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20th Century Japan
Rising Public Awareness
By the late 1960s, however, there were signs of a shift in public mood. Reports of severe environmental disruption began to vie with trade figures and other presumably good economic news in both the print and electronic media. At the same time, reports of Japan's comparatively meagre provisions for social security, housing and leisure were brought into the public eye. Public attention was beginning to focus on the detriments produced along with the benefits by modern economic activity as well as the effects of the government's growth-promoting policies.
Environmental Damage
It was reported in 1970 that the major rivers flowing through the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and Nagoya were seriously contaminated by human and industrial wastes. The nation's lakes contained high concentrations of eutrophying chemicals and the water in a stream running off the seemingly pristine slopes of Mt Fuji that a roll of film dropped by a journalist actually began to "develop" blurred but recognisable images. The proportion of fresh surface water containing industrial wastes was practically 100 percent.
Meanwhile, dangerously high concentrations of mercury and other toxic chemicals in fishes caught of the coasts of Japan led the Ministry of Health & Welfare to announce guidelines for weekly fish consumption to protect consumers from mercury poisoning. Fish sales plummeted, sushi shops were strangely empty and consumption of pork soared.
Public concern over food safety was further intensified by two new, pollution-related diseases which claimed over a hundred lives. Minamata disease, was traced back to the organic mercury discharged as waste by the Chisso Corporation which worked its way through the food chain into local residents, leading to crippling, loss of speech and culminated with coma and death. Itai itai disease (literally "it hurts it hurts" disease), was traced back to the discharge of cadmium by the Mitsui Mining and Smelting Corporation into nearby waters and rice paddies. People who consumed the contaminated rice developed liver and kidney problems, and in extreme cases suffered from an agonising softening of the bones and convulsions. In short, fish and rice, the two staples of the Japanese diet, had actually become a threat to human life.
Even the air was no longer safe to breathe. By 1971, levels of pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide had reached dangerous levels. The poisonous, petrochemical "white smog", which Tokyo first experienced in 1970, caused tens of thousands of cases of skin, eye and respiratory irritation. Neighbourhood clinics offering relief in the form of brief periods at a machine dispensing oxygen began to appear. In a survey done by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, about n65 percent of the city's population believed that they might have to wear gas masks at all times in fifteen years if nothing was done to tackle the problem.
Inadequate Social Welfare
A close second to the growing public concern over environmental degradation was concern over a newly publicised " welfare gap (fukushi gappu). Government spending on social welfare was discovered to be not much more in per capita outlay each year than in Tunisia and Ceylon. And the consequences were conspicuous. Only 13 percent of Japanese roads were paved at the time and many streets lacked sidewalks to protect pedestrians from traffic. The sewage systems were also woefully inadequate, with only 17.1 percent of Japanese dwellings boasting flush toilets. In Japanese cities the area of park space per capita trailed far behind the cities of the West, and other recreational facilities were also in short supply. Tokyo, an extreme example, had only 1.2 square metres of park space per capita, compared with 14.4 square metres in West Berlin, 19 in New York City and 22.8 in London.
The price of land and housing had also spiralled upwards. Commuting times for employees in both rented and owner-occupied accommodation increased as people moved further from the cities to find affordable living space. The average white-collar employee left home in the morning before his children woke up and returned home after they had gone to bed. On weekends, he would often sleep during the day to recover from the stress of long hours at work and on the road.
Housewives began to complain of the isolation they felt during the day when their children were off at school and their husbands were far away at work. They began to feel increasingly unhappy with the hastily constructed and facility-lacking bedroom communities they inhabited. Men began to die of overwork.
Government Reform
As a result of these problems, ordinary Japanese were now no longer willing to sacrifice quality of life for economic growth. The celebrated plan of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, who served from 1972-4, to "remodel the Japanese Archipelago" by, for one, diffusing industry more evenly throughout the country met with considerable opposition from the inhabitants of relatively unspoiled regions who had no interest in enduring the widely-publicised problems of industrial heartland. Nor were residents keen to suffer the noise and other health hazards of high-speed "bullet" trains in their backyards. Plans to reclaim the shoreline for the construction of several large-scale coastal industrial complexes were also cut back in the face of local resistance.
During 1973 fishermen blockaded the entrances to harbours and stopped up wastewater outlets used by firms thought to be causing pollution, causing the firms to suspend operations for a while. In July that year thousands of fishermen gathered in Tokyo for a protest rally, demanding that enterprises "awake to their social responsibility for environmental protection". Their demands echoed those of large numbers of local citizens' action groups. For a while it seemed the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had governed Japan since 1955, would topple.
But the LDP responded to popular concern. By the mid-1970s a variety of anti-pollution laws were passed and polluting industries found themselves subjected to heavy penalties in a number of court cases that were decided against them. From 1973, a series of steps were taken by the government to bring state expenditure on social security and health care up Western European levels and new national plans for the creation of an environmentally sensitive, welfare-oriented post-industrial economy, based on clean, knowledge-based industries were published.