ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the implementation of Japanese environmental assistance from the boardroom in Tokyo to the municipality in China. It concludes by assessing Japan’s contribution to improving local environmental capacity. The Japanese belief that environmental problems can best be solved through improved technologies and engineering capability meshes comfortably with the orientation of the Chinese government. Japan’s own experience in dealing with urban pollution problems during the 1960s is also relevant to the current conditions in China. The Japanese predisposition towards infrastructure building and technical fixes has been heavily criticized by Japanese and Western scholars. In the words of Matsuura Shigenori, ‘the Japanese government and industry are more interested in profits from the sale of environmentally safe products than in planetary salvation’. Japan is now the world’s largest bilateral donor of environmental aid. Since the late 1980s, Japan has repeatedly targeted the environment as a major component of its ODA.
