ura hello work chapter 9: toxic waste disposer
9 – TOXIC WASTE DISPOSER (産廃処理業者： SANPAI SHORI GYOUSHA)
RISK:***
SALARY:**
HARD LABOR:****
ILLEGALITY:***
THE FACTORY FOREMAN WHO HUNG HIMSELF.
“About four or five years ago, in Shikoku, there was a case of illegal touki (投棄: waste-dumping). The amount was the biggest in Japanese history at that time – somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 tons. As you’d expect, the police did an investigation, and several businessmen were arrested. A few days later, the factory foreman hung himself. But I’m not convinced that his hanging was actually suicide. "
So speaks Mr. Watertown ( 32, not his real name), a truck-driver for a sanpai shori (産廃処理：waste-management) business. Of course, waste disposal is legal if it’s done right, but if you mention ‘ sanpai shori ‘ to the average person, he will imagine some crooks. Part of this image comes from mass-media reports of illegal waste-dumping. The other part comes from what Watertown describes as “black rumors.”
“The truth is, me, I know a guy who works at that company. It looks like he’d heard something, because a few days before the ‘suicide’, my guy told me, ‘I bet the foreman’s going to be killed.’. They made it look like a suicide, but everyone in the industry knew what really happened. They wanted him to keep his mouth shut, didn’t they! I can’t be sure if he was straight-up murdered or just – ‘strongly encouraged’ – to do the ‘honorable thing’ by ‘certain people.’
“In any case, the ‘bakku’ of waste-management companies is usually Yakuza (‘bakku’, or ‘back’ if you prefer, refers to silent partners, or people holding strings in, a company). Recently there’s all these strict new laws about sanpai shori. They say that if the government administrators find there’s mobsters involved, they can punish them now. They say that they took care of the mob problem. But from where I sit, not a damn thing’s changed: every company I know has Yakuza ‘in bakku’ – either Yakuza or politicians!! That was certainly the case of the company where the foreman was hung: after he died, there were a lot of black Mercedes with Kansai plates circling out side. Everyone saw that!”
Mr Watertown speaks with a very quiet, indifferent tone of voice. But his hushed, intense tones pack a punch quite out of proportion to their volume.
“In this industry, I can’t say there’s a lot of companies doing illegal dumping, but they’re certainly doing it in a lot of places, aren’t they! A bit too much, if you ask me. Where is the garbage coming from? Who is the money going to? If I talk about that, I’ll get in trouble, just like that foreman! He had to take responsibility for all the illegal stuff, so that the investigation wouldn’t concentrate on living people.
“That company continues to do business, by the way, but it looks like the president and director are safe. I wonder what kind of connections they have behind the scenes? The foreman, though, he must have known too much, but he can’t talk now, can he! In the end, the newspapers never printed the name of the Yakuza gang who was the bakku of the company. Not even once.”
MY COMPANY DUMPS ILLEGALLY ON LAND WHICH WE OWN
Next, Mr. Rivertown talked about an illegal-dumping incident in which he was directly involved.
“Big cases like the one I just mentioned are pretty rare, actually, but there’s guys at my company that will illegally dump small, manageable amounts. Too many to count! (thikns for a second) If anything, you should think of that as the norm! Of course you can dump it in the countryside, deep in the mountains, on land you don’t own, but only in small amounts, and even then your chances of being caught are relatively high. So we rarely do it, yo. Mostly we use our own company’s land for illegal disposals.
“So what is the touki mono (投棄物: industrial waste) we dispose of? Cinders, sewage, sludge, old plastic, and waste oil, animal and plant residue, concrete and glass rubble, a lot of things. . . But it’s the waste wood, oil, and plastic, and waste fibers that are made into landfill. But before you can put ’em in the landfill, you’re supposed to do ‘intermediate processing.’ That sounds complex, but it’s just incineration! The rule is, you’re supposed to burn it, and take the resulting ashes to an official landfill site, and funnel the ashes through a hole into the ground in that site, and bury it that way. But, you know. That costs money, and the incinerator itself wears out and has to be replaced. So we try to skip that step as much as possible.
“My old company illegally dumped on their property, too. And they had a lot of property! Over 10,000 square meters! There was a forest surrounding the property, and a cliff behind it. First we built a concrete wall along the side of the cliff. Then, we’d just roll the waste off the cliff. After we were done, we’d cover it up with earth. Every time, layer after layer. Of course, we didn’t ‘intermediate process’ any of it! That way we could save the money. And we didn’t have to pay the fee for the landfill, either. We made crazy profits that way! We’d always do the work on weekends. The local officials were wise to us and would come around sometimes to catch us doing fuhou touki, (不法投棄, illegal dumping) but those guys never work weekends. By the time they came on Monday, everything would be covered up with a fresh layer of earth! Nothing wrong here, boss!
“Factories pay us $400 per ton to dispose of their stuff. If we illegally dispose of it, we can get hella paid - 10,000 tons gets us $4,000,000! Of course, even fuhou touki is work in its own way, so they have to pay SOME money to us guys. But the remaining profit is still hella more than they’d get disposing of it properly.
“There are cases where guys get caught, the company’s assets are seized, and it goes bankrupt. But even then, the guilty guys go to prison for only a month. I don’t think any of them really came out reformed! Also, most companies hide their ‘black profits’ so the government can’t confiscate them in the first place. Not a lot of people would mind going to jail for a month, if they had $1,000,000 waiting for them when they got out!”
In cases where the crime is exposed, the government can force the offending company to pay all the costs for removing the waste to an appropriate place. But even then, the company has to be careful who they hire for the job, don’t they!!
The waste-management industry is a cash business. So, in addition to the problem of fuhou touki, it is also a ‘dumping ground’ of sorts for dirty money. Especially with the landfill sites- those turn a huge profit, all in cash. So there’s always different Yakuza fighting over the best sites:
“It’s such big business, the largest gangs in the country squabble over the landfill sites. But as you might expect, the Yakuza don’t really care that much if the waste is disposed of safely. They just want the cash. They do have some rules, though. Come at 6AM, don’t come at noon. You’d think there would be rules about how to dump, but no. Just pile the shit up somewhere, give us the cash, and get out! They make out all right on the deal! One time, “X gang” owned a disposal site, but that wasn’t enough for them – they started throwing the waste onto the neighbor’s property, too. So they got arrested. By the time they made bail, “Y gang” had already acquired the rights to that site! Apparently it was all a matter of money – people say they threw between one and two million at the mayor. But it’s normal for gangs who have had their site stolen to complain to the rival gangs. It’s not unusual for them to agree to split the takings, in the end.”
THE ADMINISTRATORS WHO TURN A BLIND EYE
The corrupt beauracrats don’t feel any guilt about their connections to illegal dumping. They adapted to it a long time ago: it just feels normal to them now. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that all beauracrats are corrupt. There’s a lot of good ones who are trying to reform and clean up the ‘intermediate processing’ racket. The cases that Mr. Watertown speaks of are definitely the worst of the worst of the bad apples.
“Recently, a lot of guys are getting busted for fuhou touki. But the arrests don’t ‘damage’ just the sanpai shori companies. . . the politicians and beauracratic patrons get damaged too! If there’s a lot of illegal dumping cases within one administrator’s jurisdiction, people will say, ‘What’s going on with this clown?!? He’s supposed to be the one cleaning up the environment, not wrecking it!’ And that increases the risk of his corruption being exposed. In my ken (my prefecture), the mass-media has done a huge number of reports on fuhou touki. And every time another incident comes to light, the reporters besiege the prefectural governor – because he’s the one who issues all the permits for us sanpai shori companies! ‘Why are you still giving these crooked companies permits? What’s the deal?’ they say. That’s why we try to do our illegal dumping in small amounts – it’s easier for our political patrons to deny it that way: they can save face. They can plausibly claim to the media, ‘It’s such a small amount, how could I possibly have known about it?’”
After hearing all of this, I commented to Mr. Watertown that he must be in it for the money, too!
“Naw, it’s not like that,” he said. After taxes, he only gets $3,000 a month, not a surprisingly large sum. Only the bosses make real loot. Mr. Watertown’s major regret is not money, but the effect of his job:
“Ten years ago, Japan’s environment was pretty beautiful. But the environmental quality has degraded along with our economy. The reason for this is that there’s less and less space in our legal landfill areas. Once it’s all used up, there won’t be any legitimate place to dump industrial waste at all! And as space continues to shrink, the disposal costs increase proportionally, increasing the incentive to illegally dump.
“I know I can’t do this work forever. But, that’s the only way I know how to put bread on the table. So it can’t be helped. There’s no space left in my prefecture. We have to drive our legitimate waste to other prefectures! And even if we do open up more land for legitimate dumping, our whole country will turn into a mountain of trash. If you could imagine all the waste I’ve dumped in my ten years on the job! If a guy starts thinking about the environmental impact, he can’t do this job anymore. And make no mistake, it’s really stinky garbage. Human waste mixed in. No matter how many times you wash your overalls, the smell doesn’t come out. Lots of guys stop the work because they can’t take that. Then there’s the guys that get a rash all over, from the toxins.
And the garbage is hot – even in winter, it feels like summer. Rank and humid. But , you know, you don’t want to get warm like that! And then there’s the spontaneous combustions. Too much trash – poof! On fire! That is not a rare incident by any means. The only way to put it out is by covering it with earth. Tire fires are the worst – even re-burial can’t put them out. Black smoke rising from barren ground. Full of dioxins. Makes you wonder what the world is coming to, eh?”
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Devastating.
Fascinating, especially because I always considered Japan to be so advanced when it came to waste disposal and management.
I can’t help but wonder how much Japanese trash gets shipped to China or Russia, I know there’s gotta be tons of dirty money in that, and Chinese officials would be happily involved if it worked out financially for them.
Thats terrible. An excellent report on it though.