After World War 11 the glorification of an ever larger GNP formed the basis of a new mater

ialism, which became a sacred obligation for all Japanese governments, businesses, and trade unions. Anyone who mentioned the undesirable by-products of rapid economic growth was treated as a heretic. Consequently everything possible was done to make conditions easy for the manufacturers.【1】Few dared question the wisdom of discharging untreated waste into the nearest water body or untreated smoke into the atmosphere. This silence was maintained by union leaders as well as most of the country's radicals; except for a few isolated voices, no one protested.【2】An insistence on treatment of the various effluents would have necessitated expenditures on treatment equipment that in turn would have given rise to higher operating costs. Obviously this would have meant higher prices for Japanese goods, and ultimately fewer sales and lower industrial growth and GNP.

【3】The pursuit of nothing but economic growth is illustrated b v the response of the Japanese government to the American educational mission that visited Japan in 1947. After surveying Japan's educational program, the Americans suggested that the Japanese fill in their curriculum gap by creating departments in chemical and sanitary engineering. Immediately, chemical engineering departments were established in all the country's universities and technical institutes. In contrast, the recommendation to form. sanitary engineering departments was more or tess ignored, because they could bring no profit. By 1960, only two second-rate universities, Kyoto and Hokkaido, were interested enough to open such departments.

【4】The reluctance to divert funds from production to conservation is explanation enough for a certain degree of pollution but the situation was made worse by the type of technology the Japanese chose to adopt for their industrial expansion. For the most part, they simply copied American industrial methods.【5】This meant that methods originally designed for use in a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific with lots of air-and water to use as sewage receptacles were adopted for an area a fraction of the size. Moreover the Japanese diet was niche more dependent on water as a source of fish and as an input in the irrigation of rice; consequently discharged wastes built up much more rapidly in the food chain.

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