{"id":344,"date":"2013-02-15T12:29:56","date_gmt":"2013-02-15T20:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/?p=344"},"modified":"2022-09-23T11:29:12","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T19:29:12","slug":"japans-pollution-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/japans-pollution-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan’s Pollution Diet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nHere is some good news about how a nation can change and clear up their air with regulation:<\/p>\n

Japan\u2019s Pollution Diet<\/h1>\n
By\u00a0ALEXANDRA HARNEY<\/a>\u00a0| International Herald Tribune Opinion<\/address>\n<\/header>\n
\n

TOKYO \u2014 Seeing Beijing wreathed in smog throughout the winter, it has been hard not to worry about the costs of China\u2019s rapid economic growth.\u00a0As Jon Stewart pointed out<\/a>\u00a0on The Daily Show: Can\u2019t a country capable of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty find a way to keep its own capital safe for habitation?<\/p>\n

Five decades ago, people were asking similar questions about Japan. Even as the world marveled at the country\u2019s 10 percent annual growth, alarm was growing over air pollution in several cities. Emissions of nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide tripled during the 1960s. Japan became known for pollution-related illnesses: Yokkaichi asthma, Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) \u2014 both named after the cities where they first appeared \u2014 and cadmium poisoning, known as\u00a0itai-itai<\/em>, or \u201couch-ouch,\u201d because of the excruciating bone pain it caused.<\/p>\n

Today, Japanese cities are among the world\u2019s\u00a0least polluted<\/a>, according to the World Health Organization. Japan\u2019s environmental record is\u00a0hardly spotless<\/a>, but the country rightly prides itself on blue skies, Prius taxis and mandatory recycling. What\u2019s more, it managed to clean up without sacrificing growth by investing in pollution-control technologies and giving local governments leeway to tighten standards beyond national requirements.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t easy. The Liberal Democratic Party, which governed Japan almost continuously from 1955 to 2009 and returned to power in December, wasn\u2019t proactive in cleaning up the country\u2019s air and water. That\u2019s partly because until the mid-1990s Japan\u2019s electoral system incited politicians to pander to the interests of business. With candidates from the same party required to also run against one another, most politicians stood little chance of distinguishing themselves on policy and so tried to secure votes by courting business and industry associations.<\/p>\n

It was only when citizens\u2019 movements, which grew out of protests against the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the Vietnam War, got the attention of opposition parties in the 1960s and early 1970s that the government was forced to confront pollution. \u201cI saw the government and L.D.P. as responding just enough, just in time, when the pressure got strong enough that they could defuse the opposition and stay in power,\u201d said Timothy George, a professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of a book on Minamata disease.<\/p>\n

The first result was a blizzard of laws \u2014 14 passed at once \u2014 in what became known as the Pollution Diet of 1970. Air pollution fell dramatically in the years that followed.<\/p>\n

Read rest of article here \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is some good news about how a nation can change and clear up their air with regulation: Japan\u2019s Pollution Diet By\u00a0ALEXANDRA HARNEY\u00a0| International Herald Tribune Opinion TOKYO \u2014 Seeing Beijing wreathed in smog throughout the winter, it has been hard not to worry about the costs of China\u2019s rapid economic growth.\u00a0As Jon Stewart pointed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1614,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/1614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ijdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}