this is karai.com

Many of the problems in Japan that Alex Kerr mentions in Dogs and Demons have come up in the news this week.

Kerr mentions how the Forest Agency engaged in a program to clear-cut natural Japanese forests and replace them with mostly cedar trees, which was thought to be much more profitable to industry. It has had a damaging effect on the wildlife of the forest, increased erosion, and nearly single-handedly created the annual cedar pollen problem. Incidentally, this year’s cedar pollen season is supposedly one of the worst on record. The Mainichi Daily News reports, “The pollen count this year is tens of times higher than last year’s levels in many regions.” My girlfriend mentioned that the hills near her home are completely white from the blowing pollen. As a result she suffers constantly from cold-like symptoms and has even been forced to wear a mask to work. The Mainichi article quotes a pollen allergy expert as saying, “Unless a specific medicine such as a hay fever vaccine is produced, there is fundamentally no way to prevent hay fever.” As a radical idea, why not just cut down the cedar forests and replant the natural forests? You could easily prevent hay fever by changing the source of the problem.

In this interview at The Asahi Shinbum, environmentalist C.W. Nicol mentions the same problems. The conifer plantations that have replaced Japan’s natural forests are sick. There is a lack of diversity in the forest which drives animals, in this case bears, out of the forest to search for food. Nicol also identifies the bureaucracy as the problem. It is a very interesting full of common sense ideas that fly in the face of the bureaucracy. For example:

…we are discouraged from teaching our students field work. When we set up the college, bureaucrats said: Why are you having your students live in tents? Any essential field work was questioned. They said “just teach them biology.” But how do you teach them field biology if you don’t go into the field?

I think it is better to have three or four people working on a local forest than it is having 10 people working in an office in Tokyo. You can’t manage a forest from Tokyo.

I think Nicol is correct. You can’t manage the forest from Tokyo in the same way you would manage the steel industry. The result of that management is the mess that the Japanese forests are currently in.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 2:13 pm and is filed under News, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.