Published on August 15, 2019.
Based on an essay by Kunihiko Takeda, this article criticizes Sawako Ariyoshi’s Compound Pollution not as a “masterpiece warning against environmental pollution,” but as a work of pseudoscience lacking scientific basis.
Through its claims about synthetic detergents, food additives, gunpowder, and environmental issues, its serialization in The Asahi Shimbun, and comparison with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the essay discusses how scientific errors were spread through liberal ideology.

August 15, 2019.
Because of its reputation as a “masterpiece warning against environmental pollution,” the author began reading it thinking it was a “scientific book,” but he was astonished by how much of it was “pseudoscience.”
This is a chapter I published on August 14, 2018, under the title “Why Compound Pollution Is Dangerous.”
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
Why Compound Pollution Is dangerous.
The author read Sawako Ariyoshi’s Compound Pollution not in 1975, when it was serialized in The Asahi Shimbun, but in the 2000s, when environmental issues once again came into focus.
This work became a major topic in an era shaken by Minamata disease, Yokkaichi asthma, and other problems.
Because of its reputation as a “masterpiece warning against environmental pollution,” the author began reading it thinking it was a “scientific book,” but he was astonished by how much of it was “pseudoscience.”
Soap is good, but synthetic detergents have bad effects; food additives are dangerous; gunpowder and the like cause wars….
Its style appears to be “scientific,” “objective,” “comprehensive,” and “panoramic,” and it is also written plainly so that ordinary people can understand it.
However, from the viewpoint of the author, who is a natural scientist, and also by the standards of doctoral dissertation examination and the like, her work gave the impression of being far removed from scientific method and merely an arrangement of baseless delusions.
In other words, it fails; it receives a failing grade.
The author taught design at Tama Art University and engineering at three universities, and he always told his students, “If your skill improves or you acquire technical ability, you must never do anything contrary to ethics.”
If such a person has ability, it becomes possible to lead people into war or antisocial activities by making full use of inflammatory design, or to create cruel weapons.
Therefore, teachers must demand of such young people not only technique, but also noble ethics and character.
In that sense, Sawako Ariyoshi’s Compound Pollution is dangerous.
That is because it makes full use of the skill of writing plainly in a way that attracts ordinary people, or the skill of making something appear scientific.
The author feels that, no matter how academically wrong it may have been, the writer seemed to think, “It is enough as long as it becomes a bestseller.”
The one that gave power to such a writer was The Asahi Shimbun, which serialized it, though I think it would be more appropriate to call it the Asahi Information Manipulation Company.
When considered in light of its reporting on comfort women, the Nanjing Massacre, and sea-level rise due to global warming, I cannot help feeling that it was trying to dye its readers in its own editorial line, even by distorting facts.
Among other works by women writers that attracted attention from the left on environmental issues is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Carson mistook “the insects disappeared” for “the birds disappeared,” condemned DDT and the like, and as a result is said to have taken the lives of many malaria patients.
Both Compound Pollution and Silent Spring are works that seem to have brought the logic of medieval witch hunts into the present day, but dull-witted liberals used them in ways advantageous to their own camp, and ended up producing many victims.
Ariyoshi, in collusion with The Asahi Shimbun, was one of the masterminds who caused scientific errors to spread throughout Japan.