Tokyo's Cantankerous Boss Takes On Global Warming

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 18, 2008

TOKYO -- In a long, fabulous and cranky life, Shintaro Ishihara, the three-term governor of Tokyo, has specialized in the art of giving offense.

The 75-year-old novelist, yachtsman, North Pole adventurer, theatrical director, nationalist fulminator and big-city boss has exuberantly offended women, immigrants, animal lovers, Africans and the French, as well as countless Asians whose nations were brutalized by Japan before and during World War II.

He is not done yet.

Thanks to global climate change and the Bush administration's refusal to join in the U.N. accord that is attempting to deal with it, Ishihara is just getting warmed up.

"America is the most selfish country," he said during an interview in an austere meeting room in the 48-story building from which he runs Japan's largest city. "From the way they talk, Americans believe even if the world disappears, America wouldn't disappear."

Ishihara described the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations, who gathered this month in Japan for a summit, as co-conspirators in "a big racket." They dispensed "nonsense," he said, when they agreed to try to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, but declined to make their target mandatory.

In any case, Ishihara thinks it is too late to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

"I personally believe we are not going to make it in time," he said.

That does not mean that Ishihara -- whose city of nearly 13 million people will be half-swallowed by the rising sea by 2050, if worst-case predictions come true -- intends to stand by quietly and let Tokyo slip into a warm, wet grave.

He has bullied the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly into setting binding limits on greenhouse-gas emissions in his city, which is home to one in 10 Japanese.

He readily concedes these limits will not significantly alter the momentum of climate change, worldwide or in Japan, which is the world's fifth-largest emitter. Tokyo, for all its people, accounts for only 5 percent of Japan's emissions.

"You can only do what you can," he said. "Somebody has got to do it."

That reminds Ishihara of what the Protestant theologian Martin Luther had to say about the spiritual value of a hopeless gesture: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

Ishihara's apple tree is a mandatory cap-and-trade system that commits Tokyo to reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020. The plan will assign 1,300 office towers and factories a maximum annual tonnage of emissions. If they emit less than allowed, they can sell their allowances to others that exceed the limit.

Thanks to Ishihara's willfulness on climate change, Tokyo is far ahead of the rest of Japan in the numerical specificity of its reduction goals and in the power of its laws to enforce them.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has said his government plans to test a voluntary carbon-trading system later this year, and he estimates Japan can cut emissions by 14 percent by 2020.

The Tokyo system goes into effect next year. When it does, Ishihara boasts, his will be the only city in Asia to be part of the International Carbon Action Partnership, which includes the European Union and several U.S. states, including California, New York and Maryland.

Fines for companies that violate the emissions law will be relatively small, but Ishihara said the public-relations price will be big and heavily weighted with shame. "We will be releasing names of companies that are fined," he said.

Climate change is now a vote-swaying issue in Tokyo and across Japan, where a populist ethic of energy conservation has taken firm hold. Energy consumption per person here is about half that in the United States, and the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions is slower than anywhere in the industrialized world.

In the decades before he mounted his bully green pulpit as mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara traveled a mightily strange ideological highway.

Before graduating from college, he wrote a novel, "Season of the Sun," that won Japan's most prestigious literary prize and was made into a classic movie of post-war adolescent angst.

A celebrity his entire adult life, Ishihara covered the Vietnam War for Japan's largest daily newspaper. He wrote a sensational polemic, "The Japan That Can Say No," which scolded his homeland for being a lickspittle of the United States. He served in parliament for 25 years. And he carved an attention-grabbing niche for himself as an unapologetic teller of nationalist truths.

These truths, as he saw them, periodically involved derogatory references to immigrants, denials of Japan's war atrocities in China and a broadside against women. After women have aged beyond their childbearing years, he told a magazine, they are "useless."

In a nation where group harmony -- wa-- tends to crush individuality, Ishihara has proved himself uncrushable -- and politically appealing. For along with his harangues, there is substance, awareness and decisive action, especially in environmental matters. In the 1970s, Ishihara headed Japan's environment agency. He recalls being struck by the capacity of unchecked industrial pollution to sicken children.

As mayor, he ordered a ban on most diesel trucks inside Tokyo and persuaded three adjacent municipalities to do likewise. Tokyo's air quality has improved markedly.

When asked how it is possible for an irrepressible nationalist and a get-things-done greenie to dwell contentedly inside the skin of the same politician, Ishihara smiled mischievously.

"I am a very notorious guy," he said.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

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