Global warming is not primarily a climate issue but a civilizational one, rooted in severe air pollution in China and India and their political and social systems. This essay contrasts Japan’s environmental reforms with the realities of authoritarian governance.

2017-06-11
As a novelist advances a story centered on the protagonist, the characters gradually begin to take on lives of their own.
That is often the nature of novels.
As readers know, since July 2010 I have, reluctantly, appeared bearing what I call the “Turntable of Civilization” and have continued writing ever since.
When I recently realized something about global warming that no one else in the world had noticed and sent it out to the world, it was precisely because I had kept writing that I was able to perceive it.
In other words, the issue of global warming is, in fact, a problem of air pollution in China and India, where the environment has already become uninhabitable for humans.
Air pollution in those countries did not begin yesterday or today.
It has continued for several decades.
Japan has provided China with one of the largest amounts of financial and technological assistance in human history.
This has contributed greatly to China’s current position—not merely as a populous nation, but as the world’s second-largest economy in nominal GDP after the United States.
In Japan, a single human life is considered heavier than the Earth itself.
As prime ministers of the time have stated and the media has continued to write, Japan is a country that values each individual life above all else.
When environmental pollution arose during the period of economic growth in which Japan miraculously rebuilt itself after being reduced to ashes and occupied, Japan immediately moved to remedy it.
But what about China.
Is China a country where a single human life is heavier than the Earth.
Hardly so.
This is evident in the fact that China continues to leave in place air pollution so severe that humans can no longer live there—pollution that regularly reaches Japan, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula, even withering trees in places such as Hokkaido—while at the same time pouring enormous sums of money into military expansion.
In other words, global warming is fundamentally a question of what to do about the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party dictatorship and about India’s caste system.
As proof of this, the skies over the United States, where various sports are held, are always a magnificent blue.
To be continued.