of tropical forests in Southeast Asia has become the target of worldwide criticism. While the global trend is to protect greenery, the immorality of the Japanese is questioned. This is indeed ironic in view of Japan's long love and custodianship of its own forests.
Japanese unrecycled waste of building forms, paper, and all manner of disposable wooden and paper products is destroying the tropical rainforests of Asia. The disappearance of greenery due to environmental pollution and human exploitation of forests is concomitant with a new worry about the future of humanity itself. This fact too shows the strength of the relationship between humans and forests.
About eight thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution led the first humans to establish permanent settlements, 6.1 billion out of the earth's 13 billion hectares of land were covered with dense foliage. Forests today comprise only 2.7 billion hectares. Fifty-five percent of the world's forests have already disappeared. These precious forests are still being destroyed, by indigenous peoples for fuel and pastureland, and by foreign corporations, especially Japanese. We Japanese, who thought we had learned the wisdom of nature, cherished our own beautiful forests, and created a wonderfully harmonious social life by practicing ethics, find ourselves among the killers of the world's forests.
Nature grows at a very slow pace. Ancient people who loved and lived within nature matched their pace of life to nature's. They gratefully used only a limited amount of lumber, which did not damage the life of the entire forest. This amount even contributed to regenerating the forests, and there was complete harmony between forests and humans.
We have no choice but to learn from our ancestors how to protect our forest resources and revive the beautiful greenery of the earth. We must start reforesting the tropics, conserving present forests, prohibiting indiscriminate logging, and finding alternative fuels and incomes for those who live in and around tropical forests.
If we continue to consume paper and lumber at the present rate, the earth will lose its tropical forests in the next generation and almost all its forests in the next century. We must commit ourselves to stop wasting trees and paper. There is already a grass roots movement urging that we carry our own chopsticks and avoid disposable chopsticks when dining out. This is one good way to awaken our consciousness of the deforestation problem.
In our mountains of household wastes, the most conspicuous item is paper. Innumerable junk-mail advertisements, leaflets, and pamphlets are stuffed daily into millions of mailboxes, unsolicited and unread. We can write or call the senders and ask that they discontinue these wasteful mailings. Millions of magazines and comic books are read and discarded every week. We can recycle them rather than throwing them away into landfill. We can use our own cups, chopsticks, and shopping bags instead of consuming new paper every time we go out.
We can find countless examples of the waste of wood and paper in our lives, and for every example we can find a simple alternative. The important thing is to look around us with eyes full of ethical gratitude and to practice ways to avoid unrecyclable waste.
Imported Ores and Energy
It is widely observed that Japan lacks mineral ores and sources of energy. Metals and energy are prerequisites for industrialization, yet Japan has very few of them. Only by dint of its diligent labor and later by high technology was Japan able to industrialize, by adding value to foreign raw materials and reselling them for a profit. Japan imports raw mineral ores; smelts them into purified metals such as steel and aluminum by high-tech electrolysis; presses, rolls, and stamps them into sizes appropriate for their respective manufacturers; and finally moulds them into consumer goods and industrial commodities.
Because of their low price, high precision, durability, and design, Japanese products were welcomed around the world. Japan obtained foreign currency and raised its standard of living by its manufacture and export of industrial products. To maintain their standard of living, the Japanese must continually import foreign resources, transform them into marketable products, and reexport them. In the 1990s other Asian countries are competing with Japan in the same game, and the Japanese yen is pricing many Japanese goods out of third world markets.
It goes without saying that this cycle consumes mineral ores and energy. Japan lacks these mineral ores and energy sources even more than it lacks food and wood resources. If consumption of mineral resources continues at its present rate, some of them predictably will be exhausted in the near future. The countries that mine ores may move to protect their own resources. Then what will become of Japanese industries that depend almost entirely on imports?
When we examine Japanese rates of dependency on imported mineral ores, we notice that Japan depends entirely on other countries for these resources: 99 percent for iron ore, 93 percent for copper, 78 percent for lead, 63 percent for zinc, 98 percent for tin, 100 percent for bauxite (aluminum), and 100 percent for nickel. Moreover, Japan produces only about 10 percent of its own energy, from waterpower and coal. This means that Japan purchases almost 90 percent of its energy as uranium and petroleum from abroad. Japan's 10 percent rate of energy self-sufficiency is extremely low when compared with 81 percent for the United States, 62 percent for the United Kingdom, and 46 percent for Germany.
Eighty percent of Japan's imported energy is petroleum. This would pose no problem if oil were producible indefinitely. In fact, if the world continues to increase its oil consumption at the present rate, known oil reserves will be exhausted around the year 2020.
Japan is undoubtedly one of the most industrialized countries in the world. However, when we contemplate the resources that enable Japan to keep its position, we cannot but realize the instability of the ground on which Japan stands. We simply cannot afford to waste. As leaders and examples to the world, we must reduce our energy consumption, and make a practice of reusing things with care and compassion in our daily lives.
A Tragic Waste of Resources
Japan is no longer dark at night. Not only are street lamps lit all night long, but brightly lit shops are open twenty-four hours a day, and many corporate showrooms and stores are fully illuminated whether open or closed. Some lights in giant office buildings are left on throughout the night. Countless buildings are designed so that their windows cannot even be opened, requiring electrical heating, cooling, and ventilation throughout the year. These are an enormous waste of electric power.
Then there is the notorious Japanese passion for excessive wrapping. At supermarkets, for example, small shrink-wrapped fish and produce are again wrapped in small plastic bags, that are in turn put together into larger plastic bags. Consumers discard such bags as garbage; they are scattered to the winds and find their way to fields, ponds, and even mountains. Many swans, ducks, and waterfowl are entangled or choke on these floating bags and die, as do fish which mistake the bags for food. Even whales and porpoises eat plastic bags, painfully suffering for a long time before dying of asphyxiation.
Wrapping is not only a matter of plastic bags. Even candies, cookies, Japanese crackers, and chocolates are individually wrapped in foil and cellophane before being packed in a plastic box which is in turn wrapped in cardboard, cellophane, and paper. We must think how much oil, wood, and metal are wasted in the production of such highly wrapped items.
Electric appliances and personal computers are now used and discarded as fashions change. For example, Japanese people throw away TVs and stereos, washing machines and electric irons, electric fans and heaters that still work well, only to buy fancier goods of the same type one after another. Perfectly serviceable personal computers and word processors are abandoned as soon as updated models appear on the market, and pile up by the score in vacant lots in the suburbs. Used bicycles and cars are no exceptions. That they cannot fetch a decent price on the used market also reflects a deep-seated Japanese preference for new fashions over merely usable items.
Japan consumes in one week the iron, copper, lead, and aluminum resources that many developing
