From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima:

Transcription

1 Simon Avenell Japan Forum From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima: Environmental Activism and the Nuclear Blind Spot in Contemporary Japan Abstract On September 19, 2011, sixty thousand people gathered in Tokyo to protest against nuclear power and radiation pollution after reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Their protest evoked memories of the 1960s when Japan was among the most polluted locations on the planet with hazardous levels of air, water, and ground contamination. Observers at the time described the country as a polluters paradise and advised tourists to pack a gas mask. By the early 1970s, however, the Japanese had addressed many their thorniest pollution problems and the country possessed some of the strictest regulatory standards in the world. In this article I analyze the activities of an influential group of natural and social scientists, the Pollution Research Committee, which spearheaded the struggle against pollution. I make two claims. First, on the positive side, the # 2012 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please journals.permissions@oup.com Simon Avenell, From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima: Environmental Activism and the Nuclear Blind Spot in Contemporary Japan, Environmental History 17 (April 2012): doi: /envhis/emr154 Advance Access publication on February 22, 2012

2 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 245 committee played a decisive role in Japan s pollution turnaround through its field research, pollution victim advocacy, and extensive international activities. But, second, the reactive victim-centered environmental agenda of the committee and other contemporary groups never developed into a preventive movement capable of identifying and scrutinizing potential forms of pollution such as radiation. The result was a nuclear blind spot in Japanese environmental activism only made visible with the Fukushima disaster of Knowledgeable people in other countries will be watching Japan closely, much as old time coal miners once watched the canary in the cage. Paul R. Ehrlich Introduction Paul Ehrlich s gloomy comparison of Japan to a coal miner s canary was no exaggeration. The country s astounding spurt of economic growth from the mid-1950s not only made the Japanese rich, it also bequeathed an environmental crisis of historic proportions. Observers at the time sardonically described contaminated regions of Japan as pollution department stores, fully stocked with a poisonous cocktail of ground, water, air, and bio-accumulative pollutants. 1 In a 1972 pamphlet prepared for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, activist Ui Jun bluntly concluded that Japan probably had the worst environmental pollution problems of any country in the world. 2 Rejecting triumphant talk about the country s economic miracle, Ui described Japan as the world s most advanced polluted nation. 3 Ehrlich could only agree, concluding that, although the country was doing well economically, from an ecological viewpoint this vastly overpopulated nation was teetering on the brink of disaster. 4 That Japan from the late 1950s to the early 1970s was a hazardously toxic archipelago is beyond doubt: children playing outdoors collapsed from photochemical smog inhalation, fishing communities were devastated by methylmercury poisoning, residents breathing noxious oxides from petrochemical plants coughed themselves to death, and babies were born with deformed genitalia after their mothers consumed oil laced with endocrine-disrupting polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). 5 Pollution, indeed, was a merciless and capricious phenomenon the fallen angel of Japan s postwar economic miracle. Yet just as significant as Japan s pollution nightmare was the country s pollution cleanup. By the time of Ehrlich s somber observations in the mid-1970s, the Japanese had gone a long way to substantively addressing, if not solving, many of their thorniest pollution issues.

3 246 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) Later observers even speak of this sudden turnaround as Japan s pollution miracle : stringent laws and regulations were enacted, noxious emissions reduced; victims compensated; companies forced to clean up; an environmental bureaucracy established; grassroots movements invigorated; and the environmental pollution problem elevated to the very center of public debate. 6 While Japan clearly still faces significant environmental problems, as the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 makes clear, the speed and efficacy with which the Japanese addressed their pollution problem from the late 1960s is beyond doubt. Multiple factors fueled the pollution turnaround. A wave of grassroots movements for compensation and prevention gained momentum from the late 1960s, pressuring corporations and state officials to act. After initially ignoring the growing movement, the print media began to document the crisis, providing a public forum for environmental advocates. Progressive local governments enacted strict emissions regulations and implemented creative policy initiatives. Public opinion polls from the late 1960s warned officials that citizens were deeply concerned about pollution and expected immediate official action. Pressures from abroad on the government grew when the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) began planning the first UN conference on the environment in 1968, and the United States held Earth Day in More irritating for Japanese officials, foreign media began to portray Japan as a polluters paradise and Earth Day participants in the United States, replete with symbolic gas masks, demanded No More Tokyos! 7 All of these forces combined to encourage substantive legislative change and a striking reduction in industrial pollution. By 1977 an Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on Japan s environmental policies could conclude that, although the country still faced environmental quality issues, it had won many battles for pollution abatement. 8 Why did this response come when it did, and what were its longterm legacies? The mere occurrence of pollution even deadly incidents of industrial poisoning had not automatically or immediately produced a response in Japan. Politicians enacted forceful regulations only when politically expedient and only after years of foot dragging. Pollution victims suffered silently for years before protesting or suing, public opinion changed only slowly, and media coverage intensified only late in the 1960s, long after pollution was a ubiquitous national problem. This article explores the political factors shaping the pollution turnaround, focusing on the role of a pioneering group of natural and social scientists who formed the influential Pollution Research Committee. I argue that the committee influenced the burgeoning domestic and international environmental movement of the time while also

4 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 247 shaping a human-centered environmentalism in Japan that focused primarily on the victims of industrial pollution. As the group s founder, Tsuru Shigeto, later explained, the diverse backgrounds of committee members produced powerful synergies for the group in terms of multidisciplinary perspective, investigative methodologies, social networks, and repertoires of contention. 9 Committee members regular monthly meetings to discuss and debate pollution issues, their public advocacy, and their surveys of contaminated regions also heralded a new stage of professionalism in Japanese environmental activism that had previously been largely ad hoc and sporadic. 10 Above all, the group shared a commitment to the plight of pollution victims and a determination to expose the perpetrators. Indeed, I argue that although this focus on victims led to rapid progress on pollution in the 1970s, it never developed into a preventive movement capable of identifying and scrutinizing potential forms of pollution such as radiation. The result was a nuclear blind spot in Japanese environmental activism that was graphically exposed at Fukushima in March While other historians have recognized the individual contributions of Pollution Research Committee members, this article is the first to examine the interplay between the committee s local and international activities, as well as to consider the long-term impact of its victimcentered agenda. At home, members spearheaded the antipollution movement through field investigations, print media reports and publications, cooperation with local movements, testimony in pollution lawsuits, and coordination of antipollution networks. Internationally, members conducted pollution site investigations in socialist and capitalist countries, networked with scientists and environmental officials, and participated in landmark events such as the 1972 UN conference. Put in somewhat schematic terms, I see the committee and its members as the Japanese equivalents of individuals such as Rachel Carson, Kenneth Boulding, Paul Ehrlich, or Barry Commoner, and groups like the Club of Rome. Just as these individuals and groups by no means single-handedly created the environmental movement in their countries or internationally, neither did the committee. What they did do was articulate a candid and disturbing picture of pollution along with a pragmatic set of strategies for victim redress. In the conclusion I discuss the legacies of this first phase of environmental activism in postwar Japan, especially in light of the Fukushima disaster. Why, after the bitter experiences of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the pollution of the 1960s and 1970s, did the Japanese people so willingly accept the development of nuclear power in the country? Moreover, why did groups such as the committee that had fought so hard against industrial pollution fail to mobilize a similar movement warning of the dangers of radiation or to create a

5 248 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) robust civic-led initiative to monitor the safety of nuclear power plants in the country? Pollution Crisis and Response To appreciate the contribution of the Pollution Research Committee, it is worthwhile recalling how contaminated Japan was in the 1960s. Before environmental groups began to mobilize in the mid-1960s, Japan had made little progress in pollution control. The country had a long history of industrial pollution dating back to at least the midnineteenth century when Japan s samurai rulers abandoned isolationism for Western-style modernity and imperialistic expansion. Most infamously, in the 1890s, pollution from the Ashio Copper Mine in Eastern Honshū devastated the surrounding environment and local communities. Sulfur dioxide from the mine decimated forests while soil erosion from deforestation polluted the nearby Watarase River killing freshwater trout and contaminating water necessary for rice cultivation. 11 But with the transition from early postwar deprivation to the bright life of high-speed economic growth in the mid-1950s, industrial pollution came to national attention for the first time. As early as 1955 newborns were poisoned by arsenic mistakenly introduced into powdered infant formula manufactured by the Morinaga Milk Company. Ten thousand were affected and six hundred died. Similar poisoning occurred in 1968 when people consumed Kanemi rice bran oil contaminated with PCBs. Victims suffered from painful eye discharge and eruptions on the skin, and the so-called cola babies born of pregnant women who had been exposed were marked by dark brown pigmented skin and were found to have lower IQs. 12 Industrial waste contaminated air, land, rivers, and seas, most shockingly in the Big Four pollution incidents at Minamata Bay, Yokkaichi City, and the Jinzū (Toyama) and Agano (Niigata) Rivers. In the mid-1950s, patients living around Minamata Bay in Kagoshima Prefecture presented at local hospitals with abnormalities of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Investigations revealed the source of the pollution as effluent dumped into the bay by the Chisso Corporation. First observed as strange dancing, seizures, and sudden death among local cats that ate fish from the bay, the etiology of Minamata disease lay in consumption of seafood containing methylmercury, a bioaccumulative organometallic compound. In addition to altering adult nervous system function, methylmercury can cross the placenta, making it a developmental neurotoxin. Some children born of women who ate polluted seafood while pregnant exhibited severe symptoms, including mental retardation, altered reflexes, and coordination disturbance.

6 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 249 Around the same time, residents living downwind from a petrochemical complex in Yokkaichi City in Mie Prefecture began to complain of breathing difficulties and severe asthma. Subsequent investigations revealed the cause to be sulfur and nitrogen dioxides emitted from the complex. This second of the Big Four pollution incidents was called Yokkaichi asthma, a term that became synonymous with the downside of regional development in the postwar period. The third of the Big Four surfaced in the late 1950s when a local doctor in Toyama prefecture confirmed that cadmium dumped into the Jinzū River by Mitsui Mining and Smelting caused the debilitating condition known as Itai Itai disease ( It Hurts It Hurts ). The cadmium made victims bones brittle and prone to fracture, caused damage to major organs, and resulted in an excruciatingly painful death. In 1964 the fourth major pollution incident emerged: methylmercury poisoning in Niigata Prefecture caused by effluent dumped into the Agano River by the Shōwa Denkō Company. 13 Urban centers such as Tokyo and Osaka also suffered from deteriorating air and water quality. In 1960 Osaka experienced choking smog for 165 days out of the year and Tokyo fared no better: as late as 1969, Mount Fuji (about 60 miles from central Tokyo) was visible for only thirty-eight days. Reports from a century early had the number at over a hundred. Air quality became so bad in the nation s capital that in April 1970 some forty children in Tokyo s central Suginami Ward collapsed from photochemical smog inhalation. 14 As gross national product (GNP) soared, so too did pollution and related complaints. Indeed, in the 1960s, the three seemed inextricably intertwined. Local movements initiated the pollution fight. As early as the late 1950s, irate fishermen in Tokyo (1958) and Minamata (1959) stormed the premises of polluting factories and demanded recompense. In 1964 activists in Shizuoka Prefecture south of Tokyo attracted national media attention when they forced local politicians to abandon plans for a petrochemical complex similar to the Yokkaichi facility. Energized by this victory and supported by progressive lawyers and Pollution Research Committee members, victims of the Big Four pollution incidents instigated civil law proceedings against offending companies beginning in From 1971 to 1973, courts delivered important victories in their favor. Similar antipollution and antidevelopment movements mobilized around the nation from the late 1960s, peaking at around three thousand local mobilizations in Influential weekly magazines such as the Asahi Shūkan carefully documented the spread of protest, describing the rising wave of resistance as a new stage in the democratization of Japan. 15 Media attention was an important factor in the pollution battle, although it did not become significant until the late 1960s. The left-leaning daily the Asahi Shimbun led the way in pollution coverage, eventually forming a pollution team of reporters in 1970 for a special

7 250 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) Figure 1: Photochemical smog spreads over Tokyo and its surroundings in A snow-capped Mount Fuji is visible above the polluted skies to the south. Credit: The Mainichi Newspapers. series called Protecting the Environment. 16 Outside the country, the foreign media communicated Japan s pollution calamities to the world. In January 1968 the New York Times ran an article titled Not All Is Serene in Cities of Japan describing how Japanese urbanites breathed some of the most heavily polluted air in the world. A 1971 article in the same newspaper identified Tokyo as one of the seven pollution wonders of the world and advised visitors to bring a gasmask. 17 Government officials began to respond first at the local level. In 1964 Yokohama City signed a landmark pollution prevention

8 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 251 agreement with local industry that set voluntary emissions standards and formalized processes of citizen participation and oversight. In nearby Tokyo, leftist governor Minobe Ryōkichi established a dedicated Pollution Research Office in 1967 and in 1969 passed a landmark pollution prevention ordinance with the strictest standards for air and water quality in the nation. 18 Pressured by these movements from below and a worried populace, national bureaucrats and lawmakers thereafter responded. In 1968 the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) officially recognized the Itai Itai and Minamata conditions as pollution diseases, a decision that bolstered the ongoing lawsuits and opened the way for official compensation. 19 At a historic Diet (the Japanese Parliament) session in 1970 later called the Pollution Diet, fourteen pollution-related laws were either newly passed or amended giving Japan one of the strictest environmental regulation regimes in the world. For example, lawmakers strengthened the Basic Law for Environmental Pollution Control of 1967 by deleting a pro-industry clause in Article One that had required environmental protection to proceed in harmony with sound economic development. 20 Complementing these historic legislative reforms, in 1971 the Environment Agency was established and a nationwide system for pollution dispute resolution put in place. Two years later, in 1973, the Diet passed the Law for the Compensation of Pollution- Related Health Injury, creating the world s first governmental compensation scheme for pollution victims. Japan could now boast a hefty suite of antipollution regulations and an environmental leviathan staffed by an army of officials to oversee the regulatory apparatus. The environment by no means topped policymaking or popular concern, of course, and it would be wrong to characterize these changes as some kind of environmental revolution, but things had changed in a way unimaginable a decade before. Environmental Pioneers Pioneering environmentalists played a catalytic role in this history, connecting the dots between pollution, politics, injury, and response. Among these no group was more influential than the Pollution Research Committee formed in 1963 by eight leftist academics. Through their public activities and publications, the committee helped to contextualize a problem that few Japanese understood, even in the late 1960s when industrial pollution was ubiquitous. A number of features gave the committee its potency. First, unlike company employees or even government bureaucrats, committee members relative political and financial insulation in universities freed them to pursue a relentless and often confrontational campaign against polluting industries without fear of reprisal. Second, members disciplinary specialties gave their group an expansive perspective on

9 252 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) pollution, stretching from economics, history, law, and public policy to urban engineering, sanitation, microbiology, epidemiology, and public hygiene. Third, their extensive network of contacts plugged the group into multiple elite and grassroots organizations within Japan and abroad. Drawing on his bureaucratic connections, committee founder Tsuru Shigeto secured precious startup funding from the MHW from 1963 to 1967, and Miyamoto Kenichi and Shōji Hikaru s contacts in the progressive publishing house Iwanami Shoten made possible publication of their 1964 bestseller Fearsome Pollution (Osorubeki Kōgai), the Japanese equivalent of Silent Spring. 21 Miyamoto and other committee members involvement in local government issues in the late 1950s also opened a pipeline to alliances with pollution victims and grassroots activists. Finally, the committee benefited from members balancing of ideology and empirical rigor. Most members brought a Marxist perspective to the pollution problem, attributing it to the accumulative proclivities of Japanese capitalism. Nevertheless, their ideologies did not blind them to empirical evidence that communist countries could also pollute. Rather than follow the determinist Marxist assertion that only capitalism produced pollution, members adopted the more moderate position that, although pollution might seem more severe under capitalism, free-market economies and communist economies exhibited system-specific pollution triggers and hence required different remedies. This pragmatic approach made committee members sensitive to the complexities of pollution and informed their political strategies. Committee members, for example, accepted that pollution was not simply about capitalist class antagonisms, and hence they recognized that groups Marxists traditionally labeled as reactionaries and conservatives could become allies in the antipollution struggle. Space prohibits any detailed biographies, but to better contextualize members motivations and activities in the 1960s and 1970s, consider briefly the career trajectories of the group s five leading figures: Tsuru Shigeto, Miyamoto Kenichi, Shōji Hikaru, Kainō Michitaka, and Ui Jun. 22 Tsuru Shigeto ( ), the committee s founder and most internationalized member, completed a doctorate in economics at Harvard University in At the start of the Pacific War in 1941 he returned home, serving in the Foreign Ministry and then briefly as an army conscript. After a stint in the postwar socialist government of Katayama Tetsu (May 1947 March 1948), Tsuru joined the Economic Research Institute at Hitotsubashi University. Tsuru s environmental interests originated in the 1930s while researching the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), whose employment policies, social programs, and conservation agenda he found particularly impressive. 23 Unlike the terribly polluted Watarase River and Ashio region in Japan, the Tennessee Valley seemed to have married development and

10 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 253 environment. For example, the Tennessee Valley had an upstream copper mine similar to Ashio, but to the Japanese, there seemed to be less pollution from the Tennessee mine. Tsuru articulated his embryonic environmental concerns in a pioneering 1950 paper, observing how actions that were rational at the micro level could be economically irrational at the macro level. For instance, loggers might profit by felling forests, but the costs for society were flooding and natural degradation. Sensitive to this complicated developmentenvironment equation and stimulated by Arthur Pigou s work on externalities and Karl William Kapp s theory of social costs, Tsuru developed a powerful critique of GNP economics and a suite of countermeasures based on civic empowerment and state regulation of industrial activity. 24 Miyamoto Kenichi (b. 1930), an economist and scholar of public finance, spent the bulk of his career at Osaka City University. Together with Shōji Hikaru (see later), Miyamoto s environmentalism had the most palpable Marxian flavor of the group, although this position softened over the years. Miyamoto described his early baptism into Marxism, which for many years enjoyed a quasi-religious status among Japanese social scientists and became the focal pillar of his thought. 25 More significantly, Miyamoto s 1950s involvement with the socialist All-Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union, or Jichirō, became the springboard for his antipollution activism. Although originally concerned with public finance, after witnessing Yokkaichi pollution firsthand, in 1962 an incensed Miyamoto penned the first postwar essay using pollution (kōgai) in its title. Lambasting the hellish skies over Japan s industrial towns, the essay condemned insidious pollution as the new king of human rights violations. 26 Thereafter, Miyamoto found himself at the center of a pollution maelstrom, the perfect position from which to write the classic Fearsome Pollution just two years later. Shōji Hikaru ( ), Miyamoto s coauthor on that book, was an engineer trained in public sanitation, hygiene, and medicine at the prestigious Kyoto University. Similar to Miyamoto, Shōji was involved in local government research in the 1950s as well as being a deeply committed Marxist. The Marxist Miyamoto even described Shōji as an old Bolshevik who criticized Miyamoto s watered-down description of pollution as accompanying or associated with capitalism. 27 On the contrary: Shōji located pollution in the very viscera of the free market. Yet he was no dogmatist; Shōji s critical contribution to the Pollution Research Committee was the methodological rigor and knowledge he brought from engineering and medical science. Kainō Michitaka ( ) was the committee s legal specialist, having trained in civil law at the nation s premier institution, the University of Tokyo. Kainō caused a stir in 1964 when he resigned his post at the Law Faculty of Tokyo City University to defend farmers accused

11 254 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) of illegal land use over which they claimed right of common. 28 Kainō never returned to academia, moving instead into local government as a pollution official under the progressive Tokyo governorship of Minobe Ryōkichi from Here Kainō drafted the landmark Tokyo Pollution Prevention Ordinance of Finally, although not a founding member, the engineer Ui Jun ( ) contributed scientific expertise along with a willingness to engage in contentious, often confrontational, political activity. Ui attended the University of Tokyo and, after working in industry, returned in 1959 as a graduate student and, thereafter, a lecturer in civil engineering. Reading the early media reports from Minamata and suspecting industrial pollution, Ui and a fellow researcher began investigating the etiology of the disease. By 1963 the two had more or less confirmed methylmercury as the pollutant, but lacking confidence they did not publish their findings. Had they done so, Ui believed, the second Minamata disease in Niigata Prefecture may have been more speedily contained if not averted. Remorse over this self-described lack of courage fueled Ui s antipollution activism and his advocacy for victims. 29 Together these five men formed the intellectual and ethical core of the Pollution Research Committee. While most of their Marxist colleagues retained class interpretations of pollution, committee members fashioned a repertoire of field research, public advocacy, legal action, local government participation, and activist network building. Fighting Pollution at Home Committee members discoveries at pollution sites stimulated their activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Miyamoto Kenichi became interested in pollution at the All-Japan Prefectural and Municipal Workers Union (Jichirō) National Meeting in 1961 where public employees from Yokkaichi leaked censored data showing severe air and water contamination around the new petrochemical complex. The Urban Engineering Department at Tokyo University, which was involved in the petrochemical complex, had described Yokkaichi in a glossy pamphlet as an ideal industrial city of sunlight and green space. Intrigued, Miyamoto traveled to Yokkaichi twice over the coming months where he was deeply shocked to discover hundreds of asthma sufferers and a foul-smelling bay with malodorous, inedible fish. In mid-1962, while on a guided tour of the complex, Miyamoto observed wastewater treatment facilities that were clearly inadequate and interviewed factory officials who insisted the pollution originated from a sunken ship in the bay. Infuriated by these denials and mindful of the victims, Miyamoto began to gather data on the insidious and fearsome pollution at Yokkaichi. 30

12 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 255 Figure 2: Smoke from the nearby petrochemical complex covers the hellish skies of Yokkaichi City in This air pollution was later identified as the cause of debilitating Yokkaichi Asthma. Credit: The Mainichi Newspapers. In 1962 Miyamoto traveled further south to the Yahata Ironworks in northern Kyushu where he was shocked again this time by the gray smog-choked sky and the blackened Dōkai Bay. He came to see these industrial cities as modern corporate castle towns similar to the feudal samurai castle towns of old. 31 With the establishment of the Pollution Research Committee in 1963 and nourished by state funds, Miyamoto, Tsuru, and other members intensified their field research, visiting Yokkaichi, the planned Shizuoka petrochemical plant, and other cities such as Minamata, Kisarazu, and Mizushima. At each site they met with activists, victims, medical doctors, and industry representatives, documenting the progression from production to exposure and illness. 32 Determined to expose industry, members began communicating their findings to the public almost immediately. Throughout the 1960s, Tsuru Shigeto, for instance, wrote numerous influential articles for the national daily, the Asahi Shimbun, with titles such as Radical Measures for Urban Pollution (1963), A Turning Point for Pollution Countermeasures (1964), and Prerequisites for Pollution Control (1967). 33 Under Tsuru s editorship, in 1968 the committee published Contemporary Capitalism and Pollution, later described as a masterpiece in the study of Japanese environmental problems. 34 While accepting Pigou s characterization of pollution as a calculable negative externality, the book emphasized Japan s particular institutional structure that encouraged industry to search for positive externalities

13 256 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) through regional concentration yet imposed no penalties on industry for generating negative externalities like pollution. Most widely read and influential, however, was Miyamoto Kenichi and Shōji Hikaru s bestselling 1964 book Fearsome Pollution, the first dedicated treatment of pollution targeting a mass audience. 35 As Ui Jun later explained, Fearsome Pollution was more than an alarm bell in the tradition of Silent Spring; it also became the how-to manual for antipollution movements nationwide. 36 Inside its covers readers encountered a shocking compendium of images and statistics. Along with photos of smoggy industrial cities, polluted lakes, and distraught victims, Miyamoto and Shōji provided a pollution map of Japan identifying cases in almost every prefecture. A pollution diary based on newspaper clippings from 1961 to 1962 painted a similar picture. Shōji marshaled his natural science knowledge in chapters on the causes and consequences of air and water pollution, and Miyamoto discussed the political economy of pollution and strategies for resistance. Fearsome Pollution went through thirty-six reprints and sold close to half a million copies, and it helped to shape a public language and debate on the environment in Japan. Miyamoto and Shōji also found their own lives transformed, deluged thereafter with requests for assistance from protest movements, local governments, and environmental litigation attorneys. 37 Reflecting committee members Marxism, Fearsome Pollution argued that the history of pollution is the history of capitalism, pollution is a symptom of class conflict, and the capitalist class is the pollution aggressor. 38 While acknowledging pollution in communist nations such as Czechoslovakia, Miyamoto and Shōji argued that pollution would be but a transitory phenomenon in such countries. Since socialist governments were not slaves to monopoly capital, social costs in these countries would be socialized (not class stratified) through industrial regulation and comprehensive urban planning. 39 Tsuru, Miyamoto, Ui, and other committee members continued to refine this characterization of pollution in publications of the 1960s and 1970s, gradually moderating Marxist arguments with empirical observation. Four key points emerged in their arguments. First, they argued that Japan s distorted industrial structure tended to concentrate capital in the highly polluting heavy and chemical sectors, thus leading to greater pollution than found in countries with greater sectoral diversity. 40 The dual structure of Japanese industry combined old-style coal-driven processes and newer petrochemical operations. On such a small landmass, argued Miyamoto and Tsuru, this combination of old- and new-style pollution made Japan into a kind of pollution laboratory without precedent in the world. 41 Second, committee members pointed to state patronage of industry as an exacerbating factor. Miyamoto noted how public spending for

14 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima was 1.6 times that of a comparable nation, the United Kingdom. In Japan, however, public housing expenditure was only 28 percent that of the UK while outlays for industrial infrastructure were more than three times greater. 42 Infrastructure such as ports, railways, roads, power plants, and airports bred new forms of air, noise, and vibratory pollution. 43 Committee members depicted Japan as an Enterprise State managed by economic technocrats and conservative politicians, ever ready to violently defend corporate interests. 44 Third, committee members noted the concentration of industry around Japan s megacities of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Such hyperurbanization and intensive industrialization happened because of a lack of adequate regional planning and produced urban pollution that drew worldwide attention. 45 Finally, Miyamoto and others did acknowledge the role of mass consumption in pollution but only in a muted way, not wanting to shift blame from industry and the state to ordinary people. Ui Jun s reading of pollution perhaps best encapsulates the committee s stance in the 1960s and 1970s. As he explained, it was wrong to see pollution as a deformation or fault in Japanese capitalism. On the contrary, together with low wages and protectionism, pollution was the third pillar of Japan s economic miracle because it facilitated the unrestrained concentration of capital in productive yet pollutive industries while imposing no penalty on industry for its pollutive by-products or harm caused to humans and the environment. Put simply, pollution enhanced economic growth. 46 Despite this deterministic institutional portrayal of pollution, committee members activism revealed a faith in the therapeutic capacity of postwar Japanese democracy. Building on their growing public prominence, from the late 1960s the group expanded its antipollution campaign beyond site observations and public advocacy to include court appearances, local government service, and activist network building. In the courts, Miyamoto, Shōji, and Kainō led the way, supporting Yokkaichi asthma plaintiffs in their civil action ( ) against the six polluting petrochemical companies. 47 Miyamoto testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, providing the court with a detailed history of postwar Japanese pollution while Shōji and Kainō acted as special advisers to the plaintiffs attorneys. Miyamoto received a knife in the mail midway through the case, apparently advising him to commit ritual suicide. 48 Unperturbed, Miyamoto and Kainō joined Ui Jun as special advisers to the plaintiffs in the Niigata methylmercury poisoning case ( ). Ui s background in the etiology and pathology of pollution proved invaluable, as did Miyamoto s closing argument for the plaintiffs, who won their case. 49 Apart from the Big Four pollution cases, committee members appeared as expert witnesses and legal advisers in a myriad of pollution suits over airport noise, land reclamation, coastal access rights, auto emissions, and

15 258 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) bullet train vibration. In the process they contributed to Japanese environmental common law, including innovations such as the principle of strict liability in the Itai Itai disease case, joint tortfeasance and corporate negligence in the Yokkaichi case, and the concept of maximum permissible limits in the Osaka Airport night-flights case. 50 Members also advised leftist local governments elected from the mid-1960s. In western Honshū, Shōji Hikaru served as chairman on pollution advisory boards for Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Amazaki cities where he drafted pollution prevention ordinances that improved air and water quality. Shōji s pollution strategy for the smog-ridden Osaka City was a crucial ingredient in the successful two-term governorship ( ) of socialist constitutional scholar Kuroda Ryōichi, elected on a promise to restore Osaka s beautiful skies (which he did). 51 Even more influential in the local antipollution cleanup was the Tokyo governorship ( ) of Marxian economist Minobe Ryōkichi, who swiftly mobilized Tsuru Shigeto and Kainō Michitaka into his pollution brain trust. Tsuru served on a specialist urban planning panel, which in 1969 recommended a sweeping strategy for pollution through public housing, urban transport, and land redevelopments. 52 Kainō Michitaka shouldered responsibility as chief of the Tokyo City Pollution Research Bureau that assembled bureaucrats responsible for town water, sanitation, and waste disposal, alongside medical practitioners, biologists, botanists, public works specialists, meteorologists, and chemists. Kainō sent fact-finding missions to China, Korea, and the United States, convened international conferences, strengthened municipal regulations, and formulated a citywide strategy involving source prevention, industrial relocation, and green-belt construction. Like Miyamoto and Shōji, Kainō was enamored by Chinese and Soviet communism, and he hoped to inject some elements into Tokyo governance. He was particularly impressed by reports from Russia describing state-of-the-art automobile factories operating at 30 percent capacity because communists apparently only made what they needed. 53 Two of Kainō s initiatives as pollution czar had nationwide impact: the 1970 volume Pollution and Tokyo City and the pollution prevention ordinance of Seven hundred pages long, Pollution and Tokyo City represented a cutting-edge statement on urban environmental policymaking, covering the causes of air, water, sound, and vibratory pollution, the health effects, remedial regulatory and legal mechanisms, and the role of civic activism. 54 Given that it was an official publication, the volume s advocacy of vigorous civic opposition to pollution was particularly striking, yet understandable given the extent of Tokyo s problems and the ideological proclivities of Kainō and others in the administration. The message was that, although Revolution with a capital R was impossible, through people power a smaller

16 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 259 Figure 3: In 1973 the Tokyo Municipal Government erected electronic pollution meters throughout the city to inform citizens about concentration levels for photochemical smog, sulfur dioxide, noise, and other pollutants. Credit: The Mainichi Newspapers. pollution revolution could really happen. Despite its length, Pollution and Tokyo City sold thirty thousand copies, becoming required reading for local officials nationwide. 55 A year before publication of that book, Kainō and his bureau transformed Japanese environmental law with the Tokyo City Pollution Prevention Ordinance. What distinguished this ordinance from those in other municipalities was its disregard for national standards. Unlike national pollution regulations diluted by clauses that required economic harmony, the Tokyo ordinance set unprecedented emissions standards for sulfur and other noxious oxides. Pro-industry bureaucrats and politicians initially challenged the ordinance, arguing that local laws could not be stricter than national laws. But when faced with a potential electoral backlash, a wave of protest, and numerous lawsuits, they relented and the ordinance survived intact. 56 When the Pollution Diet convened in the following year, the ordinance became a minimum standard that vote-sensitive national politicians could not ignore. This ordinance represents one of the Pollution Research Committee s most noteworthy institutional interventions, substantively having an impact on both local and national regulation. More prosaically, life in Tokyo improved: by the mid-1970s annual average levels of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and suspended particulates had dramatically decreased, and photochemical oxidants and nitrogen dioxide were leveling off. 57

17 260 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) While Kainō and other committee members tackled Japan s regulatory deficiencies, others like Ui Jun focused on activist network building. In the evening of December 10, 1970, Ui convened the first of his Independent Lectures on Pollution at the Urban Engineering Department of Tokyo University. Coming at the height of the pollution crisis, these public lectures attracted hundreds of students, office workers, housewives, small business owners, and local administrators. Ui presented thirteen lectures during the first term covering the history and current state of Japanese industrial pollution, the situation in European countries, and strategies for resistance. The second term featured guest speakers such as Minamata activist Ishimure Michiko, Itai Itai disease researcher Dr. Hagino Noboru, and the socialist stalwart Arahata Kanson, who captivated an audience of a thousand with his talk on the legendary prewar antipollution activist Tanaka Shōzō. 58 As important as the lectures were the publications and activism generated by Ui s movement. After Ui s initial 1970 lecture, participants formed a support group that transcribed proceedings for a monthly newsletter, The Independent Lectures. Ui s first-term lectures were later published in the volume The Principles of Pollution, which sold 100,000 copies and was named among the ten most influential books of postwar Japan by the Asahi Shūkan. 59 Operating from their small office in Tokyo, Ui and his support group served as a contact point between local activists and urbanites keen to join the antipollution struggle. As Ui explained, many initially came out of curiosity but soon became active in movements at Minamata and elsewhere. 60 Ui s lectures and the activism they inspired capped off the Pollution Research Committee s remarkably comprehensive antipollution struggle within Japan during the 1960s and 1970s. The openness of group members to diverse and often contradictory strategies helped to sustain their ongoing collaboration. While Tsuru, Kainō, and Shōji worked inside the system as pollution czars and government advisers, for instance, Ui Jun waged a public crusade against many of the same institutions. Notably, in 1970 Ui was arrested for storming the MHW a financial patron of the Pollution Research Committee on behalf of Minamata disease sufferers. 61 Going International International engagement was the other cornerstone of the Pollution Research Committee s activism in the 1960s and 1970s, providing members with a channel to both contextualize the Japanese situation and contribute to the embryonic global environmental movement. The group s international engagement encompassed three broad endeavors: pollution site observations, organizing and participating in international conferences and symposia, and collaborative mobilizations with foreign activists and civic groups. As with their activities

18 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 261 Figure 4: Committee member Ui Jun is arrested in 1970 after he and thirteen Minamata disease sufferers attempt to disrupt mediation proceedings for compensation at the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Credit: The Mainichi Newspapers. inside Japan, the group benefited from this bidirectional acquisition and transmission of environmental knowledge. Similar to their early 1960s field research in Japan, from the latter half of the decade committee members began to visit pollution sites in foreign countries. There they encountered the sobering evidence of pollution across the political spectrum of European states. Miyamoto traveled to Czechoslovakia and Poland on at least four occasions from 1967 to After a conference in Prague in 1967, Miyamoto was permitted to visit the industrial region surrounding Ostrava City near the Czech-Polish border, where he discovered the same hellish skies he had seen in northern Kyushu in A year later (1968), Ui Jun began twelve months of pollution casework in Sweden, Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands as a sponsored researcher with the World Health Organization. In Western Europe he encountered methylmercury pollution similar to that in Japan; in Hungary he

19 262 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) witnessed a blackened Danube River and learned of the country s monumental DDT contamination issues. Ui left Europe appreciative of pollution s complexity: the same pollutant for example, methylmercury manifested differently in different geographic regions and under different political regimes, and hence there could be no panacea. After witnessing pollution in numerous central and Eastern European states, he concluded that certain institutional characteristics of state socialism might exacerbate the problem. Somewhat more reluctantly, Miyamoto reached the same conclusion after subsequent visits to Eastern Europe, including one trip with Ui in After meeting with Polish environmental researcher Jan Dobrowolski and seeing pollution firsthand in Gdansk, Katowice, and Cracow, Miyamoto conceded that pollution could indeed be worse under state socialism, especially when industry and government were fused. Pollution, he acknowledged, was only preventable with basic freedoms of speech and association, the separation of powers, local government autonomy, environmental education, and certain guaranteed standards of living conditions largely absent in socialist societies. 62 Miyamoto attributed pollution under state socialism to systemic defects born of sudden modernization and urbanization in planned economies where democratic traditions were weak and productivity levels low. But, still unwilling to jettison the socialist project altogether, he contended that the future of humanity based on environmental preservation would depend not on a domesticated capitalism but on the birth of a new socialism apparently more robustly democratic than that actually existing. 63 While Miyamoto and Ui travelled in Europe, Kainō turned his attention to the United States in his capacity as Tokyo City s pollution czar. In April 1970 Kainō and city officials responsible for air, water, sound, vibration, and sanitation set out for a three-city tour of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. In Los Angeles the group met with atmospheric researchers who explained how the city s photochemical smog triggered respiratory ailments, aggravated asthma, and resulted in elevated hospitalization rates. This information proved fortuitous as only days before the party returned, Tokyoites were stunned when inner-city schoolchildren mysteriously collapsed on their school playground. On their return, Kainō and his group identified the culprit as photochemical smog. 64 In New York, Kainō s group met with officials from the city s Department of Environmental Protection who showed them a wastewater treatment plant on Truman Island and specialized facilities for trash collection and incineration. Kainō was particularly impressed by the relative proximity of undeveloped natural areas so close to the urban metropolis, and he committed to a similar green belt philosophy for the Tama region surrounding downtown Tokyo. In December 1971 the Tokyo Municipal Tama Environmental

20 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 263 Conservation Bureau began operations, and this area developed thereafter into one of Tokyo s greenest. 65 In 1975 the Pollution Research Committee s overseas fieldwork culminated in surveys of environmental problems, policies, and civic activism in twenty countries. Ui and other members of the committee formed an investigative commission that studied waste disposal in Budapest, Moscow, and New York, as well as the War on Waste in England. For nature conservation they turned to the US national park system and the British National Trust. In the field of environmental law, they scrutinized regulatory regimes in France, Germany, and the United States, focusing particularly on automobile emissions regulations. In the realm of civic activism, they looked to antinuclear power movements in the United States and the Rhine Valley and to initiatives against eutrophication in Lake Erie. The commission also probed into methylmercury contamination worldwide. While in Canada, committee member and Kumamoto University medical researcher, Harada Masazumi, examined hair samples from ninety-eight Canadian Indians from the Grassy Narrows and Whitedog First Nations. They identified seven people as likely sufferers of methylmercury poisoning, a further eighty-nine exhibiting related clinical symptoms, and elevated mercury levels in hair samples of Indians who regularly consumed river fish. The results were communicated to the Indians, who then sued the Dryden Paper Company for dumping sodium hydroxide contaminated with trace amounts of mercury from its factory located 100 miles upstream from their reserves. 66 Although Miyamoto and committee members were initially reluctant to embark on such an ambitious project, in the process they came to appreciate the global scale of environmental pollution and their opportunity to contribute as specialists on Japan s own pollution. Communicating the story of Japanese pollution to the rest of the world was the second important pillar of the committee s international activism during the 1960s and 1970s. While serving under Governor Minobe, in 1971 Kainō Michitaka and committee members published the English-language book Tokyo Fights Pollution that provided a graphic portrait of air and water contamination in the capital city along with an outline of municipal countermeasures. Tokyo Fights Pollution argued that although the central government attached importance to economic development and lent a willing ear to industry, the Tokyo government represented the citizens and attached prime importance to protecting their lives and health. 67 The single most important event organized by the committee was the International Symposium on Environmental Disruption convened in Tokyo in March The conference grew out of Swedish ambassador Sverker Åström s appeal for greater attention to the environment

21 264 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) at the 1968 sitting of the UN General Assembly. In response, the International Social Science Council established a standing committee on environmental disruption headed by Tsuru Shigeto, who organized the symposium with the economist Allen Kneese from Resources for the Future, an environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Washington, D.C. Attesting to the stature of Tsuru and the committee by 1970, the symposium attracted financial and logistical support from Tokyo and Osaka cities, the Japanese Ministry of Education, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Symposium participants read like a who s who of environmental specialists at the time. On the Japan side were members of the Pollution Research Committee, Tokyo and Osaka City officials, and representatives from the MHW. Overseas participants included Allen Kneese, who proposed a theory of market systems sensitive to common property resources; Harvard economist Wassily Leontief, who advocated national accounting for externalities; Wellesley College economist Marshall Goldman, who described widespread pollution in the Soviet Union; Michigan University legal scholar Joseph Sax, who championed environmental litigation; and the German-American economist and founder of ecological economics Karl William Kapp, who provided the framing opening remarks for the symposium. Committee members guided their foreign guests on a pollution tour of Japan, visiting Tokyo Bay, Yokkaichi, Osaka, and Mount Fuji where they breathed pollution firsthand. Participants signed the so-called Tokyo Declaration, which famously asserted that all people and future generations have a fundamental right with respect to the environment, an idea of environmental rights that would carry over to the landmark UN conference in Stockholm two years later. 68 Coming as it did on the heels of the Tokyo Pollution Prevention Ordinance (1969), the symposium added steam to the struggle for national regulatory reform, realized only months later at the Pollution Diet. 69 Overseas participants left Japan with a new appreciation for life in an advanced polluted nation. Deeply moved, Joseph Sax obtained a copy of the distressing film Cries from Minamata, which he later screened for specialists at Resources for the Future. 70 Tsuru Shigeto found himself at the center of preparations for the UN Conference on the Human Environment scheduled for mid On the invitation of Maurice Strong, then executive secretary of the UN conference, Tsuru and twenty-six leading intellectuals gathered in the Swiss city of Founex in June Sensing the fissure between the developed and developing nations (the North and the South ) on the environment, Strong asked the group to think through the more fundamental question of balancing economic development with environmental protection. The final report on development and the environment compiled by Tsuru and the Founex group offered no resolutions but instead questioned zero-sum

22 From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima 265 formulations, noting how in advanced nations development was indeed a cause of environmental problems but became essentially a cure for environmental disruption in developing nations. 71 As Tsuru advocated in speeches thereafter at Resources for the Future (1971), Columbia University (1972) and La Fondation Maison des Sciences de l Homme (1972), the answer lay in incorporating environmental concerns into economic planning. The environment and economic development were not antagonists, so rather than advocating environmentalism as a remedy for excessive development, argued Tsuru, better to understand the environment as part of a more holistic concept of development. 72 As he outlined at the Columbia-UN Conference on Economic Development and the Environment in 1972, a unifying philosophy was required that would transcend the market mechanism. In such a philosophy, development would subsume the environment, which, in turn, would compete for the limited funds available for various concrete needs of development. 73 Convoluted though Tsuru s logic was, we can see here the seeds of the idea of sustainable development that would be fully articulated in the late 1980s by the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future. 74 The UN Conference on the Human Environment of 1972 launched the third element of the committee s international activities: namely, grassroots activism and networking with nongovernmental environmental groups and activists. The event also provides insight into the way committee members could pursue seemingly contradictory strategies yet remain solid allies. While Tsuru Shigeto advised executive secretary Maurice Strong and UN officials, Ui Jun and Japanese pollution sufferers participated in the unofficial people s forum, which became a defining event for international environmental NGOs in the postwar era. 75 With funds raised by the Independent Lectures movement, Ui traveled to Stockholm with Minamata disease sufferers, antidevelopment activists, Itai Itai disease researcher Hagino Noboru, and Kanemi rice oil poisoning victims. 76 The Japanese group were astounded by the media attention on their arrival, not to mention the interest from activists from developing nations who were shocked to learn of the country s pollution crisis. This attention was hardly coincidental, however. Before the conference Ui had prepared a graphic English-language pamphlet Polluted Japan that documented Japanese pollution using photos, maps, charts, tables, and an array of other data. Ui hatched the idea on reading the Japanese government s official country report for the UN conference that devoted only a few lines to pollution and claimed the problem had been resolved. Not only did Polluted Japan attract media and NGO attention, it forced the Japanese government to hurriedly release additional reports filling in the details of the Japan s environmental situation. 77

23 266 Environmental History 17 (April 2012) Figure 5: Sketch from the 1972 pamphlet Polluted Japan published by Ui Jun and the Independent Lectures movement to coincide with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Credit: Jishu Koza. Ui and the Independent Lectures international activities and connections deepened thereafter, blazing a trail for a new wave of internationalized environmental NGOs in the country. After Stockholm, the Independent Lectures began publishing a regular English-language magazine, The Kōgai Newsletter, which documented pollution both within Japan and abroad. In 1974 the movement sponsored another bus tour of Japanese pollution sites such as Ashio, Minamata, Fuji City, and Tokyo for exchange students, foreign correspondents, and academics. Ui s international involvement also blossomed. After a meeting with Barbara Ward and anthropologist Margaret Mead at the World Council of Churches in 1973, the two women arranged for Ui s attendance as a special participant at the UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976, and again as a keynote speaker at the World Council of Churches s conference of These events rounded out an extensive period of internationalization for the Pollution Research Committee during the 1960s and 1970s. As much as they learned from such interactions, committee members also contributed as spokespersons and messengers for the victims of pollution in Japan.