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UNLIKE most other countries, pressure from government rather than consumers
is responsible for the interest in environmentally sound products in Japan.
Although a recent survey that the government carried out revealed that 70
per cent of people expressed some concern about global environmental issues,
it remains a lower priority than in other rich countries. One long-time
observer of the Japanese scene, Jonathan Holliman of Friends of the Earth
in Tokyo, says: ‘People tend to support causes where there are obvious victims,
but broad conservation is very much a minority interest.’

The government, however, has started making gestures to clean up Japan’s
appalling image among environmentalists. At present, the country almost
invariably tops lists of offenders: it is the world’s largest buyer of internationally
traded tropical hardwoods, and a leading importer of endangered species
and their products ranging from the gall bladders of bears to orchids.

Even more emotively, Japan remains the only industrial nation to maintain
a whaling fleet, under the guise of its controversial programme of whaling
research. And memories linger of the Minamata disaster in the 1950s, in
which a town contaminated by organic mercury became an international symbol
of the horrors of chemical pollution.

Things are changing. Thanks to strict controls on air pollution, the
image of Japan’s people choking on foul air is now a myth. (The gauze masks
Japanese people commonly wear are to prevent colds spreading.) The government
has responded to international concern by banning most imports of ivory.
It recently startled authorities in the US by asking that country to place
the North American black bear on the list of threatened species. Japan is
one of the largest importers of gall bladders from the bear, which play
a part in traditional medicine.

But Japan still has a long way to go, as the government’s Environmental
Agency admitted in May when it published its annual White Paper on the environment.
The agency has coined the word ‘ecopolis’ as a goal for Japanese society
in the next century. The idea, however, remains a remote fantasy to most
ordinary people.

The White Paper points out that neither air pollution by nitrogen oxides,
particularly in large cities, nor pollution in urban rivers and in bays
has improved in recent years. In many cases, the pollution has increased.
Meanwhile, the agency reports that ‘new forms of pollution – such as air
pollution by asbestos and groundwater pollution due to trichloroethylene
and other organic solvents – have emerged, calling for stricter control
of release of these substances into the environment’.

The present target in Japan is chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. The need
to replace and reduce the consumption of these chemicals, particularly in
the semiconductor industry, has been a fertile area of business. Five of
its top producers make 15 per cent of the world’s CFCs, and Japan is the
second largest consumer of chlorofluorocarbons in the world, after the US.

The large producers of CFCs were the first to take action. Earlier this
year, Asahi Glass announced that it had developed a substitute for CFC-113.
The new substance HCFC-225a is claimed to be as active a solvent as CFC-113
but has much less effect on the ozone layer. The company is collaborating
on research into the effects of CFC compounds with chemical firms around
the world, such as Du Pont in the US and Britain’s ICI.

Asahi is also doing joint research with two of its rivals in the CFC
business, Daikin Industries and Showa Denko. Daikin, another large producer
of CFCs and also of air conditioners, has patented an alcohol-based substitute
for CFC-13. Last year, Showa announced that it had developed some of the
world’s first technology to mass-produce HFC-134a, a substitute for CFC-12.

More interesting, and characteristic of the Japanese way of doing things,
is the companies not directly involved in producing CFCs which have sought
out markets in the business of cleaning up CFCs. Steel companies, driven
to diversification by competition from South Korea, have led the way.

Kobe Steel, the most adventurous of the ‘big five’ steelmakers, has
developed a machine to recycle CFCs in factories. The device absorbs the
chemicals in honeycomb-shaped cells of activated carbon. The company hopes
to sell 100 of the machines a year, at a cost of around Pounds sterling
25 000 each.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which among other things is Japan’s largest
maker of military equipment, is also marketing a device for recycling CFCs:
this time from air-conditioners in cars. The machines, designed for use
in service stations, purify waste CFCs for storage and later disposal.

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), which shepherded
Japan’s growth from postwar devastation to the world’s largest creditor
nation, also has its eyes on the commercial opportunities of environmental
concern. Researchers at its laboratories in Tsukuba Science City are investigating
new ways of disposing of CFCs: for example, by burning them at very high
temperatures in a process which produces relatively benign by-products.

The ministry is also approaching the problem of global warming from
the other end: investigating technologies for reducing the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. MITI’s latest scheme is to launch a programme
of research which will develop technologies to recycle carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere. It wants to develop machines for capturing carbon dioxide
from the air, storing and recycling it.

One idea is for a system that will extract oxygen from carbon dioxide
with artificial photosynthesis and recycle carbon in the form of acetic
acid or methanol. Even Japan’s large industrial conglomerates, with almost
limitless resources for research and development, will need to be sure of
support from the government before they commit themselves to such exotic
technologies.

Meanwhile, MITI’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology started
a three-year project in July to develop biodegradable plastics. This is
a forerunner for a joint project which MITI hopes to run with private companies
from next year.

More commercial opportunities will spring from Japan’s programme of
overseas aid – the world’s largest at Pounds sterling 8 billion a year.
Projects to clean up the environment in developing countries figure strongly,
though the programme is ringing alarm bells among conservationists. They
argue that much of the aid devoted to, for example, tropical rainforests
goes into projects that benefit the hardwood industry in Japan.

Despite the recent rise to prominence of some environmental groups in
Japan, particularly those concerned with nuclear power, consumers put little
pressure on industry to produce environmentally sound products. The watchmaker
Hattori Seiko, for example, developed an electronic watch which does not
need batteries (it converts motion into electricity) for sale to business
people travelling to countries where batteries are not easily available.

Only when customers in West Germany started snapping up the watches,
at more than Pounds sterling 250 each, did the company see the potential
of aiming the product at green-minded consumers worried about lithium and
other toxic metals that accumulate in the environment when batteries are
thrown away. Hattori is now finding that sales of the watches are booming
everywhere except Japan.