While the cleanup continued during the next two years, the amount of asbestos in the air rose to fifty times the normal level, and more than two hundred grams of cancer-causing dioxin (enough to kill millions of people in concentrated form) entered the soil and atmosphere in quake-hit areas. The Geological Survey of Japan set up a task force that found carcinogenic chemicals in 55 of the 195 Kobe sites studied. «We are astonished at the results. The situation is very bad,» said Suzuki Yoshikazu, the chief of the task force. Yet the official survey of the quake-hit area, made by the Hyogo prefectural government, found carcinogens in only six sites; Kawamura Kazuhiko, in charge of soil protection at the Environment Agency, dismissed Suzuki's concerns about chemical seepage into the soil with the comment, «Even if underground water in Kobe is contaminated by chemicals, few people drink the water.»

It's time to take a little tour of the countryside, as reported by the weekly journal Friday in May 1995. We begin at the small town of Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, with a pile of 30,000 oil drums rusting and leaking behind a sign that says Anzen Daiichi, «Safety First.» In 1989, this cheap disposal facility had reached the point where it had a seven-year backlog, after which the operators began dumping excess sludge into an abandoned mine south of town in the dead of night. By 1992, when the illegal dumping ended, the waste pile came to more than 48,000 drums. The owner could not pay the $6 million bill for the cleanup, and the prefecture, unwilling to set a precedent, has cleared away only 17 percent of the mess. Near the mine, only a few yards from the closest house, a landfill contains radioactive thorium. In response to residents' complaints, the company responsible spread a thin layer of dirt over the landfill; after this there were no government studies or legal follow-up.

From Iwaki, we travel to the mountains of Nara, where we can see Showa Shinzan,« The New Mountain of Showa.» This fifty-meter hill takes its name from its origin in the late Showa period (1983-1989), when an Osaka construction company illegally dumped refuse there. The president of the company later sold the land and disappeared, and since then neither Nara Prefecture nor the national government has dealt with it. Recently, farmers have noticed a strange orange ooze on their rice paddies. Friday reported that in 1992 the police uncovered 1,788 cases of illegal dumping amounting to 2.1 million tons of waste in Japan. Even so, the arrest rate for illegal dumping is no better than 1 percent, with as much as 200 million tons going undetected each year. Fines are ludicrously small, as in the case of Yoshizawa Tamotsu, who was found guilty of cutting down 3,000 cypress trees and then dumping 340,000 cubic meters of construction-site wastes in a state-owned forest. Although Yoshizawa made about $6 million from the business, he paid a fine of only $5,000.

Scenes like these are repeated by the thousands across the length and breadth of Japan. Ohashi Mitsuo, the executive director of the Japan Network on Waste Landfills in Tokyo, notes that cities have been dumping industrial wastes in rural areas for decades. «If this continues, local areas will be turned into garbage dumps for big cities,» he cautions.

In one celebrated case, the Teshima Sogo Kanko Kaihatsu company dumped half a million metric tons of toxic waste on the island of Teshima, in the Inland Sea. For this the company paid a fine of only $5,000, and the island's inhabitants were left to deal with fifteen-meter-high piles of debris filled with dioxin, lead, and other toxins. As is the common refrain in such cases, for a decade Kagawa Prefecture refused to take responsibility for or dispose of the waste. Suzuki Yukichi, the managing director of the National Waste Association, said, «Almost all waste disposal facilities are very small-scale operations. Enterprises are not prepared to foot the bill for proper waste treatment. If consumers are not prepared to pay for waste disposal, then the job won't get done.»

It is not consumers who are to blame, of course, for in Japan they have little say in national industrial policy. The problem lies with government policy that favors industry at all costs. «Why do we have to shoulder the cost of removing illegally dumped waste while the government seems to go easy on licensed agents who dump illegally?» asks Ohta Hajime, the director of the industrial affairs bureau of Keidanren, the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations. «Japan's economy is supported by illegal dumping,» the operator of one disposal facility concludes. And it is true that central and local governments consistently support industrial polluters by means of cover-ups and lies. A typical example is the town of Nasu, near Utsunomiya (the site of ninety-four landfills for supposedly nontoxic waste). When animals started dying in Nasu, the villagers requested a survey, and the government insisted there was no problem with the water. A private research firm then found high levels of mercury, cadmium, and lead in the water supply.

This accumulated mess – and the lack of expertise to deal with it – arose because those in charge of framing national industrial policy factored waste treatment out of the equation. There are few legal or monetary costs for poisoning the environment, and Japanese companies have consequently felt no need to develop techniques for handling wastes. And they weren't the only ones who overlooked this problem. Foreign commentators, as they lauded Japan's «efficient economy,» never stopped to ask where the factories were burying sludge or why the government couldn't – indeed wouldn't – keep track of toxic chemicals. One would think that waste disposal and management of industrial poisons have an intimate bearing on the true efficiency of a modern economy; and the evidence of runaway pollution was there to see. It's a case of what some economists call «development on steroids,» for a high GNP achieved without strict controls on toxic waste is fundamentally different from one that has such controls.

Unquestioned at home, and basking in the praise lavished on them abroad, the bureaucrats in Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Environment Agency have sat back and taken it easy. They have only the haziest idea of the many techniques for testing and controlling hazardous waste that have become the norm in many advanced countries. The central and local governments simply have no idea how to test for or dispose of toxic chemicals. The reason that waste disposal after the Kobe earthquake took place in such confusion was that the agencies in charge didn't know anything about waste incineration; they didn't know about shields; they didn't know how to monitor toxic discharges.

In September 1994, the Environment Agency announced tightened regulations on industrial-waste-disposal sites. Current rules, unchanged since 1977, did not cover chemicals produced in the 1990s, and disposal sites were still mostly unprotected holes in the ground, without waterproofing, and with no devices to process leachate. There are 1,400 such unprotected disposal pits, representing more than half of all reported industrial-waste sites in Japan. (There are tens of thousands of unreported sites.) What were the Environment Agency's «tightened regulations»? A study of twenty sites over several years.

This lack of environmental technology became vividly clear on January 2, 1997, when the Russian tanker Nakhodka, carrying 133,000 barrels of oil, ran aground and split in half off the coast of Ishikawa Prefecture, west of Tokyo. Although bioremediation (using microbes to break oil down into water and CO₂ ) has been in standard use as a means of cleaning up oil spills in other parts of the world since the 1980s, the Japanese government had not yet approved its use. The Environment Agency therefore did not apply microbes to the 300-meter oil slick, and untold damage to marine life in the region resulted. Finally, a group of fishermen took matters into their own hands and used a small supply of American-manufactured microbes on what they said was «an experimental basis.»

Besides bioremediation, another common technique to contain oil spills is to have surfactant sprayed by airplanes and vessels or to have the oil that reaches the surface burned. Neither of these technologies was available in Japan. Although the tanker ran aground in an established tanker lane, there were no disaster plans in place and no large oil-recovery vessels stationed in the Sea of Japan. One had to sail all the way from Japan's Pacific coast, which took days. The actor Kevin Costner was moved to donate $700,000 of high-tech cleanup devices to the affected areas. And in the end farm women scooped oil off the beaches with hishaku, old-style wooden ladles. As Yamada Tatsuya reported in the Asahi Evening News, « This time the old-fashioned hishaku ladles – something of a museum piece in our modern society – suddenly became a symbol of the cleanup effort.»

In April 1997, the Maritime Self-Defense Force discovered a giant oil slick forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide that threatened to reach the west coast of Tsushima Island within two days. Two destroyers rushed to the scene-carrying, according to the newspapers, «a large number of blankets used to soak up oil, as well as plastic buckets and drums.» In technologically advanced modern Japan, this is how you clean up an oil spill: with old ladies using wooden ladles, blankets, and plastic buckets. This raises a fundamental question of what we should include in our definitions of modern technology. In general, economists have used a very limited definition, judging a nation's technological level by its ability to manufacture cars or memory chips, or by its academic resources in advanced science. But many more fields of human endeavor with high degrees of sophistication are qualified to be called technologies. What types of skills and knowledge are really essential for a modern state, and how high is the price for ignoring them?

Consider the simple example of forest management. In the United States, thousands of people study its fine points, and tens of millions of dollars are poured annually into numerous disciplines of forest science. In Japan, all the effort – billions of yen every year – goes into supporting the tired old scheme of cedar monoculture. While Canada supports 4,000 forest rangers, Japan has only 150, with no professional training; while the United States spends the equivalent of ?190 billion on public-park management and Canada ?50 billion, Japan devotes only ?3.6 billion. Forestry management is only one technology that Japan has failed to master; there are hundreds more.