The more things change …

April hosts Earth Day and 10 years ago Kyoto hosted the meeting that made the eponymous protocol. Are we making a difference or is the nation really going to the environmental dogs?

A lot can happen in 10 years.
On the morning of December 11, 1997, the very grand-sounding Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change opened in its namesake city to sniping and argument that years of negotiation before the event even took place had failed to ebb. Phrases like “greenhouse gases” and “sustainable environments” were just beginning to seep into the public conscience, and the world turned a watchful eye to the representatives in attendance. The stated goal — to commit the nations of the world to mandatory emissions limitations — was lofty; the stakes — an estimated six-degree temperature increase before the end of 2100, for one — were high. Though not exactly a failure, the disappointment of some countries’ refusal to embrace the Protocol (re: Australia and the United States) and the Protocol’s insistence that quite a few pollution-spewing countries be given a pass (re: India and China) made the proceedings look something less than the picture of success.

Reaction was mixed. Then-Japan Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto sounded a sober tone by calling the six-percent reduction in greenhouses gases Japan had just committed itself to “a very heavy figure,” but insisted the nation was up to the task. “Now that we have accepted it as a target,” Hashimoto was quoted, “we will do our utmost to realize it.” Then-US President Bill Clinton, whose nation signed but did not ratify the Protocol (and never has), lauded Kyoto as a “huge first step” and reiterated the United States’ commitment to tackling environmental problems head on. “This agreement is environmentally strong and economically sound,” Clinton said in a cheerful statement released after the convention. “It reflects a commitment by our generation to act in the interests of future generations.”

Nine years and some-odd months later, and it is clear that future generations may be in for a tough time of it. Though the 3Rs — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — have penetrated the public conscious to the extent that a documentary about global warming can win a major film award, the “bad” has far outpaced the good. The results of global warming have turned alarming in some places (the disappearance of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro; sea water infiltrating the fresh water supply of Bangladeshi villagers), and far more horrific in others: the floating corpses left in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina (said to be given monstrous strength as it passed over unnaturally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico) have may struck a heavier blow for global warming advocacy than anything before or since.

Wither Japan, however? Though former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi ratified the Kyoto Protocol with a flourish in 2002, and current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made advancing the Kyoto Protocol Target Attainment Plan a key point for his admini- stration (even taking time to talk up the benefits of biofuels late last year), the situation on the ground has caused some consternation. A recent report from Japan’s Port and Airport Research Institute delivered a grave warning about massively stronger typhoons swamping Japan’s coastlines if ocean warming continues unabated. The lack of snow last winter has caused ski resorts from Gifu to Hokkaido major headaches; the opening day of this year’s venerable Sapporo Snow Festival saw sculptors frantically repairing ice sculptures melting in the unseasonably warm weather; Tokyo recorded its first snowless winter since 1876.

Locally, a number of local activists and environmental groups are helping to get the word out (see sidebar); several of them are pointed in their criticism of Japan’s environmental efforts to date.

“From my point of view as an environmentalist, Japan has of course failed to preserve its natural environment in a satisfactory fashion,” says Yuichi Inoue, Professor of Environmental Studies at Kyoto Seika University. “Among others, Doken Kokka — or ‘Construction Contractor Nation’ — is a symbolic term depicting what has happened in this country. However, I do not know whether Japan is found in the worst group of the nations in the world in terms of the destruction of the natural environment.”

The answer, in terms of pure scale of destruction, is probably no: the United States remains far and away the world’s numberone polluter (though China is gaining fast); the destruction of the natural rainforests in places like Brazil and Indonesia is now reaching mythical proportions; and the vast oceans of the world — which all nations ostensibly share responsibility for — are being systematically destroyed by bottomtrawling, in which fishermen drag heavy trawls across the ocean floor to net bigger catches of fish (while, unfortunately, destroying the environments of the very fish they are attempting to catch).

“It seems to me, so far, global warming has become most apparent in the statistics of economic losses from weather-related natural disasters,” Inoue says, citing a jump in economic losses from under $10 billion in the 1980s, to losses of $200 billion in 2005. “Hurricane Katrina alone brought the losses of $125 in 2006. I do not think it unreasonable to expect still more devastating disasters are coming in a not-too-distant future.

“We have already entered the age of unexpected events,” Inoue continues. “Thus, the drastic increase of economic losses is very profound. Still however, I think far more severe damage to the humankind is most likely to be induced in terms of food security.”

Many activists disappointedly note the quickly-disappearing Japanese countryside, and large-scale construction projects in pristine locations as just some of the symptoms of Japan’s lack of environmental concern.

“Despite much lip service to [Prime Minister Abe’s return-to-traditionalism platform of] ‘Beautiful Japan,’ I believe that the environmental situation in Japan got unquestion- ably worse since 2001,” says author Alex Kerr, who writes extensively about environmental awareness in Japan in his book Dogs and Demon. “There has been a lot of talk about reform, but the substance isn’t there. Vested interests are just too strong. For example, the greatly publicized Road Committee, which recommended privatizing the Highway Corpo- rations, failed in the end to cancel even one kilometer of the tens of thousands scheduled to be built.

“On a local level, I travel constantly all over Japan, and everywhere I see further deterioration,” Kerr continues. “I wish I could be more optimistic, but the facts on the ground point otherwise.”

There is good news, of course. Environmental awareness is at an all-time high: the local Big Three automakers (Toyota, Nissan and Honda) all push cleaner-running, hybrid engine cars; recycle bins are de rigueur in most public locations; Bulgarian sumo wrestler Kotooshu dims lights, turns down convenience store bagging and separates garbage in a TV environmental ad. Still, the bad environmental news keeps coming, Japan has still not made its stated six percent emission reductions goal, and with a decade ticked off since the opening of the Kyoto Protocol, there are fears that if things don’t change for the better in the next 10 years, things will greatly change for the worse in the years after that.

The whale hunt ends

Environmentalists (and quite a few whales) breathed a sigh of relief on February 28 as Japan’s Great Whale Hunt of 2007 came to an early end. It wasn’t exactly all happy news, however; the months-long hunt in the Antarctic scheduled to run until the end of March was only canceled after a fire on board a Japanese whaling ship killed a crewmember and threatened the surrounding area with a 1.3 million liter oil spill.

After fire broke out aboard the Nisshin Maru — the mother ship in this year’s hunt — in mid-February, the ship was stricken for days and concerns arose that the oil payload inside would accidentally find its way into the surrounding area, home to enormous penguin colonies (not to mention some of the last unspoiled land on Earth). After some consideration, the whaling fleet gave up the chase and decided to return home.

“This is the first time in 20 years that we’ve had to cancel our research,” Taka- hide Naruko, the head of the Fisheries Agency’s Far Seas Division, was quoted. “We are very disappointed.”

As environmental groups such as Greenpeace Japan are quick to point out, by “research” Naruko possibly meant “killing”; the whales are, yearly, tracked around the Antarctic and killed, then studied before being sold as meat to local Japanese. This has caused a great deal of consternation to the groups that claim the whales can be studied while alive; Japan (as well as Norway and Iceland) claims a mandate from the International Whaling Commission to issue permits for whale hunts under the guise of “studying” them. Though the IWC objects, it is powerless to do anything about it. “In recent years, the Commission has passed a number of Resolutions asking governments to refrain from issuing specific permits,” the IWC states on it website.

Of course, ‘asking’ governments to ‘refrain’ from doing things does not often result in said governments refraining from doing aforementioned things; suffice to say that Japanese lawmakers have no current plans to curtail the nation’s whaling ambitions. Though the hunt is off for now, the ships will most likely sail again next season.

Text:Jeff Lo • Photosgraphics: KS