Environmental Pollution in Japan

Environmental pollution in Japan has three outstanding features in comparison with other advanced industrial nations. First of all, it is dominated by industrial pollution owing to private enterprises, much of which is criminal in character. In order to substantiate this point, we classified cases of environmental pollution reported in 46 local newspapers, one from each prefecture, from November 1961 to October 1965, and found that 70% of them had been caused by industrial discharges of manufacturing firms. In quantity, major pollutants are mostly industrial discharges. It is true that consumption activities involving, e.g., automobiles, have been increasingly responsible for environmental pollution in the 1970s, as we shall see later, but even in these instances the main fault of pollution lies with automobile manufacturers.