EDITORIAL: Environment regulation

Exactly 40 years ago, the Diet enacted and strengthened 14 environment-related laws in an extraordinary session. It was the "anti-pollution Diet session," which marked a major policy shift toward reducing pollution.

"The sky was either pure brown or gray. Taxies and trains would use their lights even during daytime." That's how Kimio Moriwaki, 75, remembers the 1960s.

Moriwaki led a group of citizens who filed a lawsuit in the late 1970s over air pollution in Osaka's Nishiyodogawa Ward due to a combination of soot and smoke from factories and vehicle emissions.

Immediately after the end of the war, Japan's industrial capacity stood at 10 percent of its prewar level, but it returned to that level within a decade. As Japan was single-mindedly pursuing economic growth, industrial plants were built in coastal areas around the nation.

Dokai Bay off Kita-Kyushu became so polluted--there was no oxygen in water--that it was called a "sea where even colon bacilli cannot live." The Sumidagawa river in Tokyo became a "river of stench." This widespread contamination was associated with four major pollution diseases--itai-itai disease due to cadmium poisoning, Yokkaichi asthma caused by air pollution, Minamata disease blamed on mercury poisoning, and Niigata Minamata disease also associated with mercury poisoning.

Back then, there was virtually no science to explain how sulfur oxides caused asthma, and little technology to efficiently remove pollutants from factory emissions.

There was no legislation to regulate such emissions. The seven key environmental problems were air, water, soil, olfactory, vibration and noise pollution, as well as land subsidence.

In 1967, the basic law on pollution control was created. It was a timid piece of legislation, which included a provision that stressed the importance of "harmony between the preservation of people's living environments and healthy economic development."

Amid fierce popular protests against environmental destruction, the government in 1970 took a series of steps to tighten regulation, including revisions to the basic law on pollution control and the air pollution prevention law, as well as the enactment of the water pollution prevention law.

The revision of the basic anti-pollution law eliminated the provision about "harmony." The Environment Agency was established in 1971.

Important social progress was achieved in a relatively short period. In his book, the late Michio Hashimoto, who was at that time a senior bureaucrat devoted to the cause of environmental protection and later came to be known as "Mr. Environment Agency," said the movement to stop pollution was "like a peaceful cultural revolution."

Japan now enjoys clear blue skies and clean rivers again. The main environmental challenge today is not local pollution, but problems like global warming. However, recession has slowed the political momentum behind the environment policy.

What was the driving force of the anti-pollution movement four decades ago? Citizens, researchers, the legal community and the mass media all played significant roles in promoting the movement, pressuring the business community and the government into action. The main impetus came from a widespread sense of crisis about threats to the people's living environment and lives.

The threat of global warming is similar to the pollution of the 1960s in the sense that it gradually harms the living environment of future generations. Extraordinary downpours and heat waves have been occurring more frequently. In Osaka's Nishiyodogawa, where the air is now cleaner, cases of allergy and asthma caused by other factors are on the rise.

Around the world, developing countries are plagued by pollution, and four decades are left until 2050, a key target year for international efforts to stem global warning. A bill to enact basic legislation for promoting measures to curb global warming is waiting to be considered by the Diet in the current extraordinary session.

We are now at crossroads as to what kind of future we will pursue over the next four decades.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 22