Nature, God, Human and then? ------An Asian’s view------

By Seiichi Kondo

English translation edited by Anne Brewer

Mount Fuji in Japan, which lost its once-permanent snowcap in 2004 (http://www.mochiya.co.jp/image/000903.jpg) Contents

1. Preface...... 2 3.4.4. Computers...... 18 2. Alarm...... 2 4. The corruption of natural balance...... 19 3. The road to catastrophe...... 3 5. Chaos of concept...... 19 3.1. Destruction of the forest...... 4 6. History of the worldview of the human race 3.1.1. Arctic zone...... 4 ...... 19 3.1.2. Japan...... 4 7. Era of Nature...... 20 3.1.3. China...... 5 7.1. Animism...... 20 3.1.4. Europe...... 6 7.2. Pantheism...... 20 3.1.5. New Zealand...... 6 7.2.1. The Orient...... 21 3.1.6. Australia...... 6 7.2.2. Sunda Land...... 21 A Queens Land...... 6 7.2.3. Brahmanism and Hinduism...... 22 B Tasmania...... 7 7.2.4. Shintoism...... 22 3.1.7. North American Continent...... 7 7.2.5. Taoism...... 23 3.1.8. Defoliation by the US Military...... 7 7.2.6. Pantheism in North and South 3.1.9. Amazon...... 8 America...... 24 3.2. Pollution...... 8 7.2.7. Pantheism on the Mediterranean 3.2.1. Minamata Disease...... 8 Coast...... 24 3.2.2. Dangers of Radioactivity...... 9 7.2.8. Pantheism in the European Continent 3.2.3. Water pollution...... 9 ...... 24 3.2.4. Pesticides and food additives...... 10 8. Era of God...... 24 3.2.5. Mass production and consumption. .10 8.1. Polytheism...... 24 3.3. Abnormal climates...... 11 8.1.1. Asia and Europe...... 24 3.3.1. Air...... 11 8.1.2. The Orient...... 25 A Smog...... 11 8.2. Monotheism...... 25 B Greenhouse Gases...... 11 8.2.1. Buddhism from India to Japan...... 25 C Ozone hole...... 12 8.2.2. Judaism and Islam...... 26 3.3.2. Abnormal temperature elevation...... 13 8.2.3. Christianity...... 27 3.3.3. Ocean...... 15 A The birth...... 27 3.3.4. Retreating glaciers and rise of sea B The Dark Ages...... 27 level...... 15 C Religious Revolution...... 28 3.3.5. Marine life and fish stocks...... 16 D Protestantism...... 28 Abnormal Ocean currents...... 16 9. Era of Humanism...... 29 Damage to human beings...... 17 9.1. Humanism...... 29 3.4.1. War...... 17 9.2. Science and technology...... 29 3.4.2. Environmental hormones...... 17 9.3. Economic growth...... 30 3.4.3. Biotechnology...... 18 10. Then?...... 30

You can jump to the page you want to read by one click of the page number mentioned above. Preface

We live on the Earth, a unique planet in the Solar system and possibly in the Galaxy. Now, in the twenty- first century, we are aware that this uniqueness is dependent on an extremely delicate, fragile and harmonious balance of nature, plants and animals. This we can understand as being given by God through the processes of evolution. However, my studies suggest the earth is in a critical state and this is confirmed by detailed scientific observation and by recent abnormal changes in the climate of the planet. People suspect that, sadly, this critical state is due to the recent vigorous activity of human beings. In order to prevent a possible catastrophe, we must understand how and why the present crisis of imbalance has arisen against the will of God. We have various kinds of prejudice against, and conflict between, different races, nationalities, cultures, and religions. The differences in culture and religion arose originally from inescapable phenomena such as differences of climate from one area to another and the slow but drastic changes in climate, and the way in which humans faced these changes. Humans have in recent centuries made wrong choices in how to deal with the outcome of the succession of these past inevitable events leading to conflict between humans and between humans and nature. Nobody can blame others in this respect. I believe that it is most important to study history objectively in order to eliminate prejudice and conflict. I wish very much that you will try hard to be aware of any prejudices, particularly those due to cultural differences between, for example, East and West, while reading the following. I hope deeply that we can find our way to maintain the peace and harmony between different human cultures and between the rest of nature and humankind.

Japanese Cherry blossom (Photograph by Seiichi Kondo)

1. Alarm

A survey of the weather for the last 25 years by the Japanese Weather Bureau shows that periods of abnormally high temperature, heavy rainfall and drought have become more frequent and more extreme than in the past in both Japan and the rest of the world. For thousands of years throughout recorded Japanese history, cherry trees in Kyoto and Osaka have bloomed from the beginning to the middle of April. In recent years, however, they have begun to bloom two weeks earlier. People everywhere are aware of the changes in their climate and many are afraid that we are facing an unpredictable global disaster. A new Japanese religious group, ‘Aum-truth-sect’, decided in the 1990s that the world would soon experience a dreadful catastrophe, the Day of Judgment or Armageddon, as described in the Bible. To survive the expected turmoil, they thought it necessary to defend themselves from possible attack by chaotic mobs. They prepared large stores of various arms, which are illegal in Japan, and synthesized Sarin nerve gas, which was invented by the Nazi during the Second World War, and is one of the most poisonous nerve-agents. It was used in the Iran-Iraqi War to kill Kurdish people. They tested the effect of this agent in a Tokyo metropolitan subway train in the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995. They killed 12 people instantly and injured about 2000.1 Various reasons for the change of climate have been discussed and various proposals made to counteract it. The major cause of the present abnormal temperature rise is commonly believed to be the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the global atmosphere. This causes a global temperature rise because it reduces the rate of loss from the atmosphere of the heat that it has absorbed from the sun’s radiation. This phenomenon is called the ‘greenhouse effect’. The rise of ocean temperature, following the increase in air temperature, further increases the CO2 concentration because some of the CO2 dissolved in the sea-water is

1 Religious violence in Contemporary Japan, University of Hawaii Press, 2000. http://www.apologeticsindex.org/a06.html released. This increase of CO2 not only raises global temperatures but in conjunction with increased levels of other gaseous oxides, especially sulphur dioxide, also increases the acidity of the air and of the water on land, under the ground, in lakes and in the ocean. The Hawaiian weather observatory has measured atmospheric CO2 from the beginning of the twentieth century. According to their observations, the concentration has risen exponentially over the 100-year period with some minor fluctuations due to forest fires and volcanic activity (see Figure 1). Measurement of the CO 2 concentration over the past 1000 years in air bubbles in the glacier ice of Greenland and the Antarctic Continent suggests that the atmospheric CO2 concentration must have begun to increase after the Renaissance and then risen sharply during the industrial revolution in Britain. Now the amount of CO 2 emitted exceeds the natural capacity of land and sea plants to absorb it, causing the CO2 balance of the atmosphere to be upset.

Figure 1 Recent changes of CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa, Hawaii (red), Okinawa (green) and Arctic pole (blue) (Japanese Weather Bureau.(http://www.data.kishou.go.jp/obs-env/hp/2-2-3n2o.html)

Since this is an international problem, international cooperation to decrease CO2 emissions was called for. For the first time in human history, delegates from more than 100 countries all over the world got together at an international congress on global environment protection, Conference of the Parties of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 20, 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. The most important theme in this congress was how to stop the increase in the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. With the exception of the USA the conference reached agreement, the so-called Kyoto Agreement, although there is no power of compulsory enforcement of this agreement against the sovereignty of the nation. The Government of USA, which consumes about 30% of global fossil fuel production, said that there is no scientific verification of the reasoning and refused to accept this agreement, because they think that decreased oil consumption in the USA would upset their economy. The patriotic American Chemical Society put a statement at the top of their website-home-page, that there is no scientific relationship between global climate change and increased CO2 concentration in the air. Besides the USA, some other people have the optimistic viewpoint that there is no serious change in global weather or that we are now in a transition period between normal weather patterns. They present opinions based only on observations favourable to them, in spite of much detailed evidence of global weather change now available from numerous scientific observations. The change of temperature is only one example of environmental change that is occurring. Numerous other disastrous changes are occurring, including damage to humans as will be mentioned in section 2.4.

2. The road to catastrophe

Planet Earth was born about five billion years ago. The life forms, which exist from the stratosphere to a few tens of kilometers underground, have existed in a closed system interacting with each other for a very long time. Accordingly, we must not look at each example of the destruction of nature as a separate and independent phenomenon, but we must look at our earth as a whole system. Let us look at several examples of the destruction of nature caused by our own hands. 2.1. Destruction of the forest

Deep, rich forests covered most parts of the world until one thousand years ago. Forests cleanse water supplies, give out oxygen, prevent floods and give shelter to humans, animals and birds. However, many of these forests have disappeared and/or become poor, because humans have destroyed them and continue to do so all over the world. They can no longer absorb all the CO2 we emit and convert it to oxygen. Since much of the forest has been destroyed during recent centuries, we can clearly observe the details as shown below.

2.1.1. Arctic zone

The vast area of the Arctic and Antarctic Zones such as Siberia, Alaska and Northern Canada was frozen to -50°C to a depth of 1000 metres during the third ice age. These frozen lands are called ‘Tundra’. The Tundra surface is covered with thick piles of mosses and rotted plants called peat or bog. Peat holds plenty of moisture and, thus, is used as gardening material, fuel and heat insulation material. Peat not only prevents the frozen ice underneath from melting even in hot summer, but also can support dense forest, called ‘Taiga’, despite the very cold winters and hot, dry summers. Grasses and mushrooms grow under these trees, which are now hundreds of years old. This immense and deep Taiga is a gift of nature, where not only humans but also many small and big animals such as Siberian tiger, wolves and squirrels, some of which are now very rare, have lived for thousands of years. The Taiga is a typical example of the delicate balance of nature! I must mention the very important fact that Tundra ice contains a lot of low molecular-weight natural gas hydrocarbons, such as methane, in the form of clathrate compounds. When water started to freeze during the formation of Tundra, water molecules I must tell you an unbelievable story. About 20 years ago, I was aggregated together by hydrogen going to present a research paper before an international bonding to form a cage-like structure. conference on porous solids, in Paris in the beginning of Methane molecules were trapped in the November. On the way to Paris from Osaka, we landed in middle of the cage. It is worth noting Moscow Airport to refuel. While I was walking around the large that this phenomenon suggests a waiting lobby to kill a few hours, I saw bookshelves full of possible fuel storage method. However, propaganda leaflets on the victory of socialism including one the amount of methane stored in the written in English with a cover illustration of a very large bulldozer Tundra is so large that if it is released to in the Taiga forest. This monster was equipped with huge the atmosphere it will add enormously to scissors at the front and a kind of a big box-type machine car the green house effect. Methane is an behind. I picked up this pamphlet with curiosity. It praised Soviet even more potent greenhouse gas than achievements in technology and proudly wrote that this high- CO2. speed giant bulldozer can chop big Taiga trees one a second, It is worrying that Tundra has now strip the skin and turn it into timber automatically in situ! This started to lose its intricate and elaborate method of timber extraction is still being undertaken even more balance and is melting into swamps with efficiently and the timber is exported in exchange for foreign bubbles of methane gas. Taiga will currencies including Yen. They kill these ancient trees in just one never recover until the ice age returns. second and leave the land bare. The Taiga is thus being rapidly Consequently, a vast number of animals destroyed. What a crime to nature! living there will disappear, and sculptures made from bones of mammoth, emerged from the swamps, decorate the souvenir shops in Moscow streets. In addition, the loss of the green Chlorophyll of Taiga will contribute to the increase of CO2 in the air and together with the release of methane will add significantly to the greenhouse effect and consequent climate change.

2.1.2. Japan

One of the old names of Japan was ‘Kinokuni’ (the country of wood). Over 1000 years ago most of Japan was covered with rich, dense forest with a variety of good quality trees. One of the oldest shrines of Shintoism, the original native religion of Japan before Buddhism arrived, is the Izumo-Taisha Shrine located in Shimane Prefecture along the Japan Sea coast. According to its mythology, records and design drawings, this shrine was built before the seventh century and had a main wooden building about 48 metres high. This is higher than the 45 metre Big Buddha (Daibutu-den) building in the Todaiji Temple, Nara City, Japan, built in 751 AD, which is the biggest wooden building in Japan. Nobody, including modern architectural experts, believed such a tall building could ever have existed. However, a recent archaeological excavation using old maps of the garden, revealed astonishing results. Traces of lines of big pillars, as described in the ancient records, were found! Each pillar consists of three big trees of 1.3 metres diameter bound together to make one pillar 3 metres in diameter. The technology of construction was studied following the ruins, and it was found possible to build such a tall wooden building. Numerous studies of the structures of temples and shrines show that construction technology at that time was very skilled.2

2 Ohbayasi Construction Co., The Recovery of Izumo Shrine, Gakusei Pub. 1989. (Japanese) http://inoues.net/yamataikoku/ruins/new_izumo_taisha.html (Japanese with many photos) http://www6.pref.shimane.jp/kodai/en/top_menu.html One of the reasons for the development of this technology was the availability of good quality timber from very tall trees. However, the forests in the plains were destroyed and turned into rice fields as the population grew. Nowadays, only small areas of ancient forest remain in the plains such as Tadasuno-Mori Forest in Kyoto City. We have to import foreign timber to repair our old temples. Fortunately, about 70% of Japan is mountainous and these areas are still covered with forests, with a lot of wild animals and birds such as bears, deer, monkeys, hawks etc.

2.1.3. China

Cold, strong westerly winds blow ceaselessly from north-west Asia to Korea, Japan and the north-west coast of America. When it gets dry in winter and early spring, this wind brings tiny colloidal particles of clay called ‘Yellow Sand’, dyeing the blue sky yellow. When the dust becomes dense, cars in Beijing need their headlights on in daytime. Windows and buildings in Japan are covered with a thin layer of yellow dust and people suffer from allergic reactions to it.

Satellite picture from Japanese Weather bureau. The white patch is the yellow sand cloud over the Japan Sea blowing eastward.

Where does this dust come from? The climate of north and north-west China across the Gobi and Takla- Makan deserts along the Silk Road is dry. It is believed that the main source of this dust is the Yellow Clay Area, along the middle part of the Yellow River. This area was once covered with forest, although only a thin layer of fertile soil covered the infertile clay beneath. In about 207 BC, the Chinese Emperor Shi-Huang-Ti of Ch’in Dynasty started to build the so-called ‘Great Wall’ as a defence against invasion by Fun-nu Mongolians, which means ‘Barbarians’ in Chinese. It took about 1200 years to complete the Wall, which had a total length after completion of about 2400 kilometres. Under the walls, thousands upon thousands of slaves used for construction were buried. During this period, they cut down all the trees in the area as fuel for baking bricks and for the slave workers. Since then, the thin fertile surface soil has been eroded by wind and rain, and has disappeared. After the earth became bare, no more trees grew. The Yellow River eroded the soil severely, turning the river and a large area of the sea beyond the river mouth, yellow. An experimental project to restore the forest by a Japanese team has had no success so far. The north-west wind blows the clay off as micro particles in a sandstorm. This erosion has made a very large Pi shape canyon and the living standards in this area are the lowest in China. The recent rise of air temperature has decreased the humidity of this area and makes the problem worse. The wind is drier than average from early to late spring and blows dense clouds of fine clay particles continuously eastward, which even reach the north-west coast of North America. Everywhere in the world, deserts are expanding due to rising temperatures and increasing numbers of domestic animals, which eat all the scarce green leaves on the edge of the deserts. Together with the micro particles of clay, heavy nitrogen and sulphur oxides emitted from prosperous Chinese industrial areas attack Japan and pollute the coastal area. As a result, pine trees along the coast of the Japan Sea are vanishing. Another example of forest destruction is in Yunnan Province in the south-eastern border of China. This place in the middle of the north-eastern end of the Himalayan Mountain Range was called Shangri-La (Utopia) in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. When I visited this area in 2002, I was very moved and impressed by the native inhabitants, who keep up the traditional way of life respecting nature. They taught the Japanese wooden construction engineering several thousand years ago – see description of the Izumo-Taisha Shrine in 2.1.2. The inhabitants still pray to god before cutting timber for construction. This is in contrast to other areas of the People’s Republic of China where money is everything. However as the population of Yunnan explodes and they need more rice to eat, they are clearing trees from canyons and steep mountain cliffs to provide countless rice field terraces. You cannot imagine the huge numbers of rice terraces covering the steep slopes of deep canyons. Modern technology is still increasing these terraces. A Chinese photographer became famous by taking photos of these areas and he is naïve enough to admire the patient endeavour of the peasants and to appreciate the human-made artificial beauty. These terraces are easily washed away by frequent landslides caused by the heavy rains of this area brought by trade winds from the Indian Ocean.

2.1.4. Europe

The European Continent is full of bad examples of the destruction of nature. Let me mention just one example. Before about the twelfth century, the continent was covered with deep forest, as described in many fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood. The reason why many European countries have different languages is that these countries were originally buried in the forest like an ocean. High walls surrounded city-states to defend them from the attacks of enemy, thief and wild animals coming from the deep, wild forest. This isolation gave each city its own culture. However, from around the twelfth century when civil power and the economy started to grow, people learned to tame horses and used them for cultivation and transport as well as for battles. The rich forest was quickly ‘opened and developed’– a symbol of the victory of human civilization against nature. However, wild animals such as rats lost their nests in the forest and migrated into cities and spread the plague. The famous folk story, Pied Piper, tells the following story. Villagers asked a Pied Piper to get rid of rats from the village and kill them. He promised to do so and, in return, he asked for a large sum of money. He blew a strange melody with his flute to collect all the rats in the village and led them to the river to be drowned. He was successful in exterminating the rats from the village but the miser villagers paid nothing. The angry Piper played a strange melody again and all the children of the village followed him to the river and all drowned. This is just a folk tale but it illustrates how it came to be that millions of people all over Europe died of the plague. This became a symphony, The Dance of Death, by Franz Liszt and is also seen in the large catacomb of St. Stephan Cathedral in Vienna, which is full of dead bodies. Only 20% of Europe is now forested. Wild animals have almost disappeared. It is interesting to note that ‘wild’ means stormy, fierce, outrageous, and untamed as well as natural in English.

2.1.5. New Zealand

The colonies of the British Empire also suffered destruction of their forests. Before the invasion of New Zealand by the English just over two hundred years ago, the large area of land along the west coasts of the South and North Islands was deep forest. These forests were converted into pastures for tens of millions of sheep and deer. Japan is one of the largest importers of wool from New Zealand. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pharmaceuticals and animal waste are dumped into the ocean causing pollution. The pasture turns brown in summer like a large desert. Only the southern end of the Island is protected as the Fjord Land National Park, and reminds visitors how beautiful it once was.

2.1.6. Australia

A Queens Land

The north-eastern horn-shaped peninsula of Queens Land, Australia in the Tropical Zone is two hundred million years old, one of the geologically oldest lands in the world. Heavy rainfall nurtured thick rain forest for a very, very long time. Thus, this area, as large as Japan, was covered with rich rain forest. This is an outstanding geological monument. Aboriginal inhabitants lived in these forests and on the seacoast for tens of thousands of years. All kinds of botanical species grow there and many new species are discovered every year in such places as Deintree National Park. The dense growth of numerous varieties of tropical plants with beautiful flowers is very impressive. Large drops of heavy rain hit the leaves high above in the canopy and reach the ground as mist. In the nineteenth century, rich mineral resources including gold and gemstones such as Opal were found and a ‘Gold rush’ occurred in various places in Australia. You can imagine the destruction of nature and of the aboriginal peoples that started then. After gold had become rare in the middle of the twentieth century, the Australian Government wanted to develop the cane-sugar industry for the sake of ‘more economical development’ in the rainforest area of Queensland. They divided the forest into tiny pieces and offered these to the so-called ‘planters’ free of charge. The condition of the offer was to cut down all trees and turn the area into sugar cane fields within one year. Otherwise, they should return this piece of land to the government. All the Aboriginals were driven from their homes in the forest and collected into townships such as Mossman Town nearby. They are socially discriminated against even today. The present Mayor of Port Douglas City in the north of Cairns was put into jail for his vigorous antigovernment action during the fight to protect this area from industry. In the 1980s, civil movements finally persuaded the Congress and government of its incomparable value. A tiny spot called Deintree Forest is protected as a National Park and is kept nearly as it was before. Visitors can only imagine the original landscape.

B Tasmania

The story is the same in geologically very old Tasmania, which is still peaceful and green. They prefer to drink delicious rainwater rather than underground water, because the Pacific, Antarctic and Indian Oceans and the Tasmanian Sea surround the island and the air is utterly clean. Stars shine with perfect brightness without twinkling. Hyon Pine, a very rare species unique to this island, grows very tall and the oldest one discovered has lived for more than two thousand years. These trees take a long time to grow, taking 200 years to reach maturity and have flowers and seed. Each annual ring in the trunk is about 0.5 millimetres thick. Hyon Pine and other similar trees produce timber of superb quality for shipbuilding and furniture. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British Empire invaded Tasmania because they found gold and noble metal mines as well as a large forest of Hyon Pine around Queens Town on the western coast of the island. By the end of the nineteenth century, about 50,000 Aboriginals who had lived on the island since the last ice age had been completely exterminated. These unique people appear to have been of a different genetic type from those of mainland Australia. The gold rush, centered on the mineral refinery of Queens Town, emitted sulfur compounds into the air and into the Gordon River, which runs down to a small fishing village, Strahan, along the Indian Ocean coast. The river coast turned black and still smells of sulfur. The sulfur pollution quickly ruined the surrounding forests. The British sold much of the timber to ship builders using deported prisoner’s labour and made a big profit. In the middle of the twentieth century, there was a plan to build a dam and a railway along the Gordon River to carry ores and other products to encourage growth in the mining industry. Civil volunteers protested strongly and succeeded in designating this wide area as a National Park. Now, one third of Tasmania is lucky enough to be maintained under protection as State and National Parks and the area of forest is increasing.

2.1.7. North American Continent

The northern part of the North American Continent is rich in forest. The paper industry owns large areas in order to produce low cost paper as in Siberia. Japan is one of major consumers of these products. They use chain saws to cut down trees, by placing two huge bulldozers linked by a huge chain a few kilometres apart in the forest. Then they pull forward these two bulldozers simultaneously and indiscriminately tear down all the trees, old or young, between them. Trees are taken to paper mills and the bare land left. This method results in the complete destruction of the forest. Native American inhabitants, who lived in and with the forest, lost everything. They were forced to fight against the bulldozers with their own bodies.

Near the Canadian-American border along the Yukon River, there is a small ghost town, Dawson City, with a population of several hundreds. However, during the gold rush in the nineteenth century it had a population of about 40,000, larger than that of Vancouver. If you drive to some of the side streams of the Yukon River, you will find cruel scars in the earth made during the gold rush. Along the winding streams in the forest, you will find long banks ten meters high made of stones varying from the size of a fist to that of a head. The bank is longer than several kilometers and at the end lies, in absolute silence, the ruins of a monstrous steel machine as big as the large Harrods department store in London. This was an automatic machine, which dug the river, washed and sieved nuggets from the mud. The waste was dumped forming the long stone banks. I assume that the story is the same with other gold mines. http://www.yukonalaska.com/communities/dawsonhist.html 2.1.8. Defoliation by the US Military

In 1950, after the Second World War, the People’s Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) declared their independence from France and established a Communist government. The USA, very much afraid of losing its influence in Asia, established an alternative Government in South Vietnam in 1954, to which it gave military aid. This action led to the Vietnam War3. The majority of the Vietnamese people was very much in favour of independence and supported the resistance movement of the Vietcong and Vietminh, which took the form of systematic guerrilla war. The US Army, equipped with plenty of sophisticated modern weapons and more explosives than they used in the Second World War could not defeat the guerrillas who had bases in the tropical jungles and villages. The US resorted to all kinds of cruel operations such as the extermination of all people including babies in Songmi Village on March 16, 1968. To locate guerrilla troops hidden in the jungle, the US military sprayed 7.2 million tons of defoliation pharmaceuticals from B52 heavy bombers. It was known that this pharmaceutical agent contained high concentrations of dioxin (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxine and its homologous compounds), known to be the most hazardous compounds to human health at very low concentrations of parts per trillion. It causes serious diseases such as cancer, and damages human genes causing a very high percentage of serious birth defects.

3 http://911review.org/Wget/www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/v1tribun.htm This is really a kind of chemical weapon. The rate of miscarriage in the area exposed to this chemical was 2.7 times bigger than that without exposure. The percentage of deformed babies in these areas is 13 times that without exposure. There was no victory and the US military was forced to withdraw from the Port of Saigon in April 29, 1975. In 1981, Siamese twin boys joined at their waists, Peto and Dok, were born in this area. In October 1988, they were brought to Japan to be separated. The Japanese press gave extensive coverage to the event. I left Japan for the USA to present a paper at an international conference, Fundamentals of Adsorption, on the day when the operation started. When I arrived in the USA the next day, I was eager to know what had happened and looked for news, but, strangely enough, I could not find it anywhere in the US media. What a selfish patriotism! The epilog is that the operation was successful and Peto is now working in a Vietnamese Hospital, but Dok is bedridden. http://www.angel.ne.jp/~nisikori/nam/nhyo65.html

In contrast to this, l saw in all the US media in the autumn of 2003, headline news on the successful operation in an American hospital on Egyptian Siamese twins who shared their heads. The same attitude was shown over the disaster of the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just recently the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC refused to accept an exhibition on this. http://www.asahi.com/

It is likely that the US is now making the same mistakes over the use of depleted uranium shells in the Balkan Peninsula and Iraq.4

2.1.9. Amazon

Forest destruction in remote areas such as the tropical zone is not very well known. In Amazon, Brazil for instance, a large-scale ‘development’ of the tropical forest is underway. It is believed that about one million native people had lived here for a long time before the white invasion started. In the twentieth century, diseases brought in by Europeans decimated this native population. Now, the Brazilian government encourages the development of the Amazon to increase the growth rate of the national industrial economy. As a result, the Amazon, the world’s largest forest and the largest source of oxygen, has begun to die. The inhabitants, who live in the forest, are fighting for their survival and many of their leaders have been secretly assassinated. 5

2.2. Pollution

Air pollution in the form of smog emerged as early as the nineteenth century in London, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. However, ecology or environmental science was only established as an important subject after the Second World War, when pollution began to have various serious impacts on humans. Let us look at some cases.

2.2.1. Minamata Disease

Minamata Disease is one of many bitter experiences of pollution in Japan, and is a good example of criminal action by the government-industrial complex. In April 21, 1953, a paper reported that a deformed baby with a damaged brain had been born in Minamata City, Kyusyu Island, Japan. The cause was not known but people thought it must be due to some local factor and called it ‘Minamata Disease’. However, some doctors were aware that the symptoms were very similar to those of mercury poisoning. There was a large caustic soda plant in the town called Japanese Nitrogen Co., which produced high-purity electrolytic sodium hydroxide (caustic soda or soda) using metallic mercury as the electrode. This was the usual method of producing high-purity sodium hydroxide everywhere in the world. I was told in a chemistry course at high school in 1940 that mercury, especially in the form of organic compounds, causes serious problems to the human nervous system. As caustic soda is an important basic chemical widely used in industry it is important to the national economy and so the Government is interested in its production from a political viewpoint. The tragedy in this case was that the effluent wastewater from this plant, containing inorganic mercuric and mercurous chlorides, was purged untreated into the shallow inland sea, Minamata Bay. I knew a medical doctor, who worked in this plant around that time. He confessed to me later that he studied the effect of the effluent water using cats as guinea pigs. The poor cats went crazy and died. He reported this to his seniors. However, the plant authority did not reveal the results of this experiment and publicly denied that Minamata Disease had any relation to the plant. Minamata was and is a traditional fishery town and a lot of shellfish and small fish harvested from the bay are eaten daily. These fish digest the mercury from the effluent and convert it to organic-mercury compounds

4 http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/background/du.html 5 http://www.amazonia.net/Articles/231.htm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1406567.stm such as tetraethyl mercury. This is readily adsorbed into the human body and was the cause of Minamata Disease. The number of patients suffering serious brain and nerve damage increased and most of them died. Several years later, the patients and their supporters protested to both the Japanese Nitrogen Co. and the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Japanese Government. However, the company and the government would not accept responsibility because high-purity caustic soda is a key feedstock of Japanese industry. The sufferers and their supporters fought very hard in the courts for about 40 years! Finally, after the Supreme Court judged in favour of the accuser, the company and the government admitted guilt and in about 1990, they agreed to pay compensation to the patients and relatives of the deceased. The number of people who were officially approved as victims was 2,265 and quite a number of patients are still fighting in the court. Similar cases have occurred in various places in the world.

2.2.2. Dangers of Radioactivity

Everyone knew about the dangers of radioactivity after the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons are obviously against International Law, since they cause numerous diseases, such as deformed babies, leukemia, cancer etc. However, nuclear testing was continued by countries such as the USA and USSR to strengthen their military power. Recognising the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the testing and production of nuclear arms was banned in all countries except those who already had them (USA, UK, USSR, France, China, India and Pakistan) and these countries were supposed to work towards the elimination of their own nuclear weapons. Sadly, they have not done so. Although the immediate influence of the radioactive isotopes released in a nuclear explosion is limited to the area where the explosion occurred, the radioactive isotopes, released during nuclear testing have diffused all over the earth. The half-life (the time taken by radioactivity intensity to decay to half its initial value) of many of these isotopes approaches 10,000 years. Most people forget these facts nowadays, but the ill effects of the radioactivity released by nuclear testing will continue for a long time.

I heard a story of civilian protest for nature conservation in Alaska in a documentary broadcast by NHK TV of Japan. For details see website http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/chariotseej.html. An abstract follows.

In 1957, the US Atomic Energy Commission decided to perform a series of nuclear tests called ‘Chariot Project’ only 30 miles south-east of Inupiat Inuit Village in Alaska. A group of volunteers including Inuit people considered the possible consequences of this project. Wild animals such as caribou and moose eat lichen growing under the snow on the surface of the Tundra. To their surprise, the radioactivity of the lichen studied was already several times higher than in plants elsewhere. The survey discovered that this was due to the fact that air and dust in the Arctic Zone contains more radioactivity than other zones. People were shocked by this result and became very much opposed to the nuclear tests. They faced strong pressure from the US Atomic Energy Commission. A professor of biology who belonged to this group was forced to leave the University of Alaska. They finally persuaded the Federal Government to cease the project. Recently, the professor got his post back and received an honorary degree from the University of Alaska. I hope very much that these people will continue fighting against the destruction of nature in other parts of the world. 2.2.3. Water pollution

Japan used to be famous for high quality water, because the average rainfall per year is about 1700 millimetres and water in the lakes is quickly recycled as the rivers from the mountains and lakes to the coasts are only short and the current is rapid. Until one hundred years ago, the largest Lake in Japan, Lake Biwa, 670 square kilometres, supplied water of superb quality to the Kyoto and Osaka areas with populations now of about 10 million. People enjoyed special tea ceremonies with this water. However, the waste from farms, houses and industries surrounding Lake Biwa seriously contaminated the water with increased values of BOD (biological oxygen demand) and COD (chemical oxygen demand). More and more chlorine was needed to make the water potable. People disliked the awful taste of their water, especially in summer when rainfall is low. Naturally, all the cities in the area made every possible effort to improve the water, such as strict anti-pollution laws. Now, they have improved the water-treatment by using ozone gas instead of chlorine and adsorbing organic material with activated carbon but at very high cost. The situation is worse where rainfall is inadequate to meet the demand for drinking water. For instance, the lakes among the mountain range between Norway and Sweden receive acid rain due to sulphur dioxide emissions from nearby countries including the British Isles and other European countries. The acidity of the lakes in these mountains increases because the recycling rate is low and the lakes as well as the rivers which flow from them will remain polluted for tens of years even if the source of the pollution is removed. This water flows into the North Sea. The Norwegian government is now spraying calcium oxide (lime) powder onto the acidic lakes to neutralize the pollution. Acid rain destroys old limestone buildings, such as various historical colleges of Oxford University. Pollution occurs in all rivers of developed countries, such as the Rhine, Thames, Danube, and Mississippi and their delta swamp areas, which are bird sanctuaries. The pollution of rivers in developing countries such as Mekong, Ganges, and Yangtze Rivers is also serious. Therefore, the demand for expensive bottled mineral drinking water has become huge even in these poor areas. This obvious contamination has attracted national attention and some countermeasures have been taken. However, the contamination of international rivers is not easily controlled.

2.2.4. Pesticides and food additives

In 1945, DDT was invented in the USA and mass-produced as an insecticide. Rachel Carson rang the warning bell on the dangers of insecticides in her book, Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin Press, in 1962. However, countless new insecticides and fungicides have been invented and introduced. Parallel to this, the number of people with serious allergies has increased dramatically. Many pesticides act as hormones. Numerous wild creatures such as the firefly, dragonfly, Japanese crested ibis and eagle are disappearing from Japanese forests. In 1954, a Food Technology Department was founded in Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA and since then food production has been revolutionised all over the world. Mass production of chickens and other animals as well as corn and vegetables has become possible with the help of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones, producing foods with attractive appearance and inexpensive price. Nowadays, people have become aware of the dangers of these additives and look for foods without them. The price of organic vegetables has risen in the supermarkets. A NHK documentary on TV Japan reported the effect of the cold summer of 2003 on agriculture as follows. A large farm in Nagano Prefecture in the Japan Alps area has successfully produced organic cabbages on a large scale for more than ten years. They used a minimum amount of pesticide to kill the insects and called the product organic, although there was no authorized definition of ‘organic’. They made their own definition of organic cabbage that the application of pesticide must be less than 19 times per season. According to them, the frequency of application was usually much less. They said proudly that, this year, they managed to keep to the maximum 19 applications in spite of the bad weather. Can you imagine - 19 applications of insecticides and they claim that their vegetables are organic! Fish cultivation is becoming popular all over the world. I mention a terrible case that happened in Japan. Japanese people love to eat delicious blowfish, which contain the highly toxic poison ‘tetrodotoxine’. It is quite safe to eat poison blowfish in licensed restaurants because the licensed cook removes all the poisonous parts. Since natural blowfish is very expensive, blowfish farming became popular but production of pearls in neighbouring traditional pearl cultivation farms began to decrease. The pearl planters searched for the reason and found that large amounts of formaldehyde or formalin (hazardous to humans in several parts per million in air) was frequently and secretly added to the water to protect blowfish from parasitic worms. Luckily for blowfish, the parasitic worms were killed but not the blowfish. Generally speaking, it is nowadays very difficult to find out the truth owing to the highly developed food technology and low morality. Besides these examples, there are numerous other cases. In Italy, at least twenty-eight gangs associated with the Mafia have been connected with illegal dumping of dangerous ‘special waste (highly poisonous chemicals such as dioxin)’ in the sea of southern Italy. There are probably other, as yet undiscovered, incidents of this kind.

2.2.5. Mass production and consumption

Before human activity became so intensive, nature could cope with our presence on this planet. One century ago, nothing was wasted and it was natural to recycle all materials. Excess foods and even human wastes, for instance, were fermented and went back to the land to enrich the soil. The planet was able to absorb all our waste and nature remained well balanced and clean. However, by the end of the nineteenth century industrial production was enhanced and Americans started the idea of mass production and promoted mass consumption as a virtue in order to support the increased industrial production. This tendency spread quickly all over the world after the Second World War and people forgot about saving and recycling. As a result, the amount of waste material, in the form of solids, liquids and gases is now far beyond the digestive capability of nature. In Japan in the past, it was common sense not to waste food. Children were told “The word rice looks like Ж shape in Kanji character [written as (8)(10)(8)] because rice is produced by human labour of eighty eight times. Therefore, god will punish you, if you waste even one particle of rice.” In Europe, older generations wipe the dishes with bread thoroughly after eating. Japan imports nearly 60% of its food and wastes a shocking amount of it - 5,600 million tons per year! Restaurants, schools, hotels, food processing industries etc. are the main sources of food waste. This is the second largest amount in the world next to the US. About 800 million people enjoy similar wasteful food habits in developed countries, whereas 800 million people are starving to death in Asia and Africa out of the total 6 billion people in the world today. 2.3. Abnormal climates

Before the first half of the twentieth century the destruction of nature was limited to small local areas as described above. However, the scale of destruction expanded to become global, parallel to the increase of the economy during the end of the twentieth century.

2.3.1. Air

A Smog

The London Fog, which resulted from the British Industrial Revolution, is well known. In the period of rapid economic growth in the sixties, Japan also had dense ‘smog’ in big cities, especially during cold seasons, as used to happen in London and Pittsburgh when coal was used as the domestic fuel. As calls for anti-pollution legislation increased in Japan, the Government was obliged to act, restricting not only the concentration of emissions but also the total amount. It was feared this might prove fatal to industry. However the air in big cities became cleaner, and industry survived without serious damage. The environment-protection-industry is now an important Japanese foreign-aid I had once a bitter experience in Krakow, Poland in the 1980s. Prof. item. This action was born from Rutzinsky of Poland invited me to his laboratory. We left Dusseldorf, bitter experiences such as the West Germany, for Lublin one morning in the middle of September. We Minamata Disease Case. managed to cross the Eisenach Border into Poland in the late However, the application of these afternoon. Darkness had fallen when we gave hardly a goodbye to a laws to heavy transport Diesel suspicious East German customs officer. We drove as quickly as we engines, one of the worst sources could in order to arrive at Lublin via Krakow in time. We felt happy and of the type of air pollution causing relaxed to be in Poland. However, as we approached Krakow there was lung cancer, is still delayed in thick smog with visibility down to only a few meters. Prof. Rutzinsky order to protect industry. murmured bitterly, “This is the result of Russian technology”. There are Pollution is not restricted to large coal-mines as well as salt-mines in the vicinity of Krakow, and national boundaries. Chinese USSR made this area the largest heavy-industry center in Poland. Of industries use inexpensive, sulfur- course, industrial productivity had first priority and no consideration was rich coal as fuel, and consumption given to pollution control. We drove very slowly in the milky sea of smog is rising in parallel with their trying to find a place to stop. A hotel light emerged in the curtain of economic growth. They do not smog, but there was no room available. Luckily for us, he remembered treat the sulphur-rich emissions that his wife had a good friend in Krakow. He called her on the phone and rain on nearby agricultural and she suggested that we hired a taxi to guide us to her house. It was fields in some areas such as the about 3 am in the morning when we finally arrived at her home. Both of Long (Yangtze) River is almost as us got serious flu. acid as vinegar (pH3) and vegetable leaves get yellow spots everywhere. A west wind brings this polluted air to Japan.

B Greenhouse Gases

As mentioned in section 1 the increased concentration of CO2 is raising global temperatures by the ‘greenhouse effect’. While CO2 is having the greatest impact due to its high concentration in the atmosphere there are other gases which have a greenhouse effect. Methane (CH4) was mentioned in section 2.1.1. and is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Nitrous Oxide (N2O) also has an effect. Concentrations of all these gases are now increasing rapidly as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases over the past 1000 years by the third IPCC (2001). The graphs show concentrations of carbon dioxide (blue), methane (yellow) and nitrous oxide (pink). (Japanese Weather Bureau (http://www.data.kishou.go.jp/obs-env/hp/2-2-3n2o.html))

Conscientious countries are now trying to decrease their CO2 emissions by sacrificing economic growth. However, the present effort to decrease CO2 shows the reality of human selfishness as follows. Travellers, including me, can now enjoy inexpensive, long-distance trips by air. Commercial aircraft fly all over the world. This is a sign of world peace and prosperity and very good for the tourism industry. Behind this phenomenon, however, the rapid increase in oil consumption by aircraft, increases the pollution of the stratosphere. Let us estimate how many tons of jet fuel per day are consumed. In one international flight by a jumbo jet, we burn more than twenty tons of jet fuel. Can you guess how many jets fly per day? About 300 international and domestic long-distance flights longer than about five hours are taking off from Narita and Kansai International Airports, and there are more than 500 short-distance domestic flights from 15 airports. The total number is more than 800 aircraft per day. Thus, passenger planes consume at least eight thousand tons of oil every day in Japan, despite the current economic depression. Commercial air companies say that their fuel consumption is only 7% of the world total, but military aircraft will add to the amount consumed by aircraft. Also, I must point out that the aircraft scatter oxides of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and other elements directly into the upper atmosphere contributing directly to the green house effect. In contrast, emissions from much of the fuel burned on the earth’s surface are absorbed by plants and the ocean, and take a long time to reach the stratosphere. These emissions from aircraft may contribute to the formation of the ozone hole as discussed in the next section.

C Ozone hole

Organofluorine compounds, often called CFCs, are stable compounds used in large amounts as refrigerant agents and in the silicone industry, and released into the air after use. These heavy-molecular-weight gases diffuse upward very slowly, reaching the stratosphere after 10 years and create chlorine radicals, which are known to decompose ozone. The ozone layer in the stratosphere absorbs high-energy ultra violet rays from the sun, which would otherwise cause fatal damage to plant and animal cells. For instance, like radioactivity, UV light damages proteins, producing free radicals, which cause skin cancer especially on white skin. The observatory in the Antarctic found a large and increasing hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic Continent. It is said that the intensity of UV radiation reaching Australia and New Zealand has increased because of this and the number of skin cancer patients is increasing in parallel. The Australian weather forecast gives daily warnings on UV radiation intensity. Fortunately, the rate of increase of the size of the ozone hole has been slowing down recently perhaps due to the decrease of CFC compounds, although the expansion of the ozone hole does not stop.

Figure 3 The concentration of CFCs at Okinawa showing the stabilisation of levels (Japanese Weather Bureau.(http://www.data.kishou.go.jp/obs-env/hp/2-2-3n2o.html)

Recent research has suggested a possible new mechanism for ozone decomposition. ‘Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs)’ formed of colloidal ice particles containing oxides of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, and other molecules including chlorine, are formed at low temperatures in the polar sky. These contaminants, perhaps partly from aircraft emissions, accumulate in polar areas from the temperate and tropical zones and become enclosed there during the polar winter. The extent of PSC formation and the size of the ozone hole fluctuate simultaneously and PSCs are now suspected to play a key role in the decomposition of ozone. At this point, I suggest that nowadays the speed of technological development and its application to industry is very high and the scale is very large compared to the assessment of its impact. In other words, not enough time and effort is being put into risk assessment. We must pay more attention to the possible risks of damage to nature from the application of new technology, as we already do in the development of new medicines. The concentration of N2O from World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases WDCGG

2.3.2. Abnormal temperature elevation

My home is located on the eastern hillside of Osaka Plain in the middle of the Temperate Zone at about latitude 35° N. We used to manage to survive in the hottest summer with a maximum temperature of 33-34°C due to a cold west wind that blows all year round across the sea of Japan from Asia. I mentioned earlier that in recent years, local plum and cherry trees have started to bloom two weeks earlier than normal. The maximum and average temperatures have been rising for decades. In the winter of 2003 to 2004, the average temperature for three months was 1.5° to 1.0° higher. The temperature inside my house nowadays exceeds body temperature at noon for a few weeks. According to the Japanese Weather Bureau, the number of days with maximum temperature above 35°C per summer is record-breaking. Apparently, the cause of this abnormality is in the high temperature of an equatorial current of the Pacific Ocean, named ‘El Nino’ near the coast of Chile. Historically speaking, this phenomenon used to occur in a 11 or 12-year cycle and the weather of the northern hemisphere fluctuated accordingly. Now, this high temperature seems to happen every year and indicates the rise of temperature and the change in the Pacific Ocean currents, which contains nearly half of the water on the earth’s surface.

Figure 4 The average temperature of the northern hemisphere over the past 1000 years. The red line shows the recent temperature measurements. The dark area is from measurements on wood, coral and ice cores of glaciers. (Japanese Weather Bureau.(http://www.data.kishou.go.jp/obs-env/hp/2-2-3n2o.html)

Another related phenomenon is the waywardness of typhoons. The nuclei of typhoons and hurricanes are born in summer on the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Then, they usually travel towards the northern and southern hemispheres along the eastern rim of the Asian and Australian Continents respectively. Typhoons travel north, and go up along the Philippines, Taiwan, and the Chinese Continent, while growing, and then to the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese Islands, and finally dissipate in the Sea of Okhotsk. These unwelcome guests used to take a regular orbit, migrating through the channel made by the low-pressure gap between the two high- altitude atmospheric pressure regions located in the Asian Continent and the Pacific Ocean, respectively. However, miraculously enough, very few of them have visited Japan now for more than twenty years, which is fortunate for us. The reason for this change is that the pressure over the Pacific Ocean is getting noticeably higher than that over the Continent, so that the channel between the two fluctuates greatly. This is because the temperature of the ocean is higher than before. The typhoons no longer have a channel to the north, and, instead, wander around the South and East China Sea. Moreover, the stratospheric west wind may be weaker than before and helps this tendency. This recent phenomenon is surely a strong evidence for the upset in the Earth’s weather. Statistical analysis over 100 years of Japanese weather by the Japanese Weather Bureau reveals that the average annual temperature is rising very rapidly compared to past changes. The frequencies and amplitudes of heavy rainfall, drought, and high and low temperatures each year have been increasing over the last 25 years. It is likely that the same phenomenon is occurring in Europe where record-breaking rainfalls and floods are now frequently seen. Analysis of changes in width of tree-rings and depth of glacier layers versus the time scale (the so-called ‘finger-print’ of the weather change), shows that climate does not change smoothly from one equilibrium condition to another, but swings radically between the two conditions until it reaches the second equilibrium. In other words, the oscillating weather change that we observe now may suggest that we are not in an equilibrium condition but are moving to a different condition, if it ever exists. This is most likely owing to the activity of humans on a global scale. In summer 2004, another shocking phenomenon resulting from temperature elevation was found. The snowcap of the world famous Mt. Fuji of Japan has disappeared! Mt. Fuji, as painted by the wood block painter Hirosige in the 1830s and by many other painters too, was famous for its permanent white snowcap on top of a beautiful conical shape.

At the end of August 2004, I led a group of tourists to the Japanese Alps in central Japan for ten days in order to escape from the oppressively hot temperatures of Osaka. We happened to find a very nice viewpoint along a roadside and enjoyed the magnificent view, looking down the Yamanasi basin surrounded by high mountain ranges. While taking photos in the fine weather, I noticed a conical shaped high mountain, totally black in colour. I wondered what mountain this was. Careful observation of the direction, distance and shape revealed that this is the beloved Fuji without snow and I exclaimed, “Look, I see Fuji.” However, people did not respond and looked doubtful, because it had no snow at all.

After I went home, I developed the digital photo, and had a nice picture of this scene. There was Fuji with a dark color in a hazy sky. Mt. Fuji is 3776 metres high located at latitude 35° N. I enlarged a few photos and I was sure that I could see no snow. I felt strange because I had a mental image of Mt. Fuji with its permanent snowcap at all seasons of the year. I hastily searched the internet for information about Fuji and found that there has been permanent ice, or Tundra, 50 cm below the surface for a very long time. One of the researchers wrote in 2003 that this Tundra was retreating every year and now exists only for about 300 metres from the summit. The beautiful snowcap of Fuji was due to this cold Tundra beneath the summit preventing the covering snow from melting. However, the Tundra had all gone from Fuji this summer and we have lost the snowcap as well as all residual snow inside the crater.

Mount Fuji without its famous snowcap. (http://www.mochiya.co.jp/image/000903.jpg)

Other consequences are a shortage of water in the large mountain-top hut and a large-scale landslide of the soil and rocks near the summit, which were previously kept solid by the Tundra beneath the surface, and the beautiful shape of Fuji will change in future. Also, I suspect that this phenomenon is connected with the decrease and contamination of natural springs on the foot of Mt. Fuji, which were famous for their excellent quality and quantity. The same is true for Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, 6007 metres high at latitude 3° S. The summit was permanently snow-covered in spite of being located near the equator. Now, the snowcap is definitely retreating as you will see in recent photos and it will presumably disappear in the very near future. 2.3.3. Ocean

Serious ocean contamination results from the wreckage of oil tankers, which occur every year. Perhaps nearly a million tons of oil have been dispersed into the ocean. Oil companies and governments try hard to minimize the damage to the ‘coastal inhabitants’, but this is only a short-term solution. They try to recover the spilled oil by pumping and absorbing it using synthetic hydrophobic or lipophilic (oil-loving) polymers. However, their final solution is to add a lot of surfactant to disperse the crude oil into the sea as an emulsion, which consists of micro particles of oil suspended in water like cream. The oil appears to have disappeared. People do not care what kind of damage is caused by creating this fine-particle oil emulsion in the sea. This problem is invisible but it cannot be sensible to put thousands of tons of petrochemical surfactants into the sea to add to the pollution of thousands of tons of oil. In addition to the chlorophyll of seaweeds and land plants, coral is a massive converter of CO2 to oxygen. Coral lives cooperatively with brown seaweed, absorbs CO2 and fixes it as calcium carbonate. I have visited several times the Great Barrier Reef, one of the largest coral reefs in the world, located 10 to 20 kilometres from the coast of north-eastern Australia. Near Heyman Island in the southern part of the reef in 1993, the coral was very beautiful like flowers and sheltered tropical colorful fishes. Even non-experts like me could see it was fresh and alive. In 2003, I was shocked to see many parts of the northern part of the coral reefs, such as near Port Douglas and Cairns. They looked deadly white as bones. We could see that much of the coral there had already died. Local people say that the pollution from the land is the reason. However, the polluting effluent from the land is not likely to be the primary cause, since it is quite far from the coast. According to Australian Government statistics, about 30% of these reefs have already died. The same is true of reefs in Okinawa, Japan, and all over the world.

Live (left) and dead (right) coral (International Coral Research and Monitoring Centre) (http://www.coremoc.go.jp/)

Coral grows in shallow seawater and has formed numerous Polynesian and Micronesian islands. Higher ocean temperature and ocean contamination is fatal for the coral, which is killed by a rise in ocean temperature of only one or two degrees. These coral rocks are vulnerable to acid rain and will gradually decompose. Together with the rise of the sea level, the islands could sink into the sea.

2.3.4. Retreating glaciers and rise of sea level

Glaciers all over the world are retreating markedly as temperature rises and the ice melts more rapidly than it is formed. I noticed that the edge of the large Athabaska Glacier in the Canadian Rocky Mountains National Park in 1990 was a few hundred meters back compared to 1970, when it was just near the highway. Its thickness must have decreased too. The glaciers of the Himalayan Mountains are also melting. In the middle of glaciers, large lakes are formed by melted water. The Indian Government tries hard to strengthen the bank of ice that keeps the water in. If these banks were broken, people living down stream would be subjected to sudden large-scale floods and avalanches. Since the amounts of water in glaciers and in the sea are estimated to be about 2.15 and 97% of the total water content of the earth respectively, the melting of glaciers will cause the sea level to rise. If the temperature continues to rise at the present rate, it could be 5°C higher after 100 years and it has been said this will cause a rise in sea level of about 90 centimetres. I think this old estimate is too optimistic. If the ice on the Antarctic Continent melts, the rise of sea level would be about 100 metres. We have never experienced such a large temperature rise in such a short period. It is interesting that satellite observation shows the thickness of the glaciers of the Antarctic Continent is increasing because of the increased snowfall caused by the increased humidity arising from the evaporation of water from the warmer oceans. On the other hand, the glaciers near the Antarctic Coast are rapidly breaking up and the penguin population is decreasing because of the warmer climate. In the third glacial period, the areas above latitudes about 40° N and 40° S were covered with thick ice and so sea level was a few hundred metres lower than now. Lands in many parts of world were connected to each other. This helped the migration of humans to various places. The temperature elevation in the following period caused the rise of sea level. Thus, many inland places in Japan, for instance, have the names of harbours, shores, and sea. The legends say that such places were once on the edge of the sea. A geological excavation discovered that my house, for instance, which is now on the side of a hill about 30 km from the nearest seashore of Osaka Bay, was once on the seashore. If the sea level rises further, then many parts of Tokyo, Osaka and many important large cities of the world will sink under the sea again. Even now, many parts of big cities are below sea level, protected from the sea by huge banks and dikes, like the dikes in Holland, built by investing large sums of money. Some Polynesian Islands, situated on the equator near the International Date Line, such as Tuvalu, with about 10,000 population, and Kiribati are marked examples. The inhabitants of some Tuvalu islands are likely to lose their lands soon and have asked the Australian Government to rescue them. However, the government refused because they do not recognize that the sea level is rising. Many cities are on the delta area of rivers such as Cairo on the Nile, and Calcutta on the Ganges. These cities have large populations consisting of many poor people. What would happen if these and other areas such as Tokyo, Osaka, Calcutta, Amsterdam, the Country of Bangladesh and so on having tens of millions people sank under the sea? There is neither an international definition of refugees due to a large-scale natural disaster nor an agreement on how to save them.6

2.3.5. Marine life and fish stocks

The fishing industry is declining. Japan is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, Japan Sea, China Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, and thus is a country of seafood. A few years ago, I visited beautiful Bergen, the Fjord All kinds of seafood, even poisonous blowfish, City, Norway, where the composer, Edward Grieg lived decorate Japanese dinner tables. Salmon, cod, and composed many songs and instrumental music sardine, herring and seaweeds were more than such as the opera “Peer Gynt”, which reminds people of abundant, only 50 years ago. The demand and the solemn beauty of Fjord Country. Raw herrings supply was balanced well. However, our marinated with various kinds of sauces decorated the domestic coastal production has not been able to breakfast table in the hotel where we stayed about 15 satisfy the traditional seafood habit now, owing to years ago. These have disappeared now. One evening, the pollution of the coast and international I went into a famous seafood restaurant on the harbor agreement to protect the territorial coasts of each and asked for local lobster, but the answer was no. country. Hence, Japanese fishing boats must Even the native Norwegians eat lobsters from New make long voyages even as far as the South Zealand, since the local lobsters became rare and too Atlantic Ocean. expensive to eat. Norway is the largest exporter of North Sea cod but its production is decreasing. They cultivate salmon in Fjords to export to Japan. The fishing industry in Norway is declining, but the international hotels in Bergen are full of people involved in the oil business based in the North Sea Oil Field.

2.3.6. Abnormal Ocean currents In the end of September 2001, I sailed along the The abnormal ocean current in the Pacific Norwegian Fjord Coast in a cargo boat from Bergen Ocean, as described in 2.3.2, is a manifestation north up to Kirkeness on the coast of the Balents Sea of of serious changes in weather patterns. Another the Arctic Ocean via Nordkapp. Before boarding, I example is in the Atlantic Ocean. bought a thick feather jacket to keep me warm from the Everyone knows that the warm Mexican possible coldness of the Arctic Zone. From the top deck Gulf Stream near the equator keeps the of our boat I fully enjoyed the silent wilderness of the northern coast of the European Continent on the coasts with many deep Fjord surrounded by high Atlantic Ocean warm. However, the present mountains. However, the temperature on the deck was phenomenon of particular warmth in the North not so cold as I thought, and the expensive thick coat Sea may cause a disaster. Danish scientists, was not necessary. We crossed the Arctic Zone in fine stationed in Greenland, found that the Gulf weather, to Trosmo, Nord Kapp at 71°N. and finally got Stream circulates the entire North Atlantic off at Kirkeness Habour near the Russian border. It was Ocean not only horizontally, but also vertically. so warm there. The welcoming beautiful maple leaves The warm current on the ocean surface goes were decorating the silent town. The end of September is north and stops near Greenland and the shore the season of maple leaves in Japan too! Now Kirkeness of Spitzbergen Islands in the Arctic Ocean, residents say it is warmer than ever. warming these coasts as well known. The newly found fact is that the current is cooled down by melting icebergs and glaciers there, and descends to the bottom of the ocean at around the Barents Sea and forms a convection current. The cooled current at the bottom of the ocean proceeds southwards, emerging near the equator, cooling the hot tropical zone. Actually, this vertical current acts as a heat pump keeping the Atlantic climate milder. These horizontal and vertical circulations helped the development of European Culture and European inhabitants enjoy a mild climate. However, this

6 http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/specials/0401/0107tuval.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1656222.stm convection current seems to be slowing down perhaps because of the lowering of the salt concentration of the sea, which makes the density of water lower, accompanied by global temperature elevation. If this slowing-down phenomenon continues, then the European, as well as North American, Continents will become cooler. There were quite a few conflicts in European history such as the invasion of the southern countries by the Swedish Empire, because of only a minor climate change in the Middle Ages. In a worst-case scenario, the same phenomenon may lead to the ruin of European civilization (once in a blue moon, I hope).

I am very grateful for an unforgettable experience of the kindness of Norwegians. Our cargo ship stopped over at Trondheim Harbour after a few days from Bergen. This town had a great fire in the beginning of 1900. Then, it was rebuilt following the fashionable Art Deco style with the aid from the German Government. We enjoyed the beautiful town for half a day while our ship was loading and unloading her cargo. I needed some money to exchange in a bank. After exchange of the currency, we happily left the town and continued the sail. After a few days, an announcement called me to come to the office immediately. I went to the reception desk and they asked me if I had my passport. I went back to my cabin and found my small shoulder bag gone. This bag contained my passport as well as money and all other important documents for my journey. I became very pale and went back to the desk in a hurry. The crew asked me to call a phone number in Trondheim. It was the bank. They said they found the bag and decided that I must have been a tourist passenger of the cargo, and contacted the boat. In my great luck, I could receive my bag in the terminal harbor Kirkeness! 2.4. Damage to human beings

When we talk about the destruction of nature, human beings are included in the category of nature. In the following section we study how we are destroying humanity.

2.4.1. War

War is the most efficient destruction of human by human! The definition of war in this chapter is fighting between nations using violence, although there are other means of fighting such as economic blockades without physical violence. The concept of the nation has changed as the worldview has changed. Before about the twelfth century God, a dictator, or a human with authoritative power was considered to own the nation and this still applies in some developing countries. In these circumstances war was a fight between these authorities and their relatives, and they only hired common people as warriors. War victims were mainly people involved in the fighting. Religious revolution, renaissance, and especially humanism, later, led to a fundamental change in the concept of nation. People, sometimes with the pretext of race, culture and/or economy, or money, are now considered to own the nation, which is called a People’s Republic or Democratic Country. As such, all people in a nation are forcibly involved in the war whether they support the war or not, with some exceptions, such as conscientious military objection. Meanwhile, the industrial revolution has entirely changed the technology, strategy and method of warfare. The number of victims increased tremendously from the end of nineteenth century. The appearance of weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, and nuclear, reflects the radical change in the nature of war. After the middle of the twentieth century, people thought that peace could be maintained by the Balance of Power or Mutually Assured Destruction based on nuclear arms. Now in the twenty-first century, Pin Point Precision Attack and robotic weapons utilizing high electronic technology is the key issue and people kill each other on a large scale under the name of a Holy War to defend Democracy. Peace does not mean a state of society without violence, but the state of the society of love and friendship.

2.4.2. Environmental hormones

We have already mentioned a few cases of chemical contamination. Here, I will talk about environmental hormones, which is the common name for Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. In the 1950s, the broiler-chicken industry grew very big in the USA. Mass production of chickens spread throughout the USA and then all over the world. They operate a large-scale production industry of thousands (now hundreds of thousands) of chickens and turkeys in a single plant to reduce the cost of production. An alarming report came from Boston in about 1990 on the effect of chemical additives on animals. The population of crocodiles in the Florida swamps was found to be decreasing. Scientists in Boston found that the sex organs of many male crocodiles had vanished or were much smaller than normal. They suspected that the synthetic surfactant effluents to the swamps could act like sex hormones and retard the growth of male organs at the embryo stage. They concluded that this could be the reason for the decrease of this species. A Japanese research laboratory experimentally confirmed this in 2001. The growth of sex organs in a baby in a mother’s When I was in Massachusetts Institute of uterus is affected and the development of male organs will Technology, Boston in 1954, I sometimes went be disturbed, if, for example, the mother takes excess to one of the chain-restaurants called female hormones or chemicals functioning as hormones Kentucky Fried Chicken with a symbol of a hen after impregnation. This gives rise to various degrees of on top of its chimney and I enjoyed young, fat, abnormal modification. What are these chemicals doing to and soft fried chicken. The meat was really human sex organs? soft and juicy, and the price was cheap for Recently I heard that a laboratory tried to grow hens foreign students. The trick was that they gave without feathers so that they can save the labour costs of birds a lot of antibiotics and female hormones plucking. This is called ‘food technology’. A brand new to make them grow faster, softer and bigger. department of food technology was built in Massachusetts This type of food has now become widely Institute of Technology while I was there and I was once popular all over the world. asked to test the taste of artificial chocolate. I was not told what the artificial ingredient was, but the taste was OK. Food technology now means poor people eat artificial foods with similar appearance to, and a vague resemblance to the taste of, genuine natural foods but cheaper. Almost all foods in supermarkets are now artificially treated in some way or other. Ordinary people have no choice but to eat these foods, containing emulsifiers, preservatives, synthetic flavours, and colour etc. It is almost impossible to find purely natural food without any additives (including agricultural chemicals). Even so- called ‘organic’ vegetables (grown without the addition of man-made chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides) when produced near cities, grow in soil mixed with decayed leaves containing polluted dust from the air. Hence, in Japan, more than 10 % of our population is suffering from various kinds of allergic symptoms, including myself. I am afraid that this is only a small example out of many other biological effects caused by chemicals used for mass-production of foods. It is nowadays nearly impossible to live a natural life as we did in old times.

2.4.3. Biotechnology

In the twentieth century our planet experienced a population explosion despite the number of wars taking place and there is a serious potential shortage of fuel and food. The U.S. Government and big enterprises have invested heavily in bio- and gene-technology to create high yielding corn, bean and other species, in order to control the world food market. They have been quite successful. However many people are against this technology because it may lead to the same mistakes as previous food technologies, which were not subjected to long-term safety assessment. It took billions of years to modify the genes of bacteria to achieve a human species through the process of evolution. Therefore, new unknown genes, which are modified over only a few years, would be too dangerous for humans to accept as edible materials on a global scale. A long period of research is absolutely necessary for safety assessment. Hopeful of achieving the great human dream of an immortal life in the very near future, laboratories try to synthesize artificial human genes on an industrial-scale, which could again be very lucrative. Soon, we will be able to synthesize parts of human organs and a human being as well. Given modern technology, it is a matter of time before this is done, whether we want it or not. We must know the outcome of this adventure. It is a typical example of the world of madness. The time is near to ask ourselves who we are, human, animal, devil or Pseudo-God. Only ten years ago, the novel by Ken Follet, Third Twin, Random House Publishing Co., 1997, was a horror mystery, but it is now a real issue. I have been describing only pessimistic aspects of modern biotechnology. However, I would like to add one small and possibly optimistic aspect of the contribution of this technology to nature. That is the biological research of human tissues. There are new cures and/or hopes of future cures, even for the lethal pancreatic cancer, which is rarely cured today. This method comprises the injection of fresh lymph of a close relative, which stimulates the patient’s natural healing power. This method has successfully cured a disease with no need of surgery or chemicals to kill cancer cells. This kind of approach may be harmonious to nature and is now called the medicine of the twenty-first century.

2.4.4. Computers

The U.S. initiated the computer technology industry in the 1940s. This has developed so rapidly that modern human society cannot exist without computers. Modern warfare relies on high precision weaponry operated by sophisticated large computers. The U.S. as a Superpower, equipped with these weapons and nuclear fusion bombs, believes that they can control this world without the cooperation of other organisations such as the UN. Let me mention one example of the disadvantages of computers. The computer, in the form of computer- games, for instance, is now attacking the human brain. The human-made computer-software as well as the hardware reacts instantly with a speed much faster than that of the human nerve. This kind of game demands instant reaction from your eyes to fingers to hit the mouse button as fast as possible. Usually, you will lose the game if you think a little longer. Thus, people will loose the logical way of thinking. This means that the computer trains you repeatedly to be instinctive with reactive behaviours and not to think logically, from a very young age. In Japan, people prefer to look cartoon-style picture stories that can be impulsively and emotionally comprehended. They are no longer interested in reading thick books. Thus cheap picture cartoon books fill more than half of the shelves of bookstores in down town. In many countries, we have many strange or illogical crimes, which even police and experts of criminal psychology cannot anticipate and understand. I believe that one of reason may be that an imaginary world is created in people’s brains based on computer games which frequently involve rapes, murders, violent fighting and killing. The manufacturers of these games care only to win bestseller ranking. These violent and/or sex stories fill half of the shelves of rental video shops and it is more and more difficult to find warm-hearted, happy, human stories. This cultural disease is spreading widely as computer technology develops. Look at the American Yahoo internet, which is full of warning pages on computer viruses. A peaceful life is seldom possible in the computer world.

3. The corruption of natural balance

As mentioned above, a simple survey of the various aspects of nature destruction indicates the loss of the balance of nature. Various types of chemicals, which did not exist before, pollute air, water, soil, plants, animals and humans. Previously nature could digest contaminants soon after their production and they did not cause any damage to nature. Thus nature kept the balance or equilibrium in the past. The worldwide occurrence of persistent pollution indicates that nature is no longer able to keep this balance. Our earth is a beautiful planet composed of water, oxygen, carbon and other elements in proportions and at temperatures that enable all kinds of plants and animals to thrive. All these living things, including humans, are based on a biological mechanism of genetics and all have similar genes and DNA. Since the earth is a closed system, each individual natural event interacts with other events within the system. This interaction had produced a beautifully balanced and harmonious system. All life on earth is creating a heavenly philharmonic symphony played by an excellent orchestra with many musical instruments. However if one of the instruments becomes out of balance, the symphony would easily be spoiled. Human activity has upset the balance and throughout the entire system individual components are experiencing big and small swings of change throughout the entire system, which will continue until they reach a new equilibrium. We do not know where and how the next stable equilibrium of the earth will be.

4. Chaos of concept

All people are aware that something is wrong with modern civilization, which is causing such drastic destruction of nature. We all feel that we should do something to protect the environment. There are many official and voluntary movements and unorganised individuals, ranging from left to right and from south to north, with a variety of philosophies, aims and methods. Aims range from the defence of the happiness of an individual, or their family, their town, or their nation, as was seen in the previously mentioned case of the Japanese ‘Aum-Sect’, to the welfare of humanity in general or the welfare of nature as a whole including humanity. Some of these movements seem to be selfish and short-sighted. Until we learn how to deal with the destruction of nature, we will surely face a large-scale catastrophe, like ants drowned in a flood. What we do now is merely a collection of separated minor efforts, but it will take a major effort to achieve the long-term conservation of the global balance of nature. Therefore, it is urgently necessary to achieve a unanimous understanding of Why we destroyed nature and what is wrong with our modern civilization and a unanimous consensus on What and how we must take action to restore nature. To obtain an answer to this question, it is helpful to study the history of the human worldview, How we have looked at nature.

5. History of the worldview of the human race

~ Nature, God and Human ~

Chimpanzee and Bonobo are said to have evolved into prototypes of humans about 6 million years ago in Africa. These prototypes started walking upright and running about several hundred thousand years ago and became able to eat not only fruits, leaves and grasses, but also meats, and able to live under a variety of different natural environments. Compared with the total length of this human prehistoric period, the period of recorded human history is very short. We can detect their trace and infer their history from about 50 to 10 thousand years ago, based on hard records such as stone, metal tools and rock paintings as well as recorded facts and memories such as mythologies, social customs and legends or folklore. We sometimes erroneously believe that people in archaeological time, compared to the modern age, were simple and uncultivated barbarians on the basis of known history. However, it is dangerous to imagine that we are superior to them because there is seldom understandable evidence about their way of living. As archeological research develops, it becomes clearer that their lives were much more sophisticated than we imagined before, and the difference lies mostly in materialistic terms. During the last ice age, the weather of the present tropical areas of Northern Africa and the Middle East were much milder and richer in plants and animals. This made human life easy and the population grew. As research has revealed, human civilization seemed to flourish for several hundred thousands years there, as seen in North African cave paintings. As the climate became warmer toward the end of the ice age, people looked for a better place to live. While some people remained in the Middle East, some groups migrated as follows: (1) East, along the coasts and shallow seas, to India, South East Asia, and Sunda Land, an area which is now sunk under the sea (see section 6.2.2), finally reaching Japan about thirty to forty thousand years ago. (2) West and, probably, north-west, to the Aegean Sea, Balkan Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast of Southern Europe, very probably giving rise to the Aegean Sea and Egyptian Culture, which is the origin of Greek, Roman and European Civilization. (3) North, some to south Siberia along what is now the Siberian Railroad and some further to the south, to northern China. This group gave rise to the Han (Chinese majority tribe) Culture along the Yellow River about ten to twenty thousand years ago. (4) Then, finally, across the Bering Strait to the North and South American Continents. Each group built its own culture suited to the prevailing climate.

It is a common understanding that humanity’s worldview has passed through approximately three stages: the ‘Era of Nature’, which lasted for many thousands of years; the ‘Era of God’ for several thousand years; and finally the ‘Era of Humanity’. Let us look at how we changed our worldview starting from the ‘Era of Nature’.

6. Era of Nature

6.1. Animism

During the ice age and soon after, tropical and semitropical zones were cooler than now and had abundant rainfall and plenty of trees, grasses and animals. In North Africa and on the Mediterranean Coast of Europe, archaic cave drawings illustrate the abundance and variety of life. In this mild climate amid nature’s abundance, people worshipped the extraordinary power of nature in the form of Animism. Initially, when the size of the community was limited only to families and relatives, they thought that objects intimate to their particular surroundings, such as animals, rocks and rivers, each had their own will and spirit. For example, the river flowed because it wanted to flow. Thus, they worshipped important animals that played a key role in their life, awesome and important natural phenomena like sunrise at the spring equinox, giant rocks, rivers, stars (which point the direction of travel) etc. as is still the case in various parts of the world. Most of the modern monotheistic religions erroneously regard animism as a primitive and immature faith, and call it ‘Voodoo’ and/or superstition.

6.2. Pantheism

As the community grew larger, and insight into the intricate mechanisms and wisdom behind nature became deeper, people developed a more generalized worldview. Animism changed into pantheism - the awareness of the presence of God behind nature in a more general form. The larger communities of people prayed in common to a particular form of nature, such as the sun, a mountain, an animal or tree, as a symbol and manifestation of God. They prayed for mercy, happiness, food, water supply and favourable weather. Pantheism seems to have been widely developed spreading out from Africa via the Orient and all over the world. (The ‘Orient’ is the area usually called the ‘Middle East’ in European texts). For instance, Zoroastrianism, which developed in Persia and still survives in that area, admires fire. Many temples and shrines in Asia including Japan admire fire and water, sometimes in the form of a dragon. In addition, many temples keep and admire animals such as monkeys, elephants, cows, snakes, hens (South East and East Asia, Japan), horses (China, Japan), deer (Japan), fox (Japan) as the missionaries of Gods. In Europe, the Celts admired the sun in the form of a ring before Catholicism spread. The ring re-appeared as the symbol of the Irish Catholic, in the combined shape of the Cross and a round sun in about the twelfth century, when St. Patrick arrived there on his mission. This would have greatly helped to convert the native Celt to Christianity.

A modern Irish ornament showing a cross with Celtic knots, in a ring. The admiration of the ring as a representation of the sun still persists in the finger ring, which is widely used not only as a symbol of power and political authority as you see in Wagner’s opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, but also as an ornament. The circle was also the symbol of God, perfection, in the initial period of Buddhism. This shape turned into a wheel and later into the fylfot. The symbol of God also means the cycle of life and perfection in the religion of native North American people.

6.2.1. The Orient

People in the Orient as well as the other two groups who migrated from the Orient to Europe and the north- eastern Eurasian Continent, Mongolia and northern China, where the climate was drier than Sunda Land, developed a culture based on wheat and animals. Their gods were stars, lion, ox and other important animals. These people were patriarchal, and buried their dead in tombs.

6.2.2. Sunda Land

As mentioned in Section 5, one group who migrated eastward from the Orient several hundred thousand years ago finally arrived at Sunda Land, via the coast of the Indian Ocean. Most of the seas surrounding the Eastern rim of the Indian Subcontinent, Andaman, Malaysia and Indonesia are now not deeper than 200 metres. In the ice age, the sea level was lower by as much as 200 metres and the area mentioned above was believed to have been a large continent called ‘Sunda Land’. Its eastern limit was the narrow but deep Lombok Strait next to Bali Island (the gap between plates). The seas of the Gulf of Thailand and the South and Eastern China Sea up to Okinawa and the southern part of the Japanese Islands would have been shallow or dry also. Some evidence of traces of that period is now being studied by ocean archaeologists. An example is the sea-bottom ruins of Yonakuni Island off Okinawa, Japan. 7 Until sometime after the ice age, the area where Sunda Land existed was cooler than now, and got plenty of rainfall because it was situated between two large oceans, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Trade winds blowing off these oceans brought plenty of moisture from both sides. A culture based on rice and fish developed and spread beyond the Himalayan Mountain Range up to Yunnan and Tibet and across the Indo-China Peninsula (Vietnam). The warm humid climate gave them a rich life supported by plenty of rice and seafood. This culture diffused widely through South Asia, the southern part of China up to the River Yangtze, and the Pacific Coast up to Japan several tens of thousands years ago. People in these areas still have the same life style eating rice, seafood and fermented food like Miso made of fermented Soya bean. (Rice has better productivity and contains more protein than wheat). They live in houses with the floor roughly 1 m above the ground to protect them from the effects of high humidity and to help keep the houses cooler. They have kept the extended family system, in which several generations live together under the same roof providing the systematized regular labour necessary for rice production. The inhabitants of Sunda land had a matriarchal society and we still find many female-line communities in the rice-growing areas, where men visit the women’s houses with the permission of the housemistress, who is the head of the family. Also they cremated their dead and this practice is still found in south and east Asia. I visited an interesting people, the ‘Naxi’, population about 230,000, in Yunnan Province, China in 2002. These people, who differ from the majority Han Race in China, are called a minority race by the Chinese Government. The Naxi had an independent country called ‘Dairi’ before the French Occupation in nineteenth century, but were invaded by Communist China after the Second World War following the withdrawal of the French military. They live around the beautiful Linjiang district, the source of the Mekong and Yangtze rivers. Recently they revived the local use of their own ‘Tompa’ language with hieroglyphic characters different from the ones, alongside the official Han language (see Figure 6).

Figure 5 Tompa letters reading ‘I love you’

They maintain the female-line family system, unlike the Han. The daughter inherits the mother’s family name. The housemistress decides everything for the family members. Women are hard workers in caring for the family and working in the fields to grow food, whereas men get together, drink tea, smoke tobacco and chat with

7 http://www.yonaguni.jp/yum.htm (Japanese), http://www.lauralee.com/japan.htm (English) http://www.xpeditionsmagazine.com/magazine/articles/japan/japan.html (English) friends, or else work as technicians such as carpenters and/or warriors. This might have happened in Japan too. We had many powerful queens, such as Himiko who was recorded in ancient Chinese Han Dynasty literature. Many leaders and the servant of God were women in Japanese mythology before Chinese culture influenced Japan. Patriarchy might have been brought later from the Orient via northern Asia through the first Silk Road, along the present Siberian Railway to Manchuria, Korea and later to Japan through the second Silk Road via the Gobi Desert and Northern China roughly 15 to 20 thousand years ago. The Han race migrated to Japan from about 5 thousand years ago. I would like to mention some examples of Pantheism in Asia.

6.2.3. Brahmanism and Hinduism

Nobody knows when Brahmanism started in India in spite of the existence of many documents written in the ancient ‘Sanskrit’ Language. Over time, it was much modified and became polytheistic. ‘Hinduism’ is the European name for Brahmanism (Hindu means India). Original Brahmanism had surprisingly similar characteristics to Shintoism in Japan in respect of its ideas and its social non-hierarchical system as will be described later. Hinduism, like Shintoism, is very hard to define. The following anecdote is often used to explain Hinduism. A boy was walking along the road and found the dead body of a little bird. He felt sorry for its death, buried it along the road, and put a small rod on top of this mound as a sign of the bird. Later a passer by looked at this rod and put a flower in front of the mound. Later, a man built a tiny shrine above the mound. Finally, a big temple was built there and many people started visiting. If you take a walk in the suburban streets of its capital, Denpasar, you Modern Hinduism has quite will easily find a succession of houses with large gardens surrounded by a large number of believers in long walls along the street. In each compound, a family consisting of Asia in such places as Bali several generations lives together in the same square. In their gardens, Island, Indonesia, where it is the they have mini-scale temples and pagodas, as many as ten or more, major religion, whereas Islam is and large and small trees. Every morning, someone like the housewife, the major religion in all other carrying on her head a plate full of small dishes having pieces of parts of Indonesia with 180 flowers, vegetables and cakes as offerings to gods, visits each of these million believers. The Balinese mini temples and trees in her garden, places these offerings in front of have an extended family system them, and prays. People carry out this kind of ceremony not only inside consisting of 3 to 4 generations the house but also in front of big trees, for instance, along the streets living in one house, as was and is and in Hindu temples every day. Each individual has his or her own god often seen in the rice-growing to protect him or her. provinces in Asia.

6.2.4. Shintoism

I would like to mention another typical example of pantheism, Shintoism, in some detail. The Japanese have kept the Sunda Land culture until today. This is because Japan, a collection of offshore islands off the Far Eastern coast of the Eurasian Continent, had little influence from the cultures of the Orient, Europe and Asian Continent until about two thousand years ago. Most Shinto shrines have kept the original, typical pantheistic style, although newer Shintoism is more polytheistic. Shintoism is a general name for many independent shrines, having different gods, as in Hinduism. It is not a centralized system but rather a definitive classification of religions by modern Japanese law, because they have similar style and formalities to each other. I will give some details on the original pantheistic shrines. There are numerous large and tiny shrines all over Japan, and each one is a legal religious foundation of its own. Each village has a Shinto shrine with its own God, such as the sun, a mountain, a giant rock, an animal such as an imaginative dragon, snake or fox, plants, or a hero and heroine of mythology. Village people visit the shrine not necessarily for their own benefit, but mostly to offer prayer for his, her or its protection from sufferings such as famine. Offerings such as fresh crops, vegetables, fresh fishes and fruits of harvest, but, usually, not a sacrifice, are still brought to the shrine. The design and structure of shrine buildings are usually older than those of Buddhism, which arrived in about the sixth century and are very similar to those in South Asia. For example, the gate of the Shinto temple is called ‘Torii’. (see Figure 7) Its original meaning in Japanese is ‘hen’s presence’. These gates were originally made of logs with a simple Π shape, which are also often seen in old villages of South Asia such as those of the Naxi tribe mentioned above. On the top of the gate, Naxi people place a skull of an animal such as a hen or water ox, which is said to act as a defense against evil spirits entering. The hen is said to be the first domesticated animal in Asia and, according to Shintoism, was a messenger of god. Figure 6 Various types of Torii

All Shinto temples contain a round-shaped mirror, representing the sun as the symbol of god, an iron sword and a comma-shaped beaded jewel made of Jade or Quartz, which represents the human embryo. We see here a typical example of pantheism. These comma-shaped beads are often found in the ancient tombs of aristocrats and in old paintings of aristocrats. Erroneously thought to be ornaments, they were actually the symbol of god, which represents the essence of nature. The human embryo is sacred, because it is the origin of the human being made by fertilization. This symbol as god is seen not only in Japan but also in other Asian countries such as Korea. The Korean national flag has, in the centre, two embryos surrounded by a circle. That is, the placenta (or the sun) surrounds the blue embryo (sky) and red embryo (earth), and this system indicates the universe. Even now, it is a custom among Japanese common people to keep the baby’s navel cord [or placenta in the case of noble classes] in a precious box and worship it for many years. Let me introduce some traditional Japanese ways of life, because this provides typical examples of their pantheistic worldview. Traditional Japanese houses are made mainly of wood with straw matting for the floor being about one metre above the ground like a Shinto shrine, with sliding doors between rooms made of wood and paper, and clay-made walls and baked clay tiles for the roof with natural decoration. One reason for this structure is to prevent damage from high humidity because all those construction materials absorb humidity whereas stone, concrete or steel do not. Also Japanese people feel more natural and relaxed surrounded by these materials. They love to have gardens, which copy nature, attached to their houses. When a satisfactory area is not available for a garden, they have veranda with flowerpots and ‘Bonsai’, which is a miniaturised form of nature. The Japanese garden is markedly different from that of Roman-type gardens in Europe. The basic concept of the former is to copy nature as simply and genuinely as possible and to enjoy the beauty of four seasons in condensed form, whereas the latter tries to modify nature as artificially as possible. People prefer to see nature in some condensed and abstract form rather than artificial geometric style. The same is true for art. Traditional Japanese painting is in watercolour using inorganic natural pigments as colour material and the subjects are mostly natural scenes and landscapes, such as mountains, rivers, lakes and flowers. The paintings of Hiroshige, a world famous painter of wood block prints, are typical. He painted the living style of common people always surrounded by natural scenery. Many Japanese traditional ceramics are intended to have irregular-shapes and colour because this gives them a natural feeling. When continental people look at these traditional ceramics made in Japan, they might feel that these are rejects. The Japanese try to copy nature in an abstract way and people prefer deformed shapes for their delicacy and elegance. The Japanese ceramics made with geometrically perfect shape and colourful decorations, such as ‘Arita’, were made mainly for export to Europe. Compared to this, most of the best Chinese and European pottery have shapes as geometrically perfect as possible and express something very artificial. The word ‘Art’ means something being made by humans.

6.2.5. Taoism

Tao means ‘road’, which means the right road people should take. It is as old as Hinduism and Shintoism and belongs to the pantheistic category. It originated in the Han tribal worship of natural objects such as the Polar Star. As time passed the original pantheistic characteristics became weak and moral, philosophical and mystical aspects were strengthened and fortune-telling and superstitious aspects were developed. These aspects had benefits for either individuals or the government. Taoists pray to many ‘gods’ or spirits, including Christ, Buddha, Confucius, and so on - whatever appears beneficial to believers. I visited a huge Taoist temple in Takao (Kaoshan), Taiwan. There were statues of all the gods from monotheistic religions. They say that because they have adopted all the other religions of the world, their religion is superior to others. Nearby stores sell false trillion yen bills to countless visitors to use as an offering to the gods in order to gain all kinds of benefits. There are various types of ceremony intended to control the spirits. The ritual of burning fake money at funerals to buy favours for the deceased is well known. Taoism was banned during the Chinese Communist Revolution together with all other kind of religions, although it has revived now, like the Russian Orthodox Church. 6.2.6. Pantheism in North and South America

I must mention another example of pantheism in the Native Americans. The American Continent was and is rich in nature. People emigrated across the Bering Strait from the Orient via Siberia a few tens of thousands of years ago. They spread all over the North and South American Continents, and developed their own culture and religion. They have always admired and worshipped nature. They believed in the circle, which indicates perfection, the mighty sun and the symbol of God. A ‘medicine man’, after rigorous training, can talk to nature such as flowers and insects. When he wanted to collect honey from the bee’s nest, for example, he asked permission of the bees. Then, bees would not attack him. They did not like to live with or near white people, not only because the severe discrimination they suffered after the invasion by ‘frontiersmen’, but also because whites use dirty (polluted) artificial things such as soap. These people believe that God owns the land and man does not – land is on loan from God and man has the responsibility to take a good care of the plants and animals, since God gives him the best wisdom among all the living things to do so. We all know what happened to these native people of the North and South American Continents in the last few centuries when Europeans who had an entirely different worldview invaded them.8

6.2.7. Pantheism on the Mediterranean Coast

The people who migrated westward reached beautiful places to live along the Mediterranean Coast such as the area which is now the Aegean Sea, as the sea level then was lower. They developed the Hellenistic and Egyptian civilizations, which invented hieroglyphics and various alphabets and forms of writing for the first time in human history. These civilizations were all pantheistic as clearly seen from the ruins and records which were preserved in much better conditions than those of Sunda land, because of the drier climate. In addition, they had a lot more mountains where they can move to, following the rise of sea level. This civilization is now recognized as the origin of European civilization by historians such as Fernand Braudel of France, who studied history from a wider point of view than before.

6.2.8. Pantheism in the European Continent

Some people moved further north and reached the Atlantic Ocean. The study of relics from the Celts and Germans, who are the ancestors of most of the present Europeans, show that they had a pantheistic culture different from that of modern Europeans. However, very little trace of them remains due to the widespread influence of Christianity. None-the-less, careful study by, for example, Leopold Schmitt, Paul Sartori and others shows that Europe still retains some traces of its past culture in festivals such as those of Odin and Troll in Scandinavia, Santa Claus, Kloepfelsnaechte, Mitra, Silbester Abent, St. Valentine and so on. As the ice age ended and the temperature went up, the climate in tropical zones got warmer, sea levels rose, and the coastal area got smaller. Sunda Land sunk slowly under the sea. The population was now too large to be accommodated in the reduced coastal areas and in Asia the population migrated northward along the coast of the Asian Continent, the Islands of Philippines, Taiwan, Okinawa to the final destination, Japan roughly 40 thousands year ago with their culture. People’s pantheistic understanding of the world began to change, as the size of communities grew and the climate changed. The idea of religion or theology developed and pantheism was transformed to polytheism.

7. Era of God

7.1. Polytheism

In polytheism the object of admiration changed from nature to gods and then to idols or statues of the gods, which frequently have human figures. It is sometimes very difficult to give simple definitions or distinctions between pantheism, polytheism and monotheism. As time passed the number and variety of traces, such as ruins, mythologies and folklore increased, and as archaeological study progresses, the past will become clearer and clearer. I will try to outline the development of polytheism based on current understanding.

7.1.1. Asia and Europe

Polytheism is largely a development from pantheism as mentioned above. Whereas in pantheism actual stars and animals were worshipped, in polytheism imaginary Gods with human and animal characteristics such as King Shiva, Apollo, Zeus etc. were worshipped as symbols of various aspects of power that humans valued. Each tribe had its own God in common as a symbol. Usually these polytheistic religions have a chief god such as King Shiva in Hinduism, and Zeus in the Greek pantheon.

8 Doug Boyd, Rolling Thunder, Bantam Doubleday Publishing, New York, 1974 7.1.2. The Orient

After the end of the ice age, the Orient became dry and hot and the land became bare. The main food was wheat, which needs less rain. From the point of food, the world can be classified into two zones, the dry wheat/meat zone, and the wet rice/fish zone. As the climate became even drier, it became very difficult for people to survive in the desert. The respect for nature, which underlay pantheism, seems to have been lost and only the admiration of the sun and stars remained. The people of the Orient gathered near the coast of the rivers such as the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, and around oases in the rapidly expanding deserts. Life had become hard, severe and cruel. The population was now too big for nature to feed. In order to have social stability within the tribe and to defend it from the attack of other tribes, or to ease the fight between tribes, they needed to have strict rules in their tribal societies to maintain unity. For instance in 1770 BC, King Hammurabi of Mesopotamia set the famous ‘Code of Laws’. It consists of 282 articles on all kinds of crimes and the degree and method of punishments, which people must obey. This code contains famous words such as “An Eye for an Eye and A Tooth for a Tooth”. In order to validate these laws, they needed a powerful dictator or Hero, with the supernatural backing of Gods to prosecute people in accordance with the chosen law. Hence, gradually polytheism spread and became acceptable to more people. In contrast, I believe that a peaceful society does not need laws of prosecution to keep social order.

7.2. Monotheism

Written records in this era became numerous and it is very difficult to describe the story of this age, because each monotheist religion had, and has, a very wide distribution of ideas in four dimensions, x, y, z and time, from right to left and from conservative to progressive. The description of this period in this essay is mainly based on commonly accepted views but I have offered my own understanding on some important points, which have a bearing on the peace of today’s world.

7.2.1. Buddhism from India to Japan

Siddahrtha Guatama, the Buddha, or Shaka, was born in 563 BC. His great contribution was to crystallize all the gods of Brahmanism into one ‘God’ who has no personal characteristics, which is universal, and gives enlightenment to all people. The original symbol of Buddhism was a circle as mentioned before. The Buddha sculpture as an idol arose from the influence of Greek god sculptures much later. In the initial stage of Buddhism, there were no elaborate churches and tombs. As recorded by his students, Shaka told people that there was only one God who gave fundamental spiritual happiness to people as well as to all natural existence. This belief has led many Indian people to adopt vegetarianism - they do not eat fish and meat or even eggs, because all living things are on the same level as human and it is a great sin to kill them. They must not kill mosquitoes even when they sting their skin, and just wait until the mosquito flies away. They believe in the harmony of nature and the spiral of life. Buddhism has almost faded away in India but has diffused further East. During its long journey from India to Japan, it has become mixed with other religions such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Taoism. When Buddhism was first introduced to Japan from China by government missions in the seventh century it more or less maintained the original form. Followers of the native Shintoism at first strongly resisted Buddhism, but eventually a compromise was reached in order to modernize the Japan of that day by the introduction of Chinese culture. Japanese emperors and aristocrats supported Buddhism on one hand, but also preserved Shintoism and used both as authoritative guiding concepts of politics. By this time, the dominant form of Buddhism was the Shingon Sect, which was introduced by monk Ku-ukai in the ninth century. In 816 AD he introduced a mystical branch of Buddhism, which had developed in Tibet and was deeply influenced by Tao. It was a religion of magical dualism and encouraged people to undertake strict disciplines to achieve enlightenment. It got strongest support from the upper classes, but degenerated, as seen in the gorgeous but extravagant buildings of Shingon temples. The holy writings of this sect were in the dead language, Sanskrit, which nobody could understand without hard study. We still suffer from its superstitious customs in Japan. The good and bad days of Tao are mentioned in our calendars but have no literal meaning and have no relation to Buddhism. For example, people prefer to choose a certain ‘good’ day, named as ‘Daian’ for their wedding. You must then pay more to hold the wedding ceremony in a wedding hall, because of the demand to hold weddings on this particular day. ‘Tomobiki’, a day to invite friends, must be avoided for a funeral ceremony, because it would be ominous to invite friends to death. Houses must be designed so that they have a ‘good’ direction such as south-west, but not north-east, for the gate. How strange it is to have such an old and meaningless custom for hundreds of years! People are like this. This is human history. European’s have similar customs such as Friday 13th is a ‘bad’ day. Most Japanese are aware that these are all comical nonsense, but the majority of the population sticks to these customs. Then, from about the twelfth century, monks such as Shinran, Ho-nen, and Nichiren, announced that not only aristocrats but also common lay people could achieve enlightenment just by praying to God without any hard study and training. This was a great religious revolution and reformed the dualistic and deformed Shingon- sect to the original idea of Monotheistic Buddhism. One example is that darkness is the shadow of light and god lives in all creatures. Let me mention an unforgettable statement by the monk Shinran. “Even a good man, who believes he is good, can be saved by Buddha. Why not a bad man, who believes he is bad?”. I believe that this is the result of the combination of Buddhist monotheism and Shintoist pantheism. This is a great contrast to the dualistic morality (good versus bad or virtue versus vice) of earlier Buddhism. Common people had become more prosperous due to the improved economy, and they supported these various newly born sects. The biggest, the Ikko Sect, was lead by monk Ren-nyo, who refused to pay tax to the government and had resisted vigorous opposition for one hundred years. This revolution helped greatly to spread Japanese culture such as Kabuki, art, tea ceremony and poetry, from the higher classes to the common people. I would like to point out that this is religious revolution is very similar to that which occurred in Europe in the same period. Generally speaking, the South Asian people are far more tolerant of other religions than people of the Orient. You will find that in many villages in South East and East Asia, inhabitants peacefully share the same sacred place to build Hindu, Jaina, Buddhist temples, and even Muslim mosques, and other religious buildings, unless they are used as the tool of politics. They like harmony rather than antagonism between people and between nature and human. The famous conflict in India is between Muslims and Hindus, but not Buddhists who are a minority in India now. As mentioned in the Hindu section, Hinduism is a typical polytheism, which esteems idols of numerous Beings giving benefits to believers. On the other hand, Islam denies any kind of idolized symbols. Hindus are very conservative and try to stick to their traditional habits for living, which are different from those of Islam. For instance, ox, elephants, monkeys and snakes are sacred animals in Hinduism, whereas Islam eats ox but not pig because the Koran forbids it. Pakistan is a Muslim country, but India has religious freedom and so is home to many religions. India was separated into two pieces in 1945 owing to the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Even the hero of Indian independence, Gandhi, could not stop the separation. Of course, politicians may use this problem to increase their influence as is seen in the present Indian political problems, although they belong to the same race. It is worth noting that the Asian concept of time is different from that of the Orient. In India, and in many parts of Asia and Japan, time is eternal and is an endless spiral as is clearly seen in Brahmanism and then Hinduism. This idea was deepened and crystallized by Buddhism. In the temperate climate, there are four distinct changes of season every year, presenting the beauty of nature and there is a cycle of life and death every year. The death of nature is not eternal but cyclical. In this understanding a human’s life and death is transmigration, or reincarnation. All living things are born as one kind of animal and die to become another kind of animal in the next life cycle. Therefore, life and time are seen as eternal. The same is true in physical science, which regards the world as full of periodical vibrations and oscillations with various periods, amplitudes and frequencies. From this idea, Buddha saves even a most evil human in the pit of hell to heaven. This is in contrast to the understanding of the Orient, where time is a straight line from the past to future. The result of wickedness, as judged by god or authorities, is Hell where no help exists.

7.2.2. Judaism and Islam

I must ask readers to excuse the sharing of only a short section on Judaism and Islam. It is not essential to discuss their histories in detail for the purpose of this book. As pointed out in 7.1.2 the view of nature in the Orient changed from admiration to fear after the climate became very dry at the end of the ice age. It became vital for the people living there to control and modify nature for their own benefit as far as possible. Seasonal changes of nature were far less distinct. The noticeable change is only the rotation of the stars. Judaism finally emerged out of the pantheistic and/or polytheistic religions of the tribes of Semites and Israelites. Although surrounding tribes were polytheistic, the Israelites came to worship only one God, Yahweh, who, they believed, gave the believers special favour and benefits. They later developed the idea that this God was God of all creation as is seen in Genesis in the Old Testament and so are looked upon as giving birth to monotheism. The most dependable way for people to survive in the desert was to unite, securing safety and prosperity under powerful leaders such as Moses and Muhammad, and even Jin Ghis Han the Mongol leader, for example. The disciplines incorporated into their sacred texts – the Old Testament and the Koran – are derived from their characteristic tribal customs and beliefs, which originated in and were necessary to this desert life. The religious systems of Judaism and Islam are somewhat alike, since they have the same root. They, as well as many of the denominations of Christianity, look upon the Holy Scriptures as having central importance. They have consecrated leaders for the believers to obey and a centralized system based on Synagogues, Mosques and Churches. Most of them have tended to be exclusive believing that their way is the ‘right’ one and forbidding marriage to people of a different religion or even a different sect within a religion, although there are now several more open and tolerant denominations. Their teachings are rooted in the accumulated wisdom of how desert people can live peacefully together. It is unfortunate to world peace that Judaism, Islam and Christianity oppose each other in many conflicts because of historical, economical and political reasons. These three groups all have belief in a one true God, though they give this God different names or in the case of Judaism ‘no name’. They also have other similarities such as strict disciplines based on the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Koran, similar church systems, trained leaders, and, in Islam and Judaism, many social customs in common such as circumcision, fasting, and dietary laws. It looks like a fight between close relatives - in fact Jews, Christians and Muslims are often called the ‘children of Abraham’. 7.2.3. Christianity

A The birth

Christianity originated in the same desert as Judaism and Islam and the first Christian believers were desert people who lived in the same society as Jews and, later, Muslims. Original Christianity brought about a religious revolution. Its gospel recorded in the New Testament was to be offered to all humankind regardless of sex, race and nation. Jesus, as a Jew, picked out and emphasised the growing strand within Judaism that saw God no longer as a tribal God but the God of the entire world. Christians taught that all who believed in the gospel would be saved. However, it is evident that the early Christians retained the same instinctive desert philosophy, ‘humanity needs to control nature’, although the New Testament suggests that God should be worshipped as the creator of all nature. The New Testament is a collection of documents written by various people at various times and so it is inevitable to find expressions, which contradict each other. It should be noted that there is an important difference between Christianity at large and Buddhism in that only humans and not animals can communicate with God in the former religion, whereas god lives in all creatures in the latter. This difference suggests that the idea of God in Oriental religions is of an ideal form of a human being as the master of nature, whereas, God in Buddhism is nature itself.

B The Dark Ages

The national religion of the Roman Empire before the time of Emperor Constantine was pantheism with the sun as the major God. They took over much of the Greek worldview and politics. They had election of leaders by vote, and foreign captives, who were initially put into the lowest class as slaves, could rise to a higher class and even become Emperor. This so-called democratic system of absorbing foreigners was the main reason for the expansion of the Empire. Christianity diffused westward from the Orient to Mediterranean area and Rome. The number of believers increased more in Rome than in the Orient. Because Christians refused to worship the pantheistic gods of the Roman Empire, they suffered discrimination and segregation for a few hundreds years. In spite of this fact, Christianity was supported and spread gradually among the common people. In the fourth century, even Emperor Constantine’s wife and daughter became Christians. Thence he decided to use Christianity to expand the area of the Roman Empire by absorbing Christians into the political system, and he approved Christianity as the national religion of the Empire. Christianity was gradually absorbed into the Roman political system. In order to moderate the friction caused by such a drastic change, countless attempts were made to mix pantheism with Christianity. For instance, various ceremonies and festivals of Christianity, such as Christmas, were mixed with these of former pantheistic festivals such as the winter solstice. Another example is the names of the weekdays such as Sunday (sun), Monday (moon), Tuesday (fire) and so on. There are still many ceremonies and festivals based on pantheistic customs in many areas of Europe. Thus, many changes must have occurred in both Roman society and the Christian Church. The church hierarchy with the Pope at the top was firmly established and was used as a tool for achieving the expansion and stability of the Empire. As a result, some of the important concepts described in the New Testament slowly faded out or were twisted to fulfil the desire of authority. Jesus was placed on the same level as God in most Christian denominations. Many gorgeous Gothic and Romanesque temples and cathedrals were built to show their power. The Vatican Palace was established as the centre of the Catholic Dominion in the Roman Empire. Popes represented God and possessed many treasures. Gorgeous church buildings were the symbol of the great kingdoms, kings and communities. Many high-ranking bishops enjoyed luxurious lives. In order to make believers obedient, the Roman Catholics, as well as Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and other Orthodox Churches, introduced stories of Heaven and Hell and various kinds of dualistic superstition. Jesus would have been deeply upset if he could observe these deeds done in his name. The Russian Orthodox Church backed up the Russian Romanov Dynasty supported by slave labour. One of the targets of the Russian Revolution was the denial of such degenerated religion. I can sympathize with Lenin’s idea that “Religion is the Opium of the people”. This is not monotheism but is actually a kind of polytheism. There, Orthodox faiths were used as political instruments to control the agricultural slaves. The Roman Empire expanded to the entire European continent with the aid of slave-like soldiers. The Roman Church claimed that the Pope represented God’s Will. They interpreted or modified the New Testament for their own benefits. The Church once claimed that the cosmos rotated around the earth and sentenced scientists, who opposed this idea, to death by burning. Many people, who were dangerous to the Church, were looked upon as witches and were burnt at the stake as examples to others. The terrible inquisitions were excuses to murder anyone whom the local church leaders wanted to get rid of, although the present Pope has shown his regret for those past mistakes 400 years later. Christianity expanded all over Europe accompanied by the expansion of the Empire. The European Empires with the support of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches expanded to east, west and south with flags of the Holy Cross and The New Testament. The Roman Empire once secured Constantinople in order to control Oriental countries and their markets, but they lost the war in the end, after the failure to stop the attack by Muslims. In the West, they also invaded north and west Europe, where the Celts lived. These people had a pantheistic religion as mentioned above, but were finally converted. Although Catholics carefully extinguished the Celt culture from the continent, as they did to the original culture of the Indio in South America, traces of the Celtic culture remain now on the Atlantic Ocean Coast in places such as Ireland, Denmark and Norway. The ring as the symbol of the sun, for example, remains as a fossil of the old culture in Europe. The destruction of the forest of Europe had started then. It took one thousand years from the birth of Jesus for Catholics to control Europe, getting rid of ‘heathens’ and ‘witches’. The power of the Catholic Church was everything in this period. This is called the ‘Dark Age’. The worldview or the basic principle that ‘human controls nature’ did not change at all for thousands of years from the birth of monotheism through the time of the Religious Revolution and Renaissance to today. I must add, however, that there were some people who admired nature such as St. Francis of Assisi.9

C Religious Revolution

The Dark Ages lasted more than 1000 years. The use of horsepower became popular in the middle of this age, and traffic and agricultural productivity began to increase. The invention of bank cheques helped domestic and international trade and travel and the middle classes became prosperous. Although The Crusades failed to maintain European power over the Middle East, they brought the forgotten culture of Greece from the Orient to Europe. These were the engines that opened the way for the new tide of humanism. During the Dark Ages Roman Catholicism was dominated by the upper classes. The Bible, for instance, was only written in Latin, which only the limited number of educated people could read. It must have sounded like a mystery or a curse to uneducated low class people. Martin Luther translated the Bible into the common German language, enabling access by ordinary people. This removed the mysterious mask of God from the faces of Catholic authorities and politicians and marked the end of the Era of God. This was the trigger for the Religious Revolution. The original spirit of Christianity revived in many Protestant or Reformist denominations despite many wars attempting to suppress this movement. It is interesting to see the analogous history of the religious revolution of Buddhism in Japan at the same age as mentioned before. This was the start of the eventual end of the prejudice and discrimination of the class system in European society. In one stream of this revolution, humanism was crystallized as the concept of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, which emerged later in the French Revolution and American Independence. Common people’s power grew stronger and the idea of humanism challenged the position of God and weakened the power of all religious authorities. This was most profound in the Russian Revolution, where a secular state was formed and all religious activities were crushed. Catholics, Muslims and Jews assumed that humans, as representatives of immortal God, had dominance over nature and could control it for the benefit of humans. However they believed members of their own race, or religion, and/or religious sect were superior to other humans who they thought of as heathens, pagans, witches and savages. Members of different religious sects still fight each other, such as the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Asia and Africa were looked upon as savage places where monsters with human faces and animal bodies lived as described in many books introducing foreign countries. Missionaries were dispatched to these areas in order to convert these monsters to the religions of the invaders and to collect information used for future invasions. In many areas, aboriginal children were kidnapped to be educated as Christians. These believers thought that they had a ‘Sacred Mission’ and had no guilty conscious over cruel deeds such as slave hunting and selling and genocide during colonialism. Even in the modern age, fanatic killings are approved under the names of their Gods.

D Protestantism

In another stream of change, there appeared a broad spectrum of Protestantism. The Church of England, for example, was established to unify people under the English monarchy, although it was very similar to the Catholicism, which it had denied. They persecuted other Protestant movements such as Puritans and Quakers who were exiled to the New World. There are some Protestant denominations whose principles are fundamentally different from Catholicism. As an example, I must mention Quakerism, because this group is unique in the history of Christianity. Quaker is a nickname for a member of the Religious Society of Friends, because they were said to quake while they prayed. George Fox (1624-1691) was the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. He was an utterly honest man and told people to listen and learn from Christ directly, rather than from the ministers of the Churches. Quakers believe that every human (and all nature for most Friends) has the light of God inside, and there should be absolute peace with no violence. They have dispensed with all religious formality, including ordained clergy and churches and outward sacraments such as baptism. George Fox told people that God does not dwell in human-made temples and called churches “Steeple Houses”. All people are seen as equal and its organization does not have a hierarchical system. On Sundays, they come to their simple Meeting House (not church) and worship God in silence, except some present may feel prompted by the spirit to give ministry and

9 Catholic Encyclopedia; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06221a.htm some Quakers, especially in the USA and Africa have found that programmed Meetings with less silence better suit their circumstances. Members carry out their activities decided by unanimous agreement – they do not vote. In their business Meetings discussion will continue until unanimous agreement or the ‘sense of the meeting’ is reached. They have no symbols, idols, icons, or statues of Jesus, Saints and God. They have no initiation ceremony. The British and American Friends Service Committees received the Nobel Peace Prize for their intensive international peace activities. An old Hollywood movie, Friendly Persuasion, with Gary Cooper as one of the actors, tells some aspects of their lives. Most of them are conscientious objectors (COs) and refuse to fight during wars. They also help people who are imprisoned for refusing to join the military in countries where there is still compulsory military service. Their faith is expressed in their concern and action for peace and justice for all, rather than in a search for their own personal salvation. Although Quakers are a minority among Christian denominations, this is a monotheistic religion with a unique understanding acceptance of other faiths.10

8. Era of Humanism

8.1. Humanism

In the Cultural Revolution called the ‘Renaissance’, science, technology, and the liberal arts spread widely into all class systems. This revolution together with the religious revolution led to a new Era called ‘the Era of Humanism’. This movement liberated the common people, who had lived like worms in the Dark Ages under the yoke of the Roman Catholic Church. The authority of the ordained clergy and the upper classes was taken over by ordinary people in revolutions such as those in France, America and the USSR. The common flags of these countries were ‘Freedom and Equality’, although these two concepts are sometimes in serious contradiction. For instance, as capitalism grew in the USA, Antimonopoly Law was declared by the second President Jefferson in order to protect small industries, but the big tide of nationalism in USA weakened the application of this law, as is seen in the case of ‘Microsoft’. As the concept of humanism deepened, the nature of society changed. The people were seen as equal regardless of race, gender, or physical or mental ability. People enjoyed their lives and European culture such as music and painting flourished. The sweat and tears of the native inhabitants of the European colonies in America, Africa and Asia supported this prosperity. However, the scale of inter- and intra-national wars became larger and more destructive in Europe. The League of Nations was born in 1920 after the tragedy of the First World War in 1918 with the hope to bring an end to war. However, it became clear very soon that National Sovereignty was still dominant. After the end of the fanatic totalitarianism and super-nationalism of the Second World War in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up in the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. Today the UN is still challenged as to how to overcome the egoism of National Sovereignty. Now, humanism is the worldview of the modern age. At this point, I regret to say that a basic antagonistic concept of the Orient, ‘Humanity controls nature’, still persists in the mainstream of modern humanism.11 ‘Communism’ appeared as the extreme idea of humanism, but ended as a paradoxical experiment. In order to achieve total equality, the total control of humanity by itself was necessary, with the assumption that this is possible and that communism is perfect. The problem was who can be the perfect controller. Religion lost its influence over people in the era of humanism.

8.2. Science and technology

Humans throughout their existence have used technology. The remarkable achievements of technology in recent times, utilising the fruits of science, has hastened the decline of religion and the rise of humanism. One must remember that science and technology are entirely different subjects, although people frequently mix up the two. Technology is about how. For example, people learnt, from their daily experience, how to make and use fire. In contrast, science arises from the natural human instinct of curiosity – it asks why things are the way they are. Science (why) is a new way of logical and causality thinking. This new way of thinking, called the ‘method of science’, was introduced during the renaissance by such persons as Francis Bacon (1561~1626) and Rene Descartes (1569~1650). The method of science is based on elimination of preconception, establishment of assumption, induction and deduction, and reasonable verification of causality of phenomenon by experiment. This idea was entirely against the theological system of the Roman Catholic Church, in such subjects as astronomy and Galileo was put into jail in 1642, because he insisted, on the basis of his observations that the earth rotates around the sun. Therefore, science was looked upon as sinful in the Dark Ages, and religion and science are still seen to be opposed to each other by many people. However, science is not antagonistic to religion. These two do not contradict each other, as you can see from the content of the scientific method. As yet, we do not understand the fundamental properties such as mass and energy or the force fields such as magnetism, electricity and gravitation. These terms are operational definitions of phenomena. Scientists only have theories, such as ‘the law of conservation of energy and mass’. Harmony,

10 Rufus M. Jones, ed., George Fox, An Autobiography; http://www.ccel.org/f/fox-g/autobio/htm/TOC.htm http://www.quaker.org.uk/more/index.html 11 http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html balance or equilibrium in nature is a fundamental belief of scientists. In other words, the basis of science is quite similar to ‘There is a Logos in the beginning of the World’ or ‘the Harmony of Nature’. Many important discoveries unravelling the mysteries of nature have been made in the many branches of science and there seems to be no end, like peeling off the skin of an onion. These discoveries have had a big influence on human history. Science had been looked upon as a useless toy of the high classes in its early stages, but, in the nineteenth century, people realized that science was a potent source of new technology. Humanity with a strong desire for the well-being provided by technology was as eager to eat the apple of science as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Now people believe that science is almighty and have developed highly efficient technology and begun the destruction of nature on a large scale, as if they were God, or the Devil. After the revolutionary changes of technology in Europe in the nineteenth century, large investment in industry became necessary. Thus, ‘capitalism’ became important and grew very strongly for the first time in history. Technology combined with capitalism grew especially in England, helped by an energy revolution based on coal and resources taken from Africa, America, Australia and Asia. Technology can be used to stimulate economic growth, so that investors can make a profit. This is good for the strong but sacrifices the weak and handicapped and the ideal of equality fades out. Things will become miserable when resources become scarce in the very near future and profits diminish.

8.3. Economic growth

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries politicians have measured success by the economic growth rate. The aim of all limited companies is to maximize their profit and so increase the dividend paid out on their shares. Politicians all over the world compete on the rate of economic growth and big multinational companies try to operate on a global basis in order to increase their influence. The USA especially pushes its ‘free trade’ policy onto countries all over the world. To what extent can economic growth continue? Is there to be no limit to growth until nature collapses? We must not forget that freedom of economic activity without equality is the same as the Law of the Jungle. The development of technology has become so rapid that humans all over the world assume that they are the Godlike masters of nature and nature is being destroyed on an unbelievably large scale. People must realize that nature cannot support this violent human action and that we must strive to do something to stop the destruction of Mother Earth. The Era of Humanism must end. What do we expect then?

9. Then?

~ Return to nature ~

It is now evident that the progress of technology will upset the whole nature of our planet. Only 50 years ago we believed nature had a wastebasket of infinite size. However, as discussed before, the digestion capacity of nature for human waste has already passed saturation point and now nature is out of balance. The era of humanism seems to be coming to an end. This is why the major oil companies, combined with the government, are madly eager to secure residual oil fields all over the world. We cannot wait until something terrible happens. If the catastrophe comes, it will be too late to stop, since the inertia is tremendous and scientists predict that due to feedback mechanisms it will be out of control. The fundamental solution is that we humankind become aware of our past mistakes. That is, we must recognize that the destruction of nature is the result of the failure of the paradoxical Oriental Worldview that humanity is the master of nature. Now we must look for a new worldview, which all humankind can accept, as the third turning point of worldview in human history, after two turning points, from Nature to God and from God to Human. Where can we find this way out? If I may suggest, there is nothing else than the return to nature. We must humbly respect God, which created the Cosmos. We should think of ourselves as responsible caretakers of the planet Earth, and not act as greedy pillagers. If we do not make this turning point on a worldwide scale, human activity on Earth will destroy NATURE and ALL LIVES.

About the author

Seiichi Kondo is a member of Japan Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends and is involved in work against social prejudice and discrimination against minority groups such as Korean residents and leprosy in Japan. He is the Professor Emeritus of Physical Chemistry at Osaka University of Education specialising in sciences of solid surface, colloids, adsorption, and science education. In November 2003, he presented a lecture titled “Nature, God, Human and Then” as the Inazo Nitobe Memorial lecture. The Japanese version of this lecture has been published by Japan Yearly Meeting in April, 2004 and has now been translated into English.

Acknowledgment

The author express his sincere thanks to Toshio Kato and Noriko Watanabe of Tokyo Monthly Meeting of Japan Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends for their help. Thanks are also due to Anne Brewer, London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. She devoted a considerable time to the correction and editing of this essay in English and offered valuable, for her comments and suggestions.

END