A Blue Sky for Tokyo

Some 500 years ago the great Japanese warrior-poet Ota Dokan built a castle on the marshy fringes of what is today Tokyo Bay. A bustling little town sprang up, and Ota wrote:

The abode of mine

Adjoins a pine grove

Sitting on the blue sea

And from its humble eaves

Commands a view of soaring Fuji.

Today Ota Dokan's poem is remembered more in sorrow than anything else. His beloved town has mushroomed into the world's most populous--and most polluted--capital, home to 11.4 million gasping people. The fabled pines are suffocating from smog. The blue sea is washed by tons of noxious industrial wastes. Tokyoites lament that soaring Fuji-san, obscured by deadly clouds of sulfur dioxide, shows its face only one day out of every ten.

Vision or Illusion? With elections scheduled next week in Tokyo--and in thousands of towns, cities and prefectures (states) throughout Japan--pollution has emerged as the capital's No. 1 issue. Socialist Governor Ryokichi Mi-nobe, 67, a scholarly, soft-spoken former economics professor, is pinning his hopes for re-election on the slogan: "Give Tokyo back its blue sky!" His opponent for the governorship (the equivalent of a U.S. mayoralty) is former Police Chief Akira Hatano, 59, a first-time campaigner, hand-picked by Premier Eisaku Sato and his Liberal Democratic Party. Hatano joined the fray with a promise from Sato that if he wins, the federal government will put up 4 trillion yen ($11 billion) to make Tokyo livable again.

How would Hatano spend the money? He commissioned an army of city planners, architects, sociologists and economists to draw up a grandiose scheme. Dubbed "Hatano's Vision," it calls for underground channels to accommodate subways, motor vehicles and sewage, plus a series of earthquake-resistant high-rise housing developments linked to commercial centers by superhighways. All would be interlaced with green belts and recreation areas. Hatano's Vision, says Minobe, is an "illusion" that would convert Tokyo into "an inhuman mass of steel and concrete."

Side Effects. Tokyo has never lacked for master plans. The boldest was designed in 1960 by Architect Kenzo Tange, whose ambitious blueprint to extend the city out over Tokyo Bay attracted attention round the world, but was virtually ignored at home. Though never geisha-gracious like Kyoto, its sister city to the southwest, Tokyo has always made up for its lack of physical charm with a sense of rawboned excitement. Its pleasure districts are the gaudiest anywhere. The hub of the nation's cultural life, Tokyo boasts five symphony orchestras, attracts most of the country's artists and hosts more than half a million university students.

Many of its problems are side effects of the postwar economic miracle that saw Japan climb to the third highest G.N.P. ($219 billion) in the world, behind the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Attracted by the promise of jobs, thousands upon thousands of rural poor poured into the city, flooding public transportation, cramming the highways and creating a desperate housing shortage. Almost unnoticed, the steel factories, shipyards and chemical works that provided them with jobs befouled the waterways, seashores and air. Commented Tokyo's leading daily, Asahi Shimbun: "Japan has won its economic battle and attained the status of a superpower in G.N.P. only to find that the slogan to which it has been so religiously dedicated means Gross National Pollution."

Even now there are no laws requiring emission devices on automobiles. Most factories still burn high-sulfur Persian Gulf oil. Only 40 full-time inspectors have been hired to check pollution in Tokyo's 10,000 factories. When a swimmer died recently in the Sumida River--which Tokyoites have renamed the "River of Death"--an autopsy showed that he had not drowned, but suffocated from inhaling methane gas, a byproduct of sludge and pollutants.

Complicating the matter further, much of the city's lethal, eye-smarting smog, which sent 8,000 persons to the hospital last July, sweeps into Tokyo from factories outside the prefecture in the bustling Yokohama-Kawasaki region. Though the Diet passed 14 anti-pollution measures last winter, including the power to arrest offenders as criminals, Premier Sato has yet to demonstrate any enthusiasm for enforcement, presumably for fear of alienating big business contributors to his party.

Pollution is currently Tokyo's most heatedly debated problem, but it is only one of many. Despite a rapidly expanding and incredibly punctual communications network, subways and trains are packed at 250% to 300% of capacity during rush hours. Several of the city's wards are sinking below sea level at an alarming rate because industrial plants have drawn off so much water from underground streams. As if all this were not enough, geologists have warned that Tokyo is just about ripe for another major earthquake--and that at least 3,000,000 would die if it were anywhere near as intense as the 1923 temblor that killed 143,000.

"There are some cities, like New York, which are finished, completed," says Candidate Hatano. "You can't do anything with them but a little bit here and there. Tokyo is not at all completed. It has a future because there is so much that can be done." Few would dispute that point--but will 4 trillion yen be enough, even for starters?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.