With a smile on her tanned face, skiier Kazumi Furukawa can vividly recall the time three years ago she stood here on Mount Zao and looked down at fir trees turned into glittering crystals.
"The sky was cobalt blue and I could see the tiny snow crystals on the tips of the tree branches," Furukawa, 56, remembers.
But these days the natural phenomenon is growing rarer and scientists say the culprit is beyond Japan's control - industrial pollution from China.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Mount Zao is whipped every year by wet winds from across the Sea of Japan that form layers of ice and snow that shine like crystals. The Japanese call them juhyo, or ice trees.
Skiiers from Japan and other Asian nations regularly fly to the 1,600m mountain just for a glimpse of the juhyo, which local people describe as little monsters for their intricate twisted shapes.
Fumitaka Yanagisawa, an assistant professor of Yamagata University who has studied the juhyo for nearly two decades, warns that the frost is increasingly mixed with acid, spelling danger for the trees' future.
This year he recorded the highest yet levels of acid, "which could have severe ramifications on the eco-system," he said.
Looking at satellite data, he and another professor, Junichi Kudo of Tohoku University, concluded that the acid in the trees came from sulfur produced at factories in China's Shanxi Province.
Since he first wrote about his research in a scientific journal in 2006, elementary school teachers have asked him to give lectures to local children.
"It's hard to explain this kind of scientific evidence to children, but finally they seem to come up with the same question: 'What are you going to do about the problem?'" Yanagisawa said.
He regretted that he had no good answer.
"The pollution comes from outside Japan. There's a limit to what local residents here can do," he said.
Mount Zao is only one example of pollution hitting Japan from China, where factory emissions are causing international concern as its economy soars ahead.
Some schools in southern Japan and South Korea have occasionally curbed activities because of toxic chemical smog from China's factories or sand storms from the Gobi Desert caused by rampant deforestation.
Environmental ministers of China, Japan and South Korea agreed last year to look jointly at the problem, but Tokyo has accused Beijing of secrecy.
"About yellow sand, I am not quite sure how and why it can be regarded as a national secret," Japanese environment minister Ichiro Kamoshita said in February.
Yanagisawa remembers making a presentation on his academic findings at a Chinese university in the early 1990s.
"When I suggested the possibility that Japan was being hurt by cross-border pollution from China, the whole audience booed my speech," he said with a bitter smile.
"Even now, it's a sort of taboo to mention cross-border pollution when I'm invited to give a speech in China," he said.
Japanese officials say they are hoping to cooperate on the environment with Beijing, as Tokyo has been trying to repair ties after years of friction.
"It will have adverse effects if we push China too much on cross-border pollution," said Reiko Sodeno, an environmental ministry official who has observed past bilateral talks.
"Blaming other countries wouldn't help to solve the problem, as it only hurts national pride," she said.
She said the goal was for Asian nations to come up with a treaty on long-range transboundary air pollution similar to agreements in place among European and North American nations.
Japan also suffered terrible air and water pollution as it built itself into the world's second-largest economy, but the situation has been improving since regulations were imposed in the 1970s.
China has taken steps to clean up its air to avoid international embarrassment at the Beijing Games in August after a warning from the International Olympic Committee.
"I have high hopes that in this year of the Olympics for China that Beijing will cooperate in international efforts towards cutting emissions of air pollutants," Sodeno said.
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
The ongoing Middle East crisis has reinforced an uncomfortable truth for Taiwan: In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, distant wars rarely remain distant. What began as a regional confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran has evolved into a strategic shock wave reverberating far beyond the Persian Gulf. For Taiwan, the consequences are immediate, material and deeply unsettling. From Taipei’s perspective, the conflict has exposed two vulnerabilities — Taiwan’s dependence on imported energy and the risks created when Washington’s military attention is diverted. Together, they offer a preview of the pressures Taiwan might increasingly face in an era of overlapping geopolitical
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
RSS