続きを読む原稿①
Thank you for chair-person. I am Natsuko Matsuoka, from Kobe University, Japan. It is my pleasure and honor to have this opportunity to present my research in progress.
This presentation tries to give a political and historical interpretation about the formation of Japanese environmental policy since 1950s. My historical study attempts to provide a case study of illegal industrial waste dumping problem. Through my case study, from the view point of recent Science and Technology studies on the social and political analysis of environmental policy, I would like to show the fact that recent "eco" project is not a positive change of Japanese environmental policy, but it is rather a product that reflects its character of arbitrator.
There is a small remote island called Teshima, in the Setouchi inland sea of
West Japan.
The island is known as the island of garbage, because a huge quantity of industrial
waste was illegally dumped there from 1977 to 1990, and the island's environment
was badly contaminated. And total amount of the dump became 500,000 ton.
Among contaminated chemicals, we find heavy metals such as lead, mercury and
cadmium, and there are also high concentration of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl),
dioxin and arsenic with combusted wastes.
In the period, the industrial waste dumper acquired local government's permission
to deal with industrial and chemically contaminated waste, and they acquired
an authorized right to damp it on the island.
But this local government's permission was turned out to be a wrong decision,
and the damper was finally found guilty of illegal handling of waste in 1991.
The problem was that his company had already bankrupted by the time, and they
were not able to take any responsibility at all. The inhabitants of the island
then claimed the local government should be responsible for long ignorance and
wrong decision, but they didn't have enough money and social skills to take
the issue into any effective way, such as a court trial.
Soil and sea there were being contaminated chemically day by day. And the people's
health and life were menaced. Income of the people who lived on agriculture
and fishery was most seriously damaged because the products around the island
were not accepted at the market.
Finally, through Environmental Dispute Coordination Commission was organized to arbitrate the issue in 1993 under the leadership of Kohei Nakabo, known as "the Lawyer for the Citizen's Justice".
After the dramatic citizen's petition and support movement, bureaucrats of the local government expressed their apology, and this case was known as the most exceptional case that public authority admitted their mishandling. Then mediation between the public and local government took place in 2000 at last.
To our surprise, however, the people of the island were obliged to take a strategy
to exclude any economic compensation. So this mediation did not include any
economic compensation for the people of the island at all. But instead, it expressed
the symbolic apology of a local government, and the clean-up plan of the island.
The clean-up plan is by means of the transfer of the waste to the near island,
Naoshima. On this Naoshima island, a refinery of Mitsubishi Material Corporation
was established in 1917, and it enriched the island for a long time. But recently,
its industry of dealing with copper has been in decline. So this plan was an
opportunity to recover recent less profit. Moreover, it combined to build a
public project of recycling "Eco-Town", with the huge public work
budget to construct the high-temperature furnace to process the harmful wastes
into harmless.
"Eco－Town"is a concept for systematic territorial industrial development
plan based on so-called "recycling" industry. The drive force to promote
this plan is "eco" boom amidst prolonged Japanese economic recession,
and behind this, there are strong advocators of this plan from the Japanese
Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Such declining industries related
to iron and coal were supposed to be rescued through restructuring them into
recycle industry. Kita-Kyushu area is one of the model cases.
This plan provides us with pretty idealistic feature, of Eco-Recycle Utopian view of industrial society. In fact, at Naoshima plan, by the high temperature combustion of the wastes, no dioxin, or other harmful substances are said to have been emitted, and such useful metals as gold and silver can be extracted from the heap of garbage. So far, this seemed to have ended in the creation of the harmonious utopia by the techno-scientific recycling system, with the recovery of environment. It is made-up into a beautiful story of self-sacrifice of the people in the island for defending the cleanness of the island, not any money involved at all.
In presenter's eyes, it is very doubtful. The reality is far from utopian nor harmonious. It is just a compromise between the bureaucratic divisions reflects arbitral character of Japanese environmental policy.
This is also a case completely entangled in the Japanese bureaucratic system
of local governing bodies.
The entanglement is like this: This is the border of Prefectures of Okayama
and Kagawa. This is Tamano city, Okayama. Tamano is only 2km from Naoshima,
so they might likely be polluted by Naoshima factory. But the local government
of Tamano can not interfere in this project, mainly because of the division
of local government border.
Another reason why Tamano did not directly meddle into this problem is that
there is also a furnace of Mitsui Corporation, here, and this factory made exhaustion
gas and water which had also contaminated the other side.
Both local governments did not interfere these company's business because they
were heavily depend their financial bases on the taxes from these companies.
Even there were some health and environmental damages already known, local governing
bodies did not claim nor defend for people's right for life. So there is no
official intervention in company's activity among them, neither to beyond governing
borders.