TETSUYA MIURA FOR TIME

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

A New Day Dawns
	An industrial city that was among the most polluted in Japan has become an environmental role model
	By Bryan Walsh

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."

Continued...

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