Japan Makes Strides Toward Joining the Green Revolution In the finish of WWII, Japan started an unprecedented rush

to turn out to be a world leader in commerce and technologies, but that rush came at a high cost to the Japanese environment. Now it appears that their believed patterns are undergoing a transformation that seeks to put an finish to Japans devastated natural resources. Part of that transformation is being fueled by a revamping of Japans tax regulations, generating it more attractive for companies to take the environment into account when they undertake new projects. The new regulations seem to be working, because there have been far fewer environmentally controversial industrial projects in Japan over the past decade. Because the 1980s, the focus of what the Japanese dubbed the iron triangle, which consisted of politicians, industry, and bureaucrats, was on ever-increasing growth, rather than on the harm that such growth might cause the natural globe. Nevertheless, recent polls have shown that Japanese citizens are beginning to view the importance of a healthy environment in a different light, even to the point of levying taxes upon themselves to pay for preserving their natural resources. In an fascinating turn of events, one issue that has drawn probably the most attention in Japan concerns a failed company venture involving cedar trees that had been planted for use as timber following WWII. That venture failed simply because competition from low-cost lumber grown and harvested in China and Southeast Asia ultimately created Japanese timber too expensive to be economically viable on the world marketplace. Those trees, which should have already been harvested decades ago (at an perfect age of 35) now have grown to cover some five.6 billion Japanese acres. As a consequence, each and every spring those cedar trees now send massive clouds of pollen into the air, causing tremendous difficulty for citizens who suffer from pollen-related allergies in Japans capital, Tokyo. The scenario has become dire enough for the Tokyo government to ask each and every citizen to donate the equivalent of $13 toward a project that would ultimately replace the huge stands of cedar west with the city having a number of varieties of more allergy-friendly trees to produce a more diverse forest. That particular issue is made more pressing in Tokyos case due the aging of Japans forestry workers. If the forestry renovation project isnt begun soon, there may not be sufficient workers left who're capable of handling the intense physical labor involved in thinning the cedar forests, which would mean those trees would turn out to be permanent fixtures of the Japanese landscape. In other parts of Japan, cities have enacted taxes to restore woodlands, to lower exhaust emissions, to improve water drainage, to produce hiking trails, and to promote educational programs. It is an encouraging sign that the Japanese have begun to embrace environmental improvement, as evidenced by minimal opposition to current tax hikes in Okayama ($7/yr) per citizen, Kochi ($7), Kanagawa ($17),

and Hyogo ($80). Much more and more, it appears as if Japan has begun generating the positive changes essential for them to become a full-fledged member of the worlds Green Revolution, which is very good news for environmentalists everywhere. Copyright 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher By on Japan