ENVIRONMENTAL AS ANYTHING

OSAKA AIR

Japan has 70% of the world's incinerators, no wonder it's got some of the highest dioxin levels in the world. Can the air around here be that bad? How does the air quality in a big Japanese city like Osaka rate? And what about the drinking water?

Text = Tim Groves
Illustration + images = Typhoon
Photography = James Fielding

It isn't news that Osaka is filthy, the Sisysphean exploits of garbage collectors and road sweepers who keep the more obvious trash from cluttering the streets notwithstanding.

Dirt, however, comes in lots of shapes and sizes. Grit, grime and grease, for instance, permeate everything -- eventually forming a visible crust on any exposed surface. Hence, pastel gray is the municipal hue -- a uniform background producing a townscape that remains miraculously dull and listless in even the brightest sunshine.

Filthier still are the myriad invisible contaminants that foul the city's air and water and make people sick. It is difficult to label these as dirt since they don't all cause visible stains and they can't all be washed away with soap and water. But they're definitely not clean and they are a ubiquitous element of the Osaka ambiance.

Everyone who lives amid this grayness, if they worry about anything beyond surviving till their next payday, must hatch a few dark thoughts about the environment from time to time.

Not the natural environment, of course -- any semblance of that had ceased to exist by the time the Yamato River won the Most Polluted Major Waterway in Japan Award and the city authorities put up that electronic scoreboard on the south side of Yoyodayabashi to give passers by real-time digital updates of the airborne levels of NOX, SOX.

People in Osaka are concerned about their living environment -- in particular, basic stuff like the quality of the air they breathe and water that comes out of their taps.

However, objections on this score are seldom heard, even from old people standing in line at the post office to collect their pensions. This may be because Japan's is a culture of non-complaint, or because the futility of complaining about such issues is fatalistically accepted, or because Osaka's seniors have grown to appreciate the aquired taste of the city's air and water.

In any case, for many Osaka residents, voiced concerns about preserving nature and improving the living environment have long since been superseded by a vague and unspoken anxiety regarding their long-term chances of personally avoiding pollution-induced diseases in a city in which everything is contaminated by something.

As every ancient Greek child learned, the world is composed of four basic elements -- fire, water, earth and air. All were interrelated and their combinations and transformations were supposed to account for everything that was physical or material.

These days, thanks to advances in science, things are more complicated. Since we started synthesizing new elements in addition to the 92 "naturally" occurring ones, few people even claim to know how many elements there are any more and fewer still are capable of reciting the periodic table backwards while standing on their heads.

Despite their conceptual naivety, the four ancient Greek elements have a lot going for them as aids to thinking about the physical world. For instance, while knowing the concentration of cadmium in tap water or the number of salmonella bacteria per gram of raw okonomiyaki mix may leave us more mystified than worried, pollution problems can be summarized comprehensibly although not very comprehensively when described in terms of Ancient Greek ideas.

With this in mind, let's apply the four elements to Osaka's situation.Å@Let's start with fire, an exothermic chemical reaction which in Osaka, as elsewhere, is widely used for keeping warm in winter and for cooking and heating water.

To a large extent, natural gas from Brunei is used to make fire in Osaka. Upon combustion, this combines with oxygen from the air to produce a relatively clean mixture of gases consisting mostly of carbon dioxide and water vapor. Some other fuels, however, are a lot less clean.

The fires in gasoline and diesel powered vehicles, for example, fill the air with gases and particles that can damage or poison the bodies of people who inhale them. Many of these effects are cumulative, so the longer people breathe polluted air the greater the damage it does.

Another kind of fire also contributes to pollution in Osaka. If it isn't done properly, which a lot of the time it isn't, the incineration of waste materials, especially those containing plastics, releases pollutants such as poisonous heavy metals and dioxins, which are carcinogenic organic chemicals. As a result of improper incineration, Osaka's air has a dioxin concentration many times higher than that of most cities in the industrialized world.

Whether it is high enough to be dangerous is anybody's guess, but since the authorities are now acting to cut the dioxin levels, we can all breathe just a little bit easier.

Dirty fires poison the Osaka air. But things don't stop there. When people breathe in this air, they absorb these poisons. Some damage the lungs, others enter the bloodstream.

Also, little by little, particles of airborne pollution rain down onto the ground and leach into the soil and water. Eventually, some migrate into our food and drink and then into our bodies. Also, incineration ash contaminated with dioxins and heavy metals has for many years been buried in landfills in and around Osaka, in particular on reclaimed sites around Osaka Bay, and the potential hazard posed by such pollution is the subject of lively debate.

Osaka's air isn't too bad in moderation. Most of the time it can be breathed comfortably without the aid of a mask, apart from in the vicinity of Tsuruhashi Station, enveloped as this area is in a semi-permanent cloud of barbecue smoke that billows from the chimneys and the open windows of countless yaki niku restaurants.

True, at ground level in many places around town, it's hard to ignore the intermittent pong from the sewers, and in the summer this can intensify to produce an effect on the nose not unlike that of a mouthful of hot mustard or horseradish. One upside to this smell is that it helps keep otherwise lethargic people awake and working on steamy afternoons in July and August. As such, it is estimated to add as much three percentage points to the city's GDP during the hot months, and this effect is projected to increase further as global warming advances.

Although the air in Osaka probably merits an official health warning along the lines of "Let's not breathe too frequently or deeply for the sake of our health," compared with the alternatives of taping up one's oral and nasal orifices or inhaling in neighboring Amagasaki City, the sensation isn't exactly unpleasant.

Overall though, the city's air could do with a touch more honeysuckle, gardenia and lilac blossom and perhaps just a little less essence of burnt takoyaki.

Osaka water is drinkable too, after a fashion. Indeed, college students have been known to down whole glasses of water fresh from the taps as a dare. That said, bottled springwater sales are at record highs, and unlike the people of many First World cities, Osaka residents don't drink the stuff just to appear chic. (When they want to do that, they move to Kyoto, Kobe, Tokyo, anywhere, and take elocution lessons.)

The fact is, Osaka tap water smells bad, tastes bad, and if clean water campaigners are to be believed, there's plenty of evidence to indicate that drinking it on a regular basis does you bad.

In large part, Osaka's drinking water is drawn from Lake Biwa, famous as Japan's largest lake and home from home to a Mississippi riverboat named the Michigan. Lake Biwa also happens to be the place where all the waste water produced by the 1.26 million people of Shiga Prefecture ends up.

Residues from pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers, runoff from roads, waste dumps and sewage works, and a long list of manmade chemicals from other sources are present in the lake's water.

Before reaching the consumer, this water is filtered and chlorinated to ensure that it is safe to drink. But the stuff that comes out of the taps still contains high enough quantities of nitrates, dioxins, PCBs and heavy metals to put many people off drinking it and a smell that deter many more.

Osaka is, as its residents are constantly reminded, bidding to host the Games of the 29th Olympiad in 2008. The bid isn't serious, but it is being boisterously pursued.

In September 1998, however, the promoters came up against a snag when the international body overseeing Olympic rowing declared the proposed site of the rowing course on the Yodo River to be unacceptable.

The reasons given -- that in places the river isn't deep enough and that the current is uneven -- are plausible enough, but one can't help wondering whether another consideration swayed the officials in their judgment.

Suppose that during the games a competing boat was to overturn while plowing along at full tilt during a race and the crew, gasping for breath on account of their aerobic activities, were to gulp down mouthfuls of brown and red Yodo River water. Would they emerge contaminated by the river's complex chemical and biological soup -- a medium in which new forms of primitive life may be evolving as you read this? Would their chests expand and their skin turn green in the fashion of the Incredible Hulk, or their personalities change abruptly in a Jekyll and Hyde fashion? Almost certainly not. But it is hard to swallow the idea that the Yodo's water is safe to swallow.

Tim Groves is a freelance journalist and copywriter. When he's not working copy for Vogue Japan, he writes his monthly column on environmental issues for the Asahi Evening News. He is also a regular contributor to the Kyoto Journal