In the construction frenzy described in the previous chapter, we can see that Japan's economic woes are linked with deep cultural trouble. The sterility of Japan's new landscape, so far from everything the nation once stood for, denotes a true crisis of the spirit. Something has driven this nation to turn on its own land with tooth and claw, and simplistic reasons like «modernization» do not explain it.

In seeking the roots of today's crisis, we need to take another look at what happened in the nineteenth century, when Japan first encountered the West. Japan woke from centuries of isolation to find itself a poor and weak nation in a world where many ancient kingdoms were rapidly being swallowed up by European colonial powers. Shocked at the nation's precarious position, Japan's new rulers set out on a crash program to build up the economy and the army, first to resist the Western powers and later to challenge them for dominance. From the beginning, this meant making industrial output a top priority to which almost everything else had to be sacrificed.

Japan's defeat in World War II had the effect of intensifying the emphasis on manufacturing, for it burned into the national memory the desire to build power so that Japan could never be defeated again. In the process, the environment, quality of life, legal system, financial system, traditional culture-everything – suffered. It was all part of a «poor people, strong state» policy, which gave Japan's economy tremendous competitive strength. However, the sacrifice of all to achieve an ever-expanding GNP spawned policies that in many ways harmed the country's mountains, rivers, and seas. One such policy is the state-sponsored stripping of native forest cover and the planting of commercial cedar; another, which has had even more serious effects, is the deliberate turning of a blind eye to industrial pollution.

Foreign analysts have admired a population trained to obey bureaucracies and large corporations as the source of Japan's industrial might. But it also means that the country has no brakes. Once the engine of policy begins to turn, it moves forward like an unstoppable tank. One might say this inability to stop lies at the root of the disaster of World War II, and it is also behind the environmental destruction of postwar Japan.

Soon after the end of the war, Japan's Forestry Agency embarked on a program to clear-cut the mountainsides and plant them with commercial timber. The aim was to replace the native broadleaf forest with something more profitable that would serve Japan's industrial growth. Tens of billions of dollars flowed to this ongoing project, with the result that by 1997 Japan had replanted 43 percent of all its woodland with a monoculture of coniferous trees, mostly sugi, or Japanese cedar.

In the process, Japan's rural landscape has been completely transformed. Today, across the country, tall stands of cedar planted in regimental rows encroach upon what remains of the bright feathery greens of the native forest cover. It is nearly impossible to find an undamaged view of the scenery that for millennia was the essence of traditional Japanese art and literature: a mix of maple, cherry trees, autumn grasses, bamboo, and pines.

Apart from the aesthetic and cultural damage, the cedar monoculture has decimated wildlife, since the cedars' dense shade crowds out undergrowth and destroys the habitat for birds, deer, rabbits, badgers, and other animals. Anyone who has hiked these cedar plantations will know how deathly silent they are, empty of the grasses, bushes, and jungly foliage that characterize Japan's native forest. Stripped of ground cover, the hillsides no longer hold rainwater, and mountain streams dry up. In Iya Valley, droughts have affected streams in my village so severely that many of them are dry for months at a time. The villagers call this «sugi drought.» Erosion from the cedar plantations also leads to landslides and to the silting up of rivers, bringing these slopes and streams into the fatal purview of the Construction Ministry.

That is not all. Allergy to sugi pollen, an ailment almost unknown a few decades ago, now affects 10 percent of all Japanese. Dr. Saito Yozo, an allergy specialist at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, observes that there is no medical treatment to eliminate pollen allergy, though he recommends wearing protective gear such as masks and goggles. And, indeed, masks and goggles are what you see on streets in the springtime in Tokyo. Some of the mask-wearers are trying to avoid contracting or spreading the common cold, but hundreds of thousands of others are trying to protect themselves against the man-made plague of sugi pollen.

The final touches in this picture are the roads that the Forestry Agency builds to bring the cedar plantations within easy reach of vehicles for harvesting. The agency has spent billions of dollars on forestry roads in every remote wilderness, including national parks-and they have involved a degree of damage to steep hillsides that one must see to believe. In Ya-magata Prefecture, the government-backed Forestry Development Corporation put forward a plan in 1969 to build 2,100 kilometers of roads in the mountains, costing ?90 billion. Residents and environmental groups opposed the project, and engineering problems plagued it for decades. «If we had this kind of money at our disposal,» says the mayor of Nagai, a town in Yamagata, «we'd do something else with it – but if the national government insists [on building forestry roads], we're happy to cooperate.» Fat government subsides drive the program on.

All this for an industry that contributes less than a fraction of 1 percent to the GNP! For economically, reforestation has been a total washout. The Forestry Agency is about ?3.5 trillion in debt as the result of decades of its subsidies to support reforestation and to build roads. Lumber prices have been declining for years, and Japan's dependence on foreign wood is now 80 percent (up from 26 percent three decades ago). Back in the 1940s, when the reforestation policy was set in motion, planners expected mountain dwellers to prune and log the sugi trees, but today nobody wants to do the backbreaking labor required to harvest timber on Japan's hillsides. Villages are depopulated, and the Forestry Agency has reduced its workforce from a peak of 89,000 in 1964 to only 7,000 by March 2001. A recent survey found that the few Japanese mountain villages that have not suffered severe depopulation are those with a low percentage of cedar plantations, where villagers can make a living from harvesting shiitake mushrooms, collecting wild herbs, firing charcoal, and hunting the wildlife of the native broadleaf forest.

One might expect the Forestry Agency to have second thoughts. This is what happened in China after a similar reforestation program: in 1996, its Forestry Ministry made a dramatic U-turn, requesting that the State Council lay out new logging and timber regulations to make conservation «more important than production.» But in Japan the program goes on. Today, logging of virgin forest and replanting with cedar continue at a heightened pace. The Forestry Agency has promised to develop a new «low pollen» cedar, although even with such an innovation it will be decades, perhaps centuries, before pollen levels begin to drop. And in place of human labor, the government is introducing mammoth «all-in-one deforestation machines» that fell, log, and haul out lumber. Eight hundred of these are already at work.

What is in store for the future is mechanized mountains – with giant machines marching across the land via concrete strips of forest roads that have been gouged through the hillsides. It is a scene from the movie The War of the Worlds . The social critic Inose Naoki comments, «We've passed into another dimension altogether. It hardly matters what people say: so long as the present system remains unchanged, the forests will disappear, like rows of corn mowed down by bulldozers.» Shitei Tsunahide, a forestry expert and the former president of Kyoto Prefectural University, adds, «The reforestation policy was a failure. During the high-growth years of the economy, the Forestry Agency was dragged into this fast-growth atmosphere and focused only on commercial concerns... They completely ignored the fact that a forest involves considerations other than business. A tree does not exist just for economic gain.» Alas, Professor Shitei has put his finger on the very crux of Japan's modern cultural malaise: not only forests but everything was sacrificed for economic gain.

The story of Japan's poisoning of its environment is not a new one. It dates to the two famous cases of Minamata and Itai-itai disease in the 1950s and 1960s. Minamata disease takes its name from a bay near Kumamoto, Kyushu, where more than a thousand people died from eating fish that were contaminated with mercury discharged into the bay by the Chisso Corporation. Itai-itai, which means «it hurts, it hurts,» was a bone disease contracted by farmers who ate rice from cadmium-tainted paddies in Toyama Prefecture. The buildup of cadmium made the bones so brittle that they disintegrated inside the body, causing excruciating pain.

Industry and government collaborated for forty years to hide the damage and prevent compensation from being paid to the victims of these disasters. At the outset of the Minamata scandal, Chisso hired gangsters to threaten petitioning victims; goons blinded Eugene Smith, the pioneering photographer who documented the agony and twisted limbs of the Minamata sufferers. Doctors investigating at Kumamoto University had their research money cut off. As recently as 1993, the Ministry of Education told a textbook publisher to delete the names of the companies responsible for Minamata, Itai-itai, and other industrial poisonings, even though they are a part of the public record.

Despite harassment, groups of victims managed to file their first suit for compensation in 1967, yet it was in the courts that the government had its ultimate victory. As has been eloquently described by Karel van Wolferen, Japan does not have an independent judiciary. The secretariat of the supreme court keeps judges strictly in line, and they dare not rule against the government; the police have broad powers to imprison without trial and to elicit confessions with methods verging on torture. An incredible 95 percent of lawsuits against the state end in rulings against the plaintiffs.