Japan has an experience that it had overcome serious industrial pollution during the 1960's and the 1970's. Transfer of the experience would be useful for developing countries currently facing similar pollution problems as Japan had. Japan has been making effort to meet increasing demand of technology transfer from these countries.
However, information on Japan's experience has not been systematically collected. One of the reasons is that local governments, which have been major player at Japan's pollution control, have little incentive for international cooperation, and have not recorded their history for this purpose. Moreover, the experience of pollution includes that of failures causing pollution, and governments do not intend to compile and disclose such information. Experts who experienced polluted Japan a few decades ago became old, and many of them have already retired, while their expertise has not comprehensively recorded. Effort should be made to compile such information before it has gone.
Experience of business is also useful. However, important information such as decision-making process in a company and pollution abatement cost is almost not available at all. Only macroscopic analysis on business' response for pollution is possible due to lack of microscopic data. Further studies are hindered due to pour availability of the data.
Transferability of Japan's experiences has not yet intensively studied. Experience of not only dispatched experts but also of Japanese engineers of private sectors working in developing countries should be collected and analyzed.
These tasks cannot be done by a single organization. Cooperation of government agencies and business is required. Based on the information, experts should be trained because young generations have not experienced “dirty” Japan and have little experience to “improve” polluted environment.
