(2 of 2)
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.