrats served on the boards of those foundations. Nor was it mentioned that the same officials hold stock in the companies that have the contracts to manage dams, channeling billions of yen directly into their own pockets.
A full-color advertisement sponsored by the Electrical Resource Development Company, in the popular weekly Shukan Shincho in December 1995, was typical of the propaganda effort. In front of a photograph of a large hydroelectric dam stands the attractive Ms. Aoyama Yoshiyo, who is traveling in the mountains of scenic Wakayama. «Ah,» says Ms. Aoyama in the text. «What lovely cedar trees. They're so nicely tended, and their trunks, shorn of branches, grow up tall and straight to the sky. And there is such abundant water here, of course, the result of this being a region of high rainfall.
Another subject that Japanese schools very definitely do not teach is social activism. Citizens' groups in Japan have pathetically low memberships and budgets. For example, Greenpeace has 400,000 members in the United States, 500,000 in Germany, and only 5,400 in Japan. The World Wildlife Fund has fewer than 20,000 members in Japan, versus millions in the United States and Europe. This adds up to powerlessness. As Professor Hasegawa Koichi of Tohoku University stresses, «Japan's nature conservation groups are not powerful enough to influence the policy-making process, unlike their Western counterparts.»
On the other side, government agencies keep up a barrage of propaganda, at public expense, to support their programs, as we have seen in the case of construction. In October 1996, newspapers revealed that the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry collected ¥47 million from ten nationally funded foundations under its own jurisdiction to pay for public relations that included magazine advertisements warning of the risk of massive rains and floods, a series of events commemorating the centennial of modern river-control methods in Japan, and two international symposiums on water resources and flood control. Needless to say, it was not revealed that retired River Bureau bureaucrats served on the boards of those foundations. Nor was it mentioned that the same officials hold stock in the companies that have the contracts to manage dams, channeling billions of yen directly into their own pockets.
A full-color advertisement sponsored by the Electrical Resource Development Company, in the popular weekly Shukan Shincho in December 1995, was typical of the propaganda effort. In front of a photograph of a large hydroelectric dam stands the attractive Ms. Aoyama Yoshiyo, who is traveling in the mountains of scenic Wakayama. «Ah,» says Ms. Aoyama in the text. «What lovely cedar trees. They're so nicely tended, and their trunks, shorn of branches, grow up tall and straight to the sky. And there is such abundant water here, of course, the result of this being a region of high rainfall.