Subject: [cwj 25] Deadly Toxins- Japan's Dirty Secret
From: Corporate Watch in Japanese <cwj@corpwatch.org>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 16:44:17 -0700
Seq: 25
Japan's Dirty Secret
Time Magazine
5/29/2000
As deadly toxins poison the environment, the government is doing its best
to avoid the issue
By DONALD MACINTYRE and HIROKO TASHIRO Tokyo
Keiko Saito wasn't concerned when a plastic-waste compacting plant opened
down the street from her house in Suginami, a well-to-do Tokyo suburb.
After all, the government had reassured residents that the neatly landscaped
facility posed no danger. But soon after the plant started running four
years ago, Saito's breasts began swelling painfully, as if she were pregnant.
Her testosterone level shot through the roof. Whiskers sprouted on her
chin, forcing Saito, now age 63, to start shaving. Her hair tested positive
for arsenic, lead and mercury--all at high levels. She has to concentrate
to avoid slurring her words and sometimes has trouble thinking clearly.
"I feel," she says slowly, "as if I am standing in the middle of a mist."
More than 400 people living near the Suginami Waste Transfer Station have
reported
frightening symptoms since the plant opened, according to the Society
to Get Rid of Suginami Sickness, a citizens' group. Local doctors are
baffled, but Atsushi Katsuki, a specialist in environmental science at
Takachiho University in Tokyo, thinks the problem is massive over-exposure
to chemicals. He cites the waste station as the likely culprit. "It should
be closed immediately," he says. A series of surveys by Tokyo city uncovered
more than 90 toxic substances around the site, including dioxin, one of
the deadliest known to man. But nobody, from ward bureaucrats up to the
head of Japan's Environment Agency, suggests closing it. "Unless we can
pinpoint the cause," says agency chief Kayoko Shimizu, "we can't formulate
a policy."
This is ground zero in Japan's toxic waste wars. Tragically, the country
has been here before. It was the searing images of the nerve-damaged children
of Minamata Bay in the 1970s that helped awaken the world to the threat
of mercury pollution. Today, some environmentalists and scientists warn
of a potentially more devastating crisis. After decades of ignoring the
dangers of toxic chemicals and hazardous waste, Japan is pockmarked with
thousands of dangerous hot spots--from leaky garbage dumps and clandestine
toxic-waste sites to aging incinerators belching dioxin. The nation's
incinerators churn out almost 40% of the world's emissions of dioxin and
furan--a related contaminant--according to a report issued last year by
the United Nations Environment Program. Earlier this month, four Greenpeace
activists scaled a building beside an incinerator facility in Tokyo and
dropped a protest banner proclaiming Tokyo the world's dioxin capital.
Even the Americans have gotten a whiff. An incinerator spewing dioxin-laden
exhaust onto the grounds of a U.S. Navy base south of Tokyo has turned
into a sore point for U.S.-Japan relations. Angered by Tokyo's reluctance
to take action, the U.S. recently filed a lawsuit in a Yokohama court
demanding closure of the facility.
Dioxin and many of the other poisons are hard to detect, and their impact on
health is tough to pin down. But in contrast to Minamata, the problem
is not confined to one poison and one place. Says Jun Ui, a University
of Okinawa expert in pollution: "This is a terrible risk for the health
of Japanese."
Suginami symbolizes the danger. Other toxic trouble spots tend to be messy
and smelly: big garbage sites set in remote hills, incinerators scorching
the sides of forest slopes with their deadly fumes. The Suginami waste
plant, built half underground and mostly covered by a grassy park where
youngsters play guitar and families stroll with their dogs, looks neat,
tidy, innocuous. The short exhaust vent that juts up into the park spews
no smoke. But unlike Minamata, which was located hundreds of kilometers
from Tokyo in southern Japan, Suginami sits in the heart of the Japanese
capital.
The toxic threat is energizing Japan's environmental movement. Citizens'
groups--small, underfunded but combative--are testing air and water
themselves,
then demanding that bureaucrats take action. The government doesn't appear
to be listening. The environment and people's health, it seems, still
take a distant back seat to the imperatives of economic growth. Official
Japan is starting to talk the environmental talk: bureaucrats and politicians
spin visions of a "recycling society," and every company, it seems, "loves
the Earth." But old ways die hard. A furor erupted recently over a government
plan to tear up a pristine forest area in Aichi prefecture to build thousands
of houses for the 2005 World Exposition. Under pressure from a citizens'
group and the World Expo ruling body in Paris, the government backed down
in March, unveiling a more modest plan. The Expo's theme? Living in harmony
with nature.
Bigger ministries with mandates to promote economic growth regularly trample
on the turf of the chronically underfunded Environment Ministry. The
concrete-happy
Construction Ministry, in charge of Japan's rivers, gets more funding
for managing--and damming--these waterways than the environment agency
has in its entire budget. Few bureaucrats seem willing to rock the system.
Just as official Japan dithered while mercury poisoning took dozens of
lives in Minamata, Tokyo appears to be hoping today's problems will just
go away. "The government's knee-jerk reaction to a new pollution threat
is denial," says Shunichi Teranishi, an expert on environmental economics
at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University. Officials respond, he adds, only when
problems become crises.
The residents of Suginami ward certainly feel as if they are getting the
runaround. A citizens' group demanded the closure of the plant five months
after it opened. The pleas were ignored. Hiroshi Yamada, who was elected
the ward's mayor last year on a promise to tackle the problem, is
sympathetic.
But he says shutting the plant would cost Suginami more than $18 million
a year--the plant squeezes about 10 truckloads of garbage into one, so
closing it would force the ward to shell out for a bigger transport fleet.
Tokyo's no-nonsense governor Shintaro Ishihara talks tough about clamping
down on trucks polluting the air with diesel fumes. But for Suginami,
he has done little more than set up a committee to study the problem.
In a report issued in March, the committee said hydrogen sulfide in plant
waste water and creosote used to protect nearby trees caused the residents'
illnesses. But the committee said these problems were solved three years
ago. "This doesn't explain the symptoms," says Nobuyasu Morigami, a former
resident of Suginami and member of the citizens' group Get Rid of Suginami
Sickness. "People are dying a slow death."
For all its problems, the Suginami plant is just a rest stop along the
highway of waste running from homes and businesses in Tokyo to final disposal
grounds, usually in the countryside. Chronically short of dump sites,
Tokyo and other big Japanese cities ship much of their garbage to surrounding
rural communities. That is where the waste wars start to get really nasty.
One battleground is Hinodecho, once a quiet village nestled in the mountains
an hour's train ride west of Tokyo. The spot was so scenic that artist
Seizo Tashima settled there with his wife in 1969 to escape the pressures
of the city, raise vegetables and paint scenes of wild animals and woods
for childrens' books. In the summers, he sketched while his children swam
in a mountain spring behind the house; the air was filled with the scent
of wildflowers and fir. "The wind was warm," recalls Tashima. "I thought
I had moved to the ideal location."
Paradise ended abruptly when the first garbage dump opened just 200 m
behind his house. The gouge in the mountains swallowed up the children's
swimming hole and a huge swath of the surrounding forest. Trying to ignore
the devastation, Tashima avoided looking back when he stepped outside.
But the garbage trucks that rumbled in every day from the suburbs of Tokyo
sometimes carried an awful cargo: dioxin-laced ash. Dioxin, a byproduct
of some types of pesticide and paper production, is also released when
plastics are burned. It has been linked to cancer and is suspected of
disrupting the hormones that regulate biological processes like sexual
development. When the trucks dumped their loads, the ash floated down
the valley. Downwind, the cancer rate soared to four times the national
average; 18 people in a village of 271 died of cancer in less than a decade,
according to a survey by the Hinode Forest, Water and Life Society, a
citizens' group. (The town's government says the rate hasn't risen.)
Tashima's
warm winds had turned deadly. Two years ago, doctors told him he too had
cancer and cut out two-thirds of his stomach.
In 1991, when the municipal association that runs the dump site announced
plans to build a second one, Tashima and some of his neighbors decided
to fight back. His wife Kiyoe launched a lawsuit demanding that the
association
disclose the results of water-quality tests it carried out around the
first dump. The court ruled in her favor and, when the association refused
to hand over the data, ordered it to pay more than $1,240 a day into Kiyoe's
bank account. A higher court overturned the ruling, however, and told
her to return the money. Kiyoe still tried to make her point: she put
the money--$1.3 million--into two garbage bags and handed it back.
But the protests failed. A hundred trucks a day now roll into the new
site, which is bigger than the first. At one stage, Tashima and 2,800
fellow crusaders from all over Japan purchased a patch of woodland on
the edge of the dump to stage protests and block the site's expansion.
But Tokyo expropriated the land "for the public benefit," using tactics
that Tashima calls "arrogant." The activists' protest banners and sculptures
will be demolished. The bureaucrats deny using heavy-handed tactics.
None of this fits with the picture Japan likes to present to the world.
In the official mythology, the country solved its pollution problems a
quarter-century ago and now has anti-pollution experience and technology
to share with the rest of the world. There is some truth to this. Japan
confronted a major environmental crisis in the 1960s and early '70s as
rapid industrialization turned Tokyo Bay into a vast zone of factories,
petrochemical plants and diesel-belching trucks. Around the country, as
tens of thousands fell ill with asthma and other respiratory diseases,
Japan finally reacted, passing air-quality laws that were then among world's
toughest. As victims of Minamata fought for compensation in the courts,
the government set a safety standard for mercury in fish.
But Japan's economy has grown dramatically since then. Today the country's
roads are clogged with 74 million vehicles, five times the number in the
late '60s. Air pollution levels exceed government health standards at
almost all roadside monitoring stations. As in other countries, the use
of new plastics and chemicals has soared. Much of them end up in the 1.2
million tons of garbage and industrial waste Japan churns out every day,
enough to fill 600,000 of the garbage trucks that deposit their cargo
at the Hinodecho dump.
This growing flood of household and industrial waste is straining the
system. When it was built in 1984, Hinodecho was one of the biggest dumps
in Japan; today it is dwarfed by newer sites. Yet Japan is quickly running
out of places to put its waste, and a not-in-my-backyard sentiment is
growing. As a result, some of the refuse gets shipped overseas: in January,
Japan had to retrieve thousands of tons of medical and other waste illegally
shipped to the Philippines by a Japanese company. The rest of the overflow
ends up in clandestine dumps at the side of quiet dirt roads cut into
the mountains--almost half a million tons a year, according to official
figures. The number of illegal toxic waste sites has doubled to nearly
1,300 since the mid-'90s, Japan's Health Ministry reports. Environmentalist
Tetsuo Sekiguchi fears the real figure is much higher: "The government
is covering up this problem."
That's not the only problem Japan isn't coming clean on. Though dioxin
contamination is a global issue, Japan is one of the world's worst offenders.
Short of space, the country favors burning--there are about 1,800
household-waste
incinerators in Japan (the U.S. has about 250) and thousands more licensed
and unlicensed hazardous waste incinerators. Many are pouring dioxin into
the air at levels far above what most of the rest of the world considers
safe.
Americans living at the Atsugi U.S naval base southwest of Tokyo found
that out the hard way. A nearby incinerator burning toxic industrial waste
has been fouling the base for more than a decade. A joint U.S.-Japan survey
last year of the local air and soil found the highest level of airborne
dioxin contamination ever recorded in Japan. Tokyo has agreed to try to
fix the problem, but dioxin-laden fumes continue to waft into the housing
where the sailors' families live. So far, the complaints are mostly about
asthma and other respiratory problems. But the Navy considers Atsugi so
dangerous it requires anyone posted there to be thoroughly briefed on
the health risks in advance, the only base in the world with such a
requirement.
Japanese citizens exposed to dioxin in other parts of the country have
considerably less clout than the U.S. government. When an incinerator
outside the town of Nose was forced to shut down in 1997, it was much
too late for workers like Mitsuo Takeoka, who believes the cancer he
contracted
resulted from dioxin exposure on the job. Hideaki Miyata, a dioxin expert
at Osaka's Setsunan University, says if dioxin is not the direct cause
of cancer, it certainly speeds its growth. Less than an hour's drive from
Osaka, Nose was once known for its rolling green hills and flavorful
chestnuts.
Now it is infamous as one of the most dioxin-polluted spots in Japan.
In 1998, government experts checking the area just outside Nose's incinerator
found the highest levels of dioxin soil contamination ever recorded in
Japan.
That probably came as no surprise to Takeoka, 69, who worked inside the
plant for eight years, moving rubbish and checking meters. He had no idea
that the fine dust that clogged the air might be deadly. But in 1996,
he found he had colon cancer. The tumor was removed, but two years later
he was in the hospital with rectum cancer. By January of this year, the
cancer had spread to both lungs, and doctors said it was too late to have
another operation. He barely has the strength now to tell his story: "It
is all so wretched. I never imagined something like this could happen."
Linking the plant to his illness won't be easy, but Takeoka wants to try.
Last year, he and five other workers filed a lawsuit against officials
in charge of the incinerator as well as the plant's manufacturer, Mitsui
Engineering & Shipbuilding, and two subsidiaries. The first such suit
by incinerator workers, it demands $5 million in damages. At the initial
hearing in March, a judge heard that Takeoka's blood contains 12 times
more dioxin per gram of fat than does the average person. There is no
indication the incinerator has affected the health of Nose residents,
who don't live close by. But nobody seems eager to buy their chestnuts
anymore.
Japan has known of the dangers for decades. The whole world took note
in 1976 when a chemical plant exploded in Seveso, Italy, raining a cloud
of dioxin on surrounding communities. In the early 1980s, a Japanese
scientist
issued a public warning about dioxin. The Ministry of Health and Welfare
ignored it. Evidence of the chemical's dangers piled up, but Japan didn't
get around to setting emissions rules until 1997. Loose by international
standards, they aren't seriously enforced, environmentalists say. When
inspectors came to places like Nose, clever incinerator bosses simply
burned less of the bad stuff. Katsuo Hatanaka, a former worker at the
Nose plant who is also suing, suffers from skin diseases that he blames
on dioxin. "Our plant used to add kerosene to the incinerator to make
it burn cleaner while the inspectors were around," he says. Mitsui
Engineering
won't comment on allegations about the plant.
Activist scientists, responding to cries for help from Nose's workers
and others, finally forced the issue onto the national agenda last year.
As horror stories about dioxin-plagued communities started hitting the
headlines, Tokyo finally passed a package of dioxin legislation, including
a law setting a limit on how much of the chemical Japanese could safely
ingest each day: 4 picograms per kg of body weight.
The legislation may be too little, too late. That level is at the upper
limit of the World Health Organization's standard of 1 to 4 picograms.
The who actually recommends bringing intake down to less than 1 picogram.
What's more, Tokyo didn't set any dioxin safety standards for fish--a
dangerous omission, critics say, in a country where seafood is an important
part of the diet. Japan isn't ready, counters Environment Agency head
Shimizu. "We passed the dioxin laws only last year," she says. "We need
more data." But in its first comprehensive survey of dioxin, the agency
last year found that fish caught near Tokyo and Osaka were badly contaminated
with the substance. Studies have determined that daily dioxin intake exceeds
the new standards in communities where people tend to eat fish caught
in polluted coastal waters. "Only the high percentage of seafood coming
from outside the country is keeping the levels of dioxin in Japanese from
soaring," says dioxin expert Miyata.
One warning was sounded last October, when scientists from the U.S., Britain
and Japan conducted a survey of meat labeled "whale" on sale in Japan.
dna tests showed that more than a quarter of the meat was actually dolphin
and other species caught in coastal waters, much of it heavily contaminated
with mercury, pesticides and poly-chlorinated biphenyls (pcb), a dioxin-like
compound. One dolphin liver labeled as whale had a mercury level hundreds
of times that of Japan's post-Minamata limit. In a letter to government
ministries in Tokyo, one of the researchers, Harvard biologist Stephen
Palumbi, took the unusual step of calling for public warnings and an
immediate
ban on sales of contaminated meat. Says Palumbi: "The whale meat market
was peppered with products that simply weren't safe." He has received
no reply.
Saito and her neighbors in Suginami are still waiting for answers as well.
She says she feels like a guinea pig in some kind of toxic chemical
experiment
gone wrong. Now that doctors and scientists have started to get involved
in the debate, it is harder for ordinary residents like Saito to make
their voices heard. All the talk about data and chemical analysis, she
says, is missing the point: "We should stop that incinerator. Then we
should find out what is the real cause of our problems." That should be
something everyone can agree on.
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