TIME, JUNE 16, 1997 
Taking on the Trash
Concerns over planned dump site have energized Japan's citizens to lead a rare fight against the system

By FRANK GIBNEY JR. MITAKE 

     As A JOURNALIST, YOSHIRO YANAGAWA covered wars.  As a small town mayor, 
he is learning how to fight one.  Voters swept the 64-year-old widower into 
office in 1995 on a campaign pledge to block construction of a huge industrial waste dump in Mitake, a sleepy coal mining hub in the mountains of central Japan.  No sooner did Yanagawa begin pursuing his cause than the threats began. A bloody rabbit's foot was left at the entrance to a local temple.  Last August, Yanagawa was warned by a supporter that his phone was tapped.  Then, on his way home one chilly October evening, the mayor stepped out of an elevator and was jumped by two men who clubbed him repeatedly, fracturing his skull and breaking his right arm. Yanagawa assumes the goons were paid supporters of the waste dump. 
     The attack may have been unusual, but what apparently motivated it is an argument that is becoming all too common: the debate over where to dump the garbage.  In land-poor Japan, where decades of development have generated mountains of refuse, there are precious few places to put it. Household garbage alone amounts to 50 million tons annually, or enough to fill 135 domed athletic stadiums. Japan burns 74% of that, ten times as much as the United States, which buries most of its trash in landfills.  The smoke spewing from Japan's 1,854 municipal incinerators often contains hazardous levels of pollutants like dioxin, a chemical agent that can cause severe skin and respiratory disorders as well as birth defects.  But the real problem for Japan is the 397 million tons of sludge and metal slag that factories generate every year.  Governments in the U.S, and other developed countries carefully monitor industrial waste, usually treating it and confining it to landfills.  In Japan, experts at the Ministry of Health and Welfare estimate that within three years there will be no landfill space left. 
     Now Japan must not only face the question of what to do with future garbage, but how to clean up a polluted legacy of poor waste management. Until the 1990s, the government mostly ignored its own tight environmental controls for the sake of economic development.  That spawned a highly profitable disposal business in which companies made money by skirting regulations for handling refuse.  Now, as communities awaken to the health hazards of waste, researchers are beginning to warn of a crisis.  �gIt is like a time-bomb,�h says Kazuki Kumamoto, a professor of international studies at Meiji Gakuin University.  �gAnd we don't know when or how it will blow.�h 
     At least Mitake, a town of 20,000 in Gifu prefecture, Mayor Yanagawa has taken on the daunting mission of defusing the waste bomb.  The proposed dump would be one of Asia's largest: when complete, it would sprawl for 2 km, the size of 43 domed stadiums, across a forested valley , straddling a national park and abutting a river that supplies drinking water for 5 million people in the Nagoya metropolitan area.  The company behind the project is Toshiwa Kogyo, one of Japan's more than 14,000 registered industrial waste disposal operators.  The plan is to truck in waste from all over the country.  Some would be burned, the rest spread as landfill.  If the project goes through, Toshiwa Kogyo could earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year, 
     When the site was proposed in 1991, no one spoke out against it. The town administration didn't bother to announce the project, and the few citizens who did find out about it respected a longstanding tradition 
of leaving government to the governors.  Then, in early 1992, a newspaper published plans for the waste dump and examined its implications for the local environment.  As opposition to the project grew over the next several years, the prefectural government and Toshiwa Kogyo stonewalled. Vocal opponents started receiving anonymous threats. The mayor at the time refused 
to reconsider his approval, in part because Toshiwa Kogyo had offered $30 million in compensation for economically depressed Mitake, plus $1 million for the 11 households that would be moved to make way for the dump. 
     Opponents of the plan figured the democratic process would block it. In April 1995, Yanagawa, a neophyte politician and former reporter for NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, won the mayoral election and immediately began holding public hearings on the waste site. He announced that despite his predecessor's acquiescence, the new administration would not permit con-
struction to begin until the citizens had voted in favor of it.  The mayor has called a referendum-only the third in modern Japanese history-for June 22. 
     In response, Toshiwa Kogyo has fought back hard.  So hard, in fact, that Yanagawa and other locals suspect the company or its supporters have used gangsters to further their cause. Toshiwa Kogyo flatly denies this.  Still, death threats not to mention last fall's attack�\which put the mayor in the hospital for more than a month�\keep surfacing.  �gThe police are focusing 
their investigation into my beating on the gangster element,�h says Yanagawa.   Indeed, evidence is sprouting all over Japan of involvement by organized crime in the multi-billion dollar industrial waste business.  Police in Saitama prefecture this year have arrested Yakuza in nearly a dozen cases involving illegal dumping.  Concedes Yukichi Suzuki,chairman of the National 
Federation of Industrial Waste Management Associations: �gThere are plenty of 
openings for boryokudan[gangsters] in this business.  Even if they have to pay $10,000 in fines, they make $1 million in profits.�h 
     Still, the public outcry over waste disposal is building across Japan. Last month, a study commissioned by the city of Utsunomiya revealed that irrigation canals near a 1994 landfill were contaminated with arsenic; the 
local government has ordered a cleanup of the site.  The scenic nearby town of Nasu is home to 94 landfills for non-hazardous waste. But several years ago, wildlife began dying mysteriously.  Villagers asked a public health center to test a local stream. When the government said there was no problem with the water, the citizens brought in a private research firm, which discovered alarming levels of mercury, cadmium and lead, all runoff from the waste dumps. 
     Similar tests around the country have sparked hundreds of local protests against improper disposal of both household and industrial garbage.  An hour from Tokyo in Saitama prefecture, 16 incinerators have polluted the air so badly that one recent study discovered dioxin levels 50 times higher than in the rest of Japan. Revelations like that have finally awakened the central 
government to the dangers Japan may be facing.  New guidelines on pollutants are being considered, and the Diet is currently debating a law that will tighten penalties on illegal waste disposal. 
     Activists are skeptical that the new measures will make much difference. The main reason is money.  Citizens on Teshima have protested the despoliation of their once-pristine island for two decades, finally drawing the attention last year of national politicians and Greenpeace.  But cleaning up Teshima's 460,000-sq-m landfill, which oozes putrid steam and has turned local tide pools black, would cost $125 million, a price no one can afford. 
     Japan's only hope may lie with activists like Yanagawa.  His June 22 referendum is non-binding, but a verdict against the Mitake plant could at least bring enough national attention to yield a compromise. In the meantime, it's still war. Toshiwa Kogyo will limit the first phase of its' project to 40 hectares, but president Michio Shimizu said last month that the company is not even considering canceling the plan.  Moreover, he announced a lawsuit against Mitake for reneging on its earlier agreement to build the plant. For his part, Yanagawa figures there's no point in giving up now.  �gThe waste will be here forever,�h says the mayor, who lives under around-the-clock police protection.  �gWe don't know what it will do to the next generation.�h