Hugh Paxton’s blog never got around to visiting Yakushima. The island is a Japan eco-tourism must but has been over-visited by tourists who chuck rubbish here and there and who trample around ignoring all those boring notices that say things like “don’t chuck your rubbish here and there” and “don’t trample around.”
Tourism may be the least of Yakushima’s problems.
“A mysterious pestilence has befallen the primeval forests of Japan’s Yakushima island, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides.”
Says Martin Fackler, The New York Times.
He goes on.
“Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he knows the culprit – airborne pollutants from smog-belching China, hundreds of kilometres away.”
Nagafuchi has been worried about this for years but has been ignored, and in some cases ridiculed as a crackpot. Silent Spring syndrome, I call it.
Let’s get back to the New York Times article.
“Japan has been taking his warnings more seriously, as the nation has been gripped by a national health scare over potentially dangerous airborne particles that have swept into other parts of Japan and that many now believe were produced by China, it’s huge and rapidly industrialising neighbour. ”
Pot calling kettle black? Yes. During Japan’s industrial burst, Japan didn’t give a hoot for the consequences. Minamata being one case in point. The people died or were perpetually deformed by mercury contaminated effluent from the Chisso factory. Anybody who complained was branded a communist. Some of the victims of ‘dancing cat’ disease were actually stoned by the good citizens of Minamata.
That’s historic. Shameful. And there is a book called Bitter Sea that rather incoherently explains what happened in the Minamata case.
But it is the past. What is happening now is now happening.
“Japanese officials still dispute whether air-borne pollutants are responsible for killing the pine trees. But they and other scientists have at last begun to view Yakushima, which is far from Japan’s own industrial centres, as a pristine laboratory for understanding how China’s growing environmental problems could be affecting its neighbours.”
That’s from the NYT again.
“We are starting to feel like the canary in a coal mine. Our island is right downwind from China, so we get the brunt of it.”
Koji Araki, mayor of Yakushima Island.
Tags: Chinese air pollution, dying trees in Japan-is China responsible?, yakushima
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