Last October in Toyama Prefecture, on coastline facing the Sea of Japan, about 60 students in fifth and sixth grade at Toyama City Elementary School walked along the shore picking up the garbage. They picked up not just bottles and plastic containers, but also lighters with Chinese markings and plastic bags with Korean hangul script on them.
The discoveries made fifth-grader Chisato Maruta realize, "Japan is connected with the rest of Asia." Toyama Prefecture began this beachcombing project in 1996, calling on other neighboring communities along the Sea of Japan coast, to study the driftage along its shores.
Last year, 16 Japanese prefectures participated, along with Russia's Sakhalin, Khabarovsk and Primorsky regions, as well as one locality in the Republic of Korea's (South Korea) Kangwondo province. The beachcombing findings are being catalogued by the Northwest Pacific Region Environmental Cooperation Center (NPEC), an institution established by Toyama Prefecture. The data is used for waste management.
Since Toyama started the project, the number of participating local governments has doubled.
This year, one local authority from China are sending a study group to NPEC. The common motivation is the need to protect the environment of the Sea of Japan.
It was around 1990 that people in Japan and the rest of Asia began to share an awareness that the whole of Asia is environmentally linked--that the destiny of Asia's environment is everybody's problem. It was a time when people began to focus on transborder environmental issues like global warming and acid rain.
In Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, Yoichi Tani, director of the NGO "Solidarity Network Asia and Minamata," starts his day by reading e-mail from all over Asia.
E-mail arrives from India, China, Vietnam and other nations. They are often from NGOs and victims of environmental pollution. Tani answers each, drawing on his 40 years of experience with the Minamata pollution case.
Tani started the Solidarity Network in 1984. Pollution was spreading all over Asia, and Tani discovered many of the polluters were Japanese companies or joint venture operations with Japanese companies.
Since then, the Solidarity Network has arranged for more than 1,000 people from other Asian countries, NGO members, victims and officials, to
visit Minamata. Tani and others of the
Network have visited many Asian countries.
In the 1980s, Japanese NGOs became involved with other Asian countries to share their experiences with pollution. Many groups also became whistleblowers on Japanese corporations "exporting" pollution abroad. Later in the 1990s, Japanese NGOs' focus with the rest of Asia shifted toward "network-building."
In 1988, the NGO "Citizens' Alliance for Saving the Atmosphere and the Earth" (CASA) started in Osaka to support victims of air pollution in the Nishi Yodogawa area of Osaka. Since the 1990s, CASA has expanded its agenda to include global warming. They believe their experience and knowledge of air pollution is useful in dealing with global warming.
In 1995, a South Korean NGO approached CASA and offered to collaborate. Eventually, they formed the "Atmosphere Action Network East Asia" (AANEA) with NGOs from South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mongolia, Russia and Japan. The aim is to exchange information on air pollution, acid rain and global warming. In the future, they intend to create common educational material on the environment and translate it into the various languages of the members.
In July 1990, professor Shunichi Teranishi of Hitotsubashi University visited Belgium as a member of Japan Environmental Council, a group of environmental researchers, lawyers, journalists and activists. He visited European environmental NGOs and was asked a straightforward question.
"Isn't there an environment network in Asia?"
Teranishi was taken aback. He returned home and began looking for fellow environmental researchers in Asia. He called on researchers in eight different countries, and in 1991, organized the first "Asia-Pacific NGO Environmental Conference." In the sixth conference scheduled in Taiwan this November, they will work on the organizational structure of the conference to turn it into a network of researchers and NGOs.
Teranishi says: "In the past decade, based on economic progress and democratization, numerous NGOs sprouted all over Asia, literally as if they were young saplings. The important thing is how to nurture those saplings and let them grow into huge trees, or a multi-layered network of environmental protection and cooperation that incorporates the local governments and researchers."
Environmental awareness growing in Asia
