From a strictly economic point of view, Japan has not calculated the cost of environmental cleanup. For an environmental mess that may be close to impossible to remedy, the next generation of Japanese will face an unpaid bill of trillions of yen. Or maybe not. Solving such problems is very low on Japan's list of priorities, which is now a century and a half old and is set as hard as concrete. When we find the Environment Agency itself taking the attitude that it doesn't matter that ground water is contaminated because, after all, «few people drink the water,» we can predict that environmental cleanup is one unpaid bill Japanese industry may never have to settle.

Yet recently there has been talk of strengthening controls over waste disposal, because the government is beginning to realize that this is an industry with growth potential. In 2000, the government began to institute a new law requiring that household electric goods such as television sets and refrigerators be recycled when discarded; the recychng will be paid for by consumers, who will buy recycling coupons at the post office. It's a great step forward, but it leaves open the question of who will pay for cleaning up the sort of pollution that doesn't involve consumers directly. Japanese business built its global competitiveness partly thanks to the free ride it got on issues of environmental destruction. Now that the Japanese economy has slowed to a crawl and exports face threats from newly industrialized Asian countries, it will be very difficult suddenly to force industry to pay the costs.

The best the Environment Agency has done for soil pollution is to set up a secret panel in 1992 to study the merits of establishing something similar to the United States' Super Fund Act, whereby industry would foot the bill for cleaning up toxic-waste sites. But powerful business leaders and bureaucrats opposed the scheme as being too expensive, so the agency quietly put the idea to sleep. The panel still meets, but its discussions go nowhere. One panelist has said, «If we dig up landfills, it's clear that they're contaminated. But if safety measures were to be applied to all such landfills, an enormous amount of money would be needed. It just wasn't realistic.»

The Japanese public exerts very little political pressure on the government to address issues of industrial pollution, and the few lawsuits are mostly ineffectual, mired in decades of delay. The central and local governments, deeply in debt after decades of funding massive construction boondoggles, cannot afford the responsibility for monitoring or disposing of toxic wastes. The Environment Agency gave up before it even started. There will be no cleanup.

One could view this runaway waste problem itself as a toxic by-product of Japan's vaunted schoolrooms. Students in Japanese schools are made to memorize huge numbers of facts, far more than is required of students in other countries, and they also learn to be docile and diligent workers. The system that teaches students so many facts and such unquestioning obedience has been the wonder and envy of many writers on Japan. But there are huge liabilities. Items of low priority on the national list for manufacturing success, such as environmental consciousness, do not appear in the Japanese curriculum. And what is the result? Mason Florence, an American resident of Kyoto and the author of Kyoto City Guide, says, «In the States there is a negative buzz to litter. If you drop a cigarette pack or a can out the window, there is a good chance of having a guy or girl next to you saying 'Hey, man!' » Not so in Japan. Discarded bottles and old refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, and plastic bags filled with junk line country roads. Plastic bottles clutter the beaches. As Mason says, «Drive through the hills of Kitayama [north of Kyoto], and you see garbage everywhere. It would be unthinkable, for example, in Colorado.» Or in the countryside of most nations of Europe. Or in Singapore or Malaysia.

Another subject that Japanese schools very definitely do not teach is social activism. Citizens' groups in Japan have pathetically low memberships and budgets. For example, Greenpeace has 400,000 members in the United States, 500,000 in Germany, and only 5,400 in Japan. The World Wildlife Fund has fewer than 20,000 members in Japan, versus millions in the United States and Europe. This adds up to powerlessness. As Professor Hasegawa Koichi of Tohoku University stresses, «Japan's nature conservation groups are not powerful enough to influence the policy-making process, unlike their Western counterparts.»

On the other side, government agencies keep up a barrage of propaganda, at public expense, to support their programs, as we have seen in the case of construction. In October 1996, newspapers revealed that the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry collected ?47 million from ten nationally funded foundations under its own jurisdiction to pay for public relations that included magazine advertisements warning of the risk of massive rains and floods, a series of events commemorating the centennial of modern river-control methods in Japan, and two international symposiums on water resources and flood control. Needless to say, it was not revealed that retired River Bureau bureaucrats served on the boards of those foundations. Nor was it mentioned that the same officials hold stock in the companies that have the contracts to manage dams, channeling billions of yen directly into their own pockets.

A full-color advertisement sponsored by the Electrical Resource Development Company, in the popular weekly Shukan Shincho in December 1995, was typical of the propaganda effort. In front of a photograph of a large hydroelectric dam stands the attractive Ms. Aoyama Yoshiyo, who is traveling in the mountains of scenic Wakayama. «Ah,» says Ms. Aoyama in the text. «What lovely cedar trees. They're so nicely tended, and their trunks, shorn of branches, grow up tall and straight to the sky. And there is such abundant water here, of course, the result of this being a region of high rainfall. Why, it's just perfect for an electrical generating station!» When she reaches her destination, Ikehara Dam, she exclaims, «My, there's no water in the river on the other side of the dam. When I asked where the water went to, I found that it now takes a shortcut via a winding river on the other side of the dam. Where the old river was,» she cries with delight, «is now the area below the dam where there is a sports garden and places for relaxation.» One of these places for relaxation is a golf course, which the electric company kindly contributed to the village when it built the dam. "If I'd known about the golf course, I would have come a day earlier," Ms. Aoyama concludes.

You can hardly pick up a major magazine without coming across this sort of thing – the public-relations barrage is nearly overwhelming. In contrast, scattered citizens' groups bravely take on the government or companies in certain isolated cases, but there is no strong movement on a national scale.

Japan's schools are instilling a mind-set in children that accepts every dam as glorious, every new road as a path to a happy future. This locks Japan permanently into its «developing country» mode. When the U.S. Department of the Interior ordered the dismantling of Maine's Edwards Dam (which was more than a century old), church bells chimed and thousands cheered at the sight of their river regaining its freedom. In Japan, where civic organizations continue to raise flags and beat drums to announce the latest civil-engineering monuments, such a reaction would be unthinkable. «Welcome to Hiyoshi Dam!» proclaims Ninomachi, the local citizens' magazine of my town of Kameoka. We see glossy photos of concrete-flattened mountainsides, and learn that Hiyoshi is a «multipurpose» dam providing not only flood control but a visitors' center that allows the public to learn and to play: «We expect that it will play a large role in improving local culture and activity not only in the hometown of Hiyoshi but also in the surrounding regions.»

Dams like Hiyoshi are precisely where Japanese children go to learn and play, and they certainly contribute to culture-indeed, they are rapidly becoming the culture, with schools, courts, and industry all functioning as one closely knit whole. Allan Stoopes, who teaches environmental studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, told me that his students want to subscribe to journals published by «green» groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but they dare not, for fear universities and companies will learn of it and turn them down when they apply for jobs. Citizens' groups such as those that fought the Minamata and Itai-itai cases for four decades truly deserve to be called heroic.

Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonetheless grieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around me about the sorts of things discussed in your book, I found I was speaking to people who had no idea of these things. While the place I live in is not Iya Valley, it is still a rural village. And yet here too, I've seen that what was ugly already is becoming increasingly ugly.»

People feel that beauty in their surroundings is doomed and that they are powerless to stop it. The landscape artist Harada Taiji, interviewed in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, said, «Whenever I find a small village I rush to it on my bad legs. It's not quite that the scenery is running away from me, but I feel, 'I've got to capture this quickly or it will disappear. When I find a wonderful place, I worry that someone will come and take it away from me.' »

The decline of domestic travel in Japan and an explosive growth of foreign travel in recent years indicate a large measure of national malaise. I believe it is possible that most Japanese know, somewhere deep in their hearts, that they are despoiling their own country, but what they know in their hearts they find difficult to think about consciously, given the array of government ideology and misinformation pitted against them. Other factors, too, make it unlikely that environmental destruction will become a mainstream political issue. One is the deep-rooted Japanese concentration on the instant or small detail, as in a haiku poem. This is beautifully expressed in the paintings on the sliding doors at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto: a few parrots, their feathers brightly painted in red and green, sit on gray branches in a landscape drawn in stark shades of black ink on white paper. The Zen message of the painting is that the parrots are the focus of our attention-hence we see them in color, while the background black-and-white trees are nearly invisible to the mind's eye. The architect Takeyama Sei says that it is this ability to «narrow their focus» that leads the Japanese people to ignore the ugliness in their environment. You can admire a mountainside and not see the gigantic power lines marching over it, or take pleasure in a rice paddy without being disturbed by the aluminum-clad factory looming over it.