Built to celebrate the first World Cup ever staged in Asia, the Yokohama complex is also a revealing case study in Japan’s environmental denial. Officials chose the site 10 kilometers outside the port city because of its convenient location along the main Tokyo-Osaka bullet-train line. In 1999, a year after the stadium opened to the public, PCBs and dioxins were discovered in the ground 500 meters from the building. But after a cursory environmental assessment, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport declared the area safe by Japanese standards. Independent environmental organizations claim that those standards are unusually generous and the testing itself is lax; they say the area continues to be heavily polluted with toxins and heavy metals, including zinc, lead and mercury. According to Teiichi Aoyama, director of the Tokyo-based Environmental Research Institute, what the country will be showcasing next summer is really “one of the most contaminated urban areas in Japan.”
The toxic mess has been decades in the making. Yokohama, an industrial city 25 kilometers from Tokyo, began the century as a center for heavy industries like shipbuilding, iron and steel. In the 1960s local automobile and electronics factories helped fuel the Japanese economic miracle. Around the same time, the stadium site began to be used as a dumping ground for the city’s industrial waste. Local residents can recall mountains of trash aflame and toxic fumes spreading across the area as recently as five years ago.
The incineration of waste releases dioxins–which are carcinogens–into the atmosphere. According to Aoyama, one of Japan’s top environmental experts, one gram of dioxin could potentially cause cancer in as many as 10,000 people. PCBs are equally hazardous: both substances can impare the immune system, sexual function and learning ability, as well as cause cancer. Both can also stay in the environment for decades.
That is beginning to be recognized as a major problem for Japan, which has experienced some of the highest levels of industrial pollution in the developed world. The country, which has no room and little public appetite for vast landfills, burns more garbage than any other developed nation, even the United States, whose surface area is 25 times bigger. Japan also has the highest number of waste incinerators and the highest concentration of dioxins in the environment.
Yokohama officials, who are building a 70-hectare park around the stadium, claim that their tests show the levels of dioxins and PCBs at the site to be low and well within Japanese safety limits. But citizens’ groups argue that such tests are flawed on two levels: they are not as rigorous as those required in Europe and the United States, and the acceptable levels of toxins set out by the Environment Ministry are relatively high. One Yokohama group sent samples taken from the soil around the stadium to Canada for testing and came up with strikingly different results. The Canadian lab found PCBs at levels 13 times higher than Japanese investigators’ figures. High levels of zinc were also found–up to 226 milligrams per gram of soil. (In Germany the danger level for zinc in the environment is just 60 milligrams.)
Dioxin tests were similarly conducted in a water channel near the stadium. Extremely high levels of dioxin–23 picograms per gram–were found in crabs. In the United States levels above 1.2 picograms are considered dangerous. Scientific studies have shown that once dioxins begin to accumulate in animals, they rise through the food chain and become more and more dense, thus posing an increasingly dangerous threat to humans.
The most heavily contaminated area at the Yokohama site is, in fact, under government lock and key. Inside, tons of highly polluted soil from the spot where toxins were originally discovered in 1999 have been stored between vertical metal barriers to prevent leaking. No bottom seal was installed, on the assumption that an impermeable soil stratum rested below the site. In January the government itself took samples from a depth of 30 meters, well below the alleged barrier: researchers found 0.72 picogram of dioxin per liter of water–close to the limit of 1.0 set by Japanese standards and much higher than the 0.013 U.S. standard. If the contaminated soil continues to be stored there, say activists, more leaking could pollute underground waterways and possibly nearby plots of farmland. Kazuhide Tachibana, an official of the Yokohama Environmental Protection Bureau, simply says that “0.72 is below the Japanese safety limit, so there is no problem.”
When the big countdown clock at the stadium’s main entrance clicks to zero next year, tourists and fans will probably not be affected by the dioxin buried all around them. The pitch itself should be safe, despite being watered by the highly polluted Tsurumi River. Players will not spend a lot of time in the area and should not therefore be at risk. But local residents and staff members hired to work for weeks or months at the stadium could be subject to dangerous levels of exposure. Even now many construction workers do not wear masks or gloves, and the ground is not watered to prevent dust from spreading beyond the area. “It’s like this throughout Japan,” says local Assembly member Hiroko Yonahara. “There is no thought of prevention. Admitting a problem implies bearing the responsibility for it, so as long as there is not a big accident, nobody takes action.”
Yokohama Mayor Hidenobu Takahide promised last year that fans from all around the world would enjoy “full safety and full peace of mind” at next year’s championship. That may be true–but only for those who stay in their seats. Football fans who stroll or picnic in green areas around the stadium could well be taking in more than the sun.
