Because of their low price, high precision, durability, and design, Japanese products were welcomed around the world. Japan obtained foreign currency and raised its standard of living by its manufacture and export of industrial products. To maintain their standard of living, the Japanese must continually import foreign resources, transform them into marketable products, and reexport them. In the 1990s other Asian countries are competing with Japan in the same game, and the Japanese yen is pricing many Japanese goods out of third world markets.
It goes without saying that this cycle consumes mineral ores and energy. Japan lacks these mineral ores and energy sources even more than it lacks food and wood resources. If consumption of mineral resources continues at its present rate, some of them predictably will be exhausted in the near future. The countries that mine ores may move to protect their own resources. Then what will become of Japanese industries that depend almost entirely on imports?
When we examine Japanese rates of dependency on imported mineral ores, we notice that Japan depends entirely on other countries for these resources: 99 percent for iron ore, 93 percent for copper, 78 percent for lead, 63 percent for zinc, 98 percent for tin, 100 percent for bauxite (aluminum), and 100 percent for nickel. Moreover, Japan produces only about 10 percent of its own energy, from waterpower and coal. This means that Japan purchases almost 90 percent of its energy as uranium and petroleum from abroad. Japan's 10 percent rate of energy self-sufficiency is extremely low when compared with 81 percent for the United States, 62 percent for the United Kingdom, and 46 percent for Germany.
Eighty percent of Japan's imported energy is petroleum. This would pose no problem if oil were producible indefinitely. In fact, if the world continues to increase its oil consumption at the present rate, known oil reserves will be exhausted around the year 2020.
Japan is undoubtedly one of the most industrialized countries in the world. However, when we contemplate the resources that enable Japan to keep its position, we cannot but realize the instability of the ground on which Japan stands. We simply cannot afford to waste. As leaders and examples to the world, we must reduce our energy consumption, and make a practice of reusing things with care and compassion in our daily lives.
A Tragic Waste of Resources
Japan is no longer dark at night. Not only are street lamps lit all night long, but brightly lit shops are open twenty-four hours a day, and many corporate showrooms and stores are fully illuminated whether open or closed. Some lights in giant office buildings are left on throughout the night. Countless buildings are designed so that their windows cannot even be opened, requiring electrical heating, cooling, and ventilation throughout the year. These are an enormous waste of electric power.
Then there is the notorious Japanese passion for excessive wrapping. At supermarkets, for example, small shrink-wrapped fish and produce are again wrapped in small plastic bags, that are in turn put together into larger plastic bags. Consumers discard such bags as garbage; they are scattered to the winds and find their way to fields, ponds, and even mountains. Many swans, ducks, and waterfowl are entangled or choke on these floating bags and die, as do fish which mistake the bags for food. Even whales and porpoises eat plastic bags, painfully suffering for a long time before dying of asphyxiation.
Wrapping is not only a matter of plastic bags. Even candies, cookies, Japanese crackers, and chocolates are individually wrapped in foil and cellophane before being packed in a plastic box which is in turn wrapped in cardboard, cellophane, and paper. We must think how much oil, wood, and metal are wasted in the production of such highly wrapped items.
Electric appliances and personal computers are now used and discarded as fashions change. For example, Japanese people throw away TVs and stereos, washing machines and electric irons, electric fans and heaters that still work well, only to buy fancier goods of the same type one after another. Perfectly serviceable personal computers and word processors are abandoned as soon as updated models appear on the market, and pile up by the score in vacant lots in the suburbs. Used bicycles and cars are no exceptions. That they cannot fetch a decent price on the used market also reflects a deep-seated Japanese preference for new fashions over merely usable items.
Japan consumes in one week the iron, copper, lead, and aluminum resources that many developing countries would consume in a year, and petroleum vanishes almost instantly, not only as fuel but as the raw material for plastics. Leftover materials are discarded at construction sites and buried in valleys and swamps all over Japan along with other industrial wastes.
This is the appalling reality of our electronic, computerized society, that pays so much lip service to saving resources and energy. What on earth can our convenient society save? Our convenient and comfortable standard of living has only been achieved by industrial exhaustion of all kinds of resources. We must awaken to this fact. Depending heavily on foreign food, wood, energy, and metal ores, we "advanced" peoples of the world will surely go down as the villains of history if we continue our present patterns of conspicuous consumption and unbridled waste.
We must first instill ethics into our personal lives. Based on a compassion for every being in this world, we must conscientiously avoid wasting things, time, and minds. The first step in this process is to buy only necessary things, to use them gratefully, and to seek a meaningful lifestyle unmoved by fashions and advertising.
If we Japanese could regain such an ethical lifestyle, the world might once again look at Japan with respect and admiration. Other countries will most willingly provide us with the resources necessary to maintain our industrial economy when they believe that providing us with those resources will bring about the true happiness and prosperity of the rest of the world.
Conserving Pure Air and Water
I remember watching a scene on television where desert tribespeople meticulously gathered every drop of evening dew from the leaves of the desert plants and stored it in earthenware pots. Concentrating to save every single drop, their tense countenances were a silent rebuke to us who take water for granted.
When thinking of resources and energy, we are apt to forget air and water, because they seem to be freely given as if from heaven. But without air we could not make fire even if we had fuel, and without water we could not drive the turbines that produce electricity. Without air and water we could neither cook nor process foods nor conduct any of the countless cooling, washing, and processing operations of modern industry. It goes without saying that the most fundamental resources that sustain our bodies are air and water. So these two substances are our ultimate resources. Even though air and water seem almost limitless, when they are polluted they are practically useless.
In addition to consuming a wide range of minerals and fossil fuels in the process of industrialization, we also contaminated our air and water so badly that it is now a tremendous challenge to restore them to their former state. This pollution of air and water poses grave dangers to our physical health in the immediate future. Our thoughtless and continuing pollution of air and water is attributable to our pursuing material wealth rather than contemplating the long-range ethical consequences of our decisions and actions. Such material wealth cannot be termed true prosperity if it deprives us of the basics of clean air and water.
Ever since the industrial revolution we have striven to make our lives richer, more comfortable, and convenient. As a result, we now confront difficult problems we must solve without delay. We can still strive to attain a better life, but our definition of this better life must be rephrased in terms of environmental quality rather than in the past terms of crude acquisition of capital.
Ethics are needed to give a viable answer to this question. An ethics of environmental sustainability will become the requisite standard of human action and save human beings from poverty, exhaustion, and devastation. The more people put ethics into practice, the purer society will be. The action of those who practice an ethically enlightened lifestyle will be reflected upon the world of nature. Then air and water, forests and fields, and all the living beings within the ecosystem will gradually recover. Only a thoroughgoing