The primary tool of the government is delay. Legal cases in Japan, especially those filed against the government, take decades to resolve. A citizen suing the government or big industry stands an excellent chance of dying before his case comes to a verdict. This is precisely what happened at Minamata. In July 1994, the Osaka District Court finally passed judgment on a later suit filed in 1982 by fifty-nine plaintiffs. In the meantime, sixteen of them had died. The verdict: the court found no negligence on the part of either the national government or Kumamoto Prefecture for failing to stop Chisso from discharging mercury into the bay. The court turned down twelve of the surviving plaintiffs because the statute of limitations had, due to the long court case, run out. The judge ordered Chisso to pay surprisingly small damages of ?3-8 million to each of the remaining plaintiffs. Only in 1995 did the main group of Minamata sufferers, representing two thousand plaintiffs, accept a mediated settlement with the government – almost forty years after doctors detected the first poisonings.

In two separate cases, in October 1994 and December 1996, courts resolved air-pollution suits that were more than ten years old by stipulating that damages should be paid to nearby residents, while rejecting demands that the responsible companies be required to halt toxic discharges. In other words, according to Japanese law, you may – after a lapse of decades – have to pay for the pollution you are causing, but the courts rarely require you to stop.

One might be tempted to put down what happened in the 1950s or the 1960s to haste and ignorance on the part of a newly developing country. But Japan enters the new millennium with only the most primitive regulation of toxic waste.

There are more than a thousand controlled hazardous substances in the United States, the manufacturing and handling of which fall under stringent rules that require computer monitoring and free public access to all records concerning storage and use. In Japan, as of 1994, only a few dozen substances were subject to government controls – a list that has changed only slightly since it was established in 1968 – and there is no computerized system in place to manage even these. In July of that year, the Environment Agency announced that it was considering creating a registration system like the American one-but computer monitoring and public access to records were not on the agenda. And it would be too much to ask companies to stop dumping these materials. They would merely be required to report to the agency the amount of these chemicals they are disposing of.

Japanese laws do not call for environmental-impact studies before towns or prefectures approve industrial projects. In having no environmental-impact assessment law, Japan is alone among the twenty-eight members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), though such assessments have been proposed eight times during the past quarter century. In October 1995, the U.S. air base at Atsugi complained to Tokyo about cancer-causing emissions from nearby factory incinerators, only to find that there are no cancer-risk regulations in Japan. «It's difficult to deal with the case if there is no violation of Japanese legislation,» an Environment Agency official said.

Despite serious incidents such as the arsenic poisoning of hundreds of farmers in the 1970s in Miyazaki Prefecture, the government has no controls for arsenic, either. The few toxic-waste regulations that do exist have hardly been revised since 1977, and the new regulations have no teeth. Only in 1990 did

Japan begin to draw up standards concerning dioxins, which are among the most lethal poisons on earth. In August 1997, driven by a popular outcry after the discovery of shockingly high concentrations of dioxin around incinerators, the government finally approved new regulations to monitor dioxin, adding it to the list of controlled substances. However, so unprepared were officials that the first study, made in 1996, had to rely on foreign data to judge toxicity, and the new regulations affected only steel mills and large-scale incinerators. Operators of small incinerators (the vast majority) would need to control dioxin only «if necessary,» according to the Environment Agency. The situation in Japan is especially urgent because, unlike other developed countries, Japan burns most of its waste rather than burying it. In April 1998, researchers found that the ground near an incinerator in Nosecho, near Osaka, contained 8,500 picograms of dioxin per gram, the highest recorded concentration in the world. It was only in November 1999 that Japan brought its dioxin soil-contaminant regulations in line with those of the rest of the developed world – and the nation is still years away from putting them into practice.

Why the long delay on dioxins? «To single out dioxin as a toxic substance, we needed more data,» a manager of air-pollution control at the Environment Agency claims. Yet it's hard to see why the agency needed more data when research worldwide has so clearly established dioxin toxicity that in 1986 the state of California ruled that there is no safe threshold for dioxin emissions, and state law there requires incinerator operators to reduce emissions to the absolute lowest level possible, using the best technology available. The real reason for the delay in Japan was simple: the dioxin problem was a new one, and Japan's bureaucrats, as we shall see, are woefully ill equipped to deal with new problems. Dioxin disposal had not been budgeted within the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and there were no officials profiting from it or business cartels pushing for it, so the ministry felt no urgency to pursue the matter.

The Japanese tradition of hiding disadvantageous facts means that it is impossible to discover the true extent of toxic waste in Japan. On March 29, 1997, Asahi Television did a special report on dioxin contamination in the city of Tokorozawa, outside Tokyo. Studies had shown that dioxin levels in the milk of mothers there were twelve to twenty times the level that even Japan considers safe for infants. The news team showed a videotape of waste-disposal techniques there to experts in Germany, who were aghast. One commented that the techniques were «pre-modern,» and the program made it clear that these were standard across Japan. A study in Fukuoka revealed similar levels of dioxin, and there is every reason to believe that the situation is the same throughout the country.

The piece de resistance was the following interview with a section chief at the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW):

Interviewer : Does the Ministry of Health and Welfare have any policy for dealing with dioxin?

Section chief : There is no policy whatsoever.

Interviewer : Has the MHW conducted any investigation concerning dioxin?

Section chief : No idea.

Interviewer : Do you have any idea how much dioxin is out there?

Section chief : No, we have not.

Interviewer : Have you set any guidelines for dioxin?

Section chief: No, we have not.

Interviewer : Do you plan to?

Section chief : No.

Interviewer: Do you have controls on dioxin emissions?

Section chief : No.

It is remarkable that the section chief gave this interview at all. The interview was granted before public concern over the dioxin situation became so strong that the Ministry of Health and Welfare was forced to listen to it. If the section chief had had any inkling that the dioxin situation was embarrassing or scandalous, the television crew would never have gotten in the front door. The MHW was so unconcerned about dioxin that the section chief exuded an air throughout of «Why are you asking me this stuff – how should I know?»

Only scattered accounts give a shadowy sense of the scale of the vast, unstudied problem of toxic dumping in Japan. In September 1997, the media revealed that the city of Tokorozawa and its prefecture had colluded in concealing data on dioxin discharges from local incinerators and that the levels for 1992-1994 were more than 150 times the legal limit. In one notorious case, the Yatozawa Waste Water Cooperative, a public agency representing twenty-seven municipalities in the Tama area outside Tokyo, continues to withhold data on water conductivity, a measure of contamination, despite being ordered by a court to release the data. In December 1995, the Environment Agency announced that spot surveys had found carcinogenic substances exceeding allowable levels in well water in forty-one of Japan's forty-seven prefectures. Among the serious cases was a well in Tsubame, Niigata Prefecture, that contained trichloroethylene (a metal solvent) at 1,600 times the safe level. Although trichloroethylene is a known carcinogen and has turned up in 293 sites across the nation, no regulations to control its use or disposal existed at the national level.

The issue of toxic waste brings up the larger issue of «modern technology,» in which Japan is reputed to be a world leader. Unfortunately, the cutting-edge techniques studied by the experts have almost exclusively to do with manufactured goods. In the meantime, Japan has missed out on a whole world of modern technology that has been quietly developing in the West since the 1960s. This world includes the science of ecological protection. Although it flies in the face of the established image of an «advanced Japan,» the nation limps along at a primitive level in this science, decades behind the West.

From 1987 to 1989, I was involved in a joint development between Trammell Crow, a real-estate company based in Dallas, Texas, and Sumitomo Trust Bank in building a fashion mart in Kobe. The designers from the United States were astounded to find that the local contractor's plans called for asbestos-containing plastic tiles for the hallways. «There is no law against asbestos flooring,» the architect said. «In fact, these tiles are standard. Most buildings in Japan use them.»

The results of continued use of asbestos materials became evident after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, when the collapse of tens of thousands of buildings released asbestos and other carcinogens into the environment. Waste-removal operators rushed to Kobe to sign lucrative contracts, which encouraged them to dispose of the rubble quickly – without shields or other health safeguards. Although the national and Kobe governments provided much of the money for cleanup, they offered almost no guidance. A Kobe city official recalls that he approved a thousand disposal contracts in a single day. «We were in a great hurry, because we thought that removal of the rubble would lead to reconstruction,» he said.