A New Day Dawns

GRAY PAST, GREEN FUTURE: Kitakyushu's Dokai Bay area, pollution-choked in the 1960s, is cleaned up today

An industrial city that was among the most polluted in Japan has become an environmental role model

By Bryan Walsh, Times Magazine

Posted Monday, October 2, 2006; 20:00 HKT
As he began his daily commute, Yoichi Kaminaga could look down the mountainside on which he lived and see the air congealed into an opaque layer of red, black and brown that obscured the city of Kitakyushu below. It was the 1960s, and the smoke was the by-product of hundreds of factories in this western Japanese city churning out the raw materials that drove the country's manufacturing boom. But if the environmental costs of Japan's rapid growth were already visible in Kitakyushu, that didn't mean they were understood. "I had to go down through the smoke when I was coming to work, and it smelled awful," says Kaminaga, who worked at a brick factory. "But we didn't feel it was dangerous. It meant for us that we were producing a lot for the country. Now I realize that we were destroying the environment."

By the 1960s Kitakyushu, one of the nation's main industrial hubs, was possibly Japan's most polluted city, at a time when the country was an environmental nightmare. But Kitakyushu was also one of the first major Japanese cities to clean itself up, prompted by local housewives who debated, protested and shamed officials and companies into controlling the pollution. Step out of Kitakyushu's new international airport today and you'll see blue sky and clean water next to factories that puff smoke as gently as a professor's pipe. Across Japan, urban pollution has been reined in to a remarkable degree. But Kitakyushu still stands out. It has internalized Japan's revolution in environmental awareness, trumpeting its green identity and sharing its antipollution experience with other Asian cities that desperately need a good example. "We want to help those cities before they suffer as much as we did," says Koichi Sueyoshi, Kitakyushu's mayor for the past 20 years. "I believe they can clean up because we were able to do it, and we can be the role model."

The grainy film shows the satanic mills of Kitakyushu, with its charcoal skies, filthy apartment buildings and children looking like chimney sweeps due to 100 tons of dust that fell per sq km some months in the city's most polluted districts. The narrator of this documentary, produced by one of the city's women's groups in 1965, declares: "Industrial development should not take place at the cost of the people." It was a simple but revolutionary statement that would drive the changes to come. In the 1950s and '60s, the housewives of Kitakyushu—organized into scores of women's associations across the city—were the first to recognize the damage that unchecked development inflicted on their families. "They could never get their laundry white from all the soot," says Yoshiko Misumi, the president of the Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women, an NGO that put together a history of the women's movement. "Their children would get sick. That's what pushed them."

Because most were married to factory workers or executives, the women were in the awkward position of targeting the very businesses that put rice on their tables. So rather then taking straight to the streets, they began to carefully gather evidence. Working with sympathetic university professors, they spent months quantifying the pollution with homemade experiments: measuring how much soot dust accumulated on drying bedsheets, recording how often children were absent from school with respiratory illness, even tossing a live goldfish into a bowl of water taken from Kitakyushu's industrial Dokai Bay, otherwise known as the "Sea of Death." (The fish died instantly.) Led by resourceful women like Akiko Mori, a teacher recognized decades later by the United Nations for her environmental advocacy, the associations took their line graphs and soot-covered shoji paper to city officials and industry executives and demanded action. One factory manager dismissed the movement, saying, "Citizens should endure a certain degree of pollution." But the women knew better, and by the mid-'60s public opinion, in Kitakyushu and elsewhere, began to swing their way. "They said it was in everyone's interest to do something, because the pollution was affecting everyone," says Beverly Yamamoto, a professor at Osaka University who has studied the movement. "They backed that up with hard data."

If industry dragged its feet at first, city politicians were quicker to respond, not least because the women's groups were poised to make pollution an electoral issue. Shortly after the national government passed Japan's first real pollution laws in 1967, Kitakyushu began establishing even tougher regulations. Factories there installed over 1,000 air cleaners between 1967 and 1978, and switched at great cost to low-sulfur fuel in the early '70s, which drastically cut emissions of smog-causing sulfur dioxide (SO2). Beginning in 1972 the city dredged 350,000 cu m of mercury-contaminated soil from the bottom of Dokai Bay, with industry paying 71% of the cost. Equally important, the local government gave teeth to its many regulations, requiring companies in 1971 to immediately cut SO2 emissions by 20-40% on days when weather conditions made smog formation especially likely.

Though much of urban Japan wouldn't turn the corner on pollution until the late '70s, dust levels in Kitakyushu fell nearly 75% from 1970-75, thanks chiefly to reduced use of coal. Kitakyushu's pioneering housewives had made the difference. "If there had been no women's movement, I believe our countermeasures would have been significantly delayed," says Reiji Hitsumoto, an environmental official with the city government. The heartening lesson of Kitakyushu—which in 1990 became the first Japanese city to win the United Nations Environmental Programme's (UNEP) Global 500 Award—is that concerned citizens, let loose to express their views, can save even the most polluted city.

That's a lesson that Kitakyushu is passing on to developing cities that are themselves struggling with the environmental burdens of industrialization. Since 1980 Kitakyushu, with the help of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, has been dispatching environmental consultants to developing countries to help local governments plan and implement antipollution measures based on the Kitakyushu model. Over the years the city has also trained thousands of visiting environmental officers from abroad in everything from waste management to cleaner industrial production. The results can be seen in Dalian, a smokestack city in northeastern China that was once a carbon copy of the polluted Kitakyushu of the 1960s. Over the past 15 years, Kitakyushu has trained factory managers from Dalian, refitted plants there with clean industrial technology and conducted a detailed, three-year environmental survey that helped the local government develop a model environmental zone—turning Dalian into a test tube for fixing China's pollution woes. The cooperation has paid off: Dalian achieved an environmental renaissance under Kitakyushu's guidance, joining it on UNEP's honor roll in 2001.

The transformation of Kitakyushu and Dalian is powerful proof that even cities accustomed to measuring their success solely by GDP can discover the importance of green, sustainable growth. "Combining environmental efforts with economic benefits has become a vital international issue," says Hiro Mizoguchi, the director of Kitakyushu's Office for International Environmental Cooperation. "I definitely think it can be accomplished, and our effort is part of that." For Kitakyushu, this commitment to a cleaner future is now fundamental to its character. The city that once celebrated its pollution in patriotic verse—"Flames may burn out sea waves and smoke will fill the whole sky," went one song—now boasts its own environment museum, where former factory workers like Kaminaga spread the green gospel to schoolchildren. "People here feel about the environment the way they used to about production," he says. "I'm proud of my city."

With reporting by Yuki Oda/Kitakyushu