Letters of Rejection from Beyond the Tide: The Boundaries of the Sea Told by Drifting Garbage (2000)

Letters of Rejection from Beyond the Tide: The Boundaries of the Sea Told by Drifting Garbage (2000)

In 2000, Professor Haruyuki Yamaguchi of Shizuoka University surveyed 500 beaches across Japan and found more than 400,000 pieces of litter strewn ashore. Surprisingly, 60-70% of this was "foreign garbage" washed ashore from China and Korea, with plastic containers and fishing nets piling up in heaps on the Izu Islands and Nansei Islands. Japan's oceans had become a silent landfill for Asian domestic waste.

At the time, Japan was beginning to become aware of its international responsibility to combat global warming after the Kyoto Protocol (1997). However, this problem of "drifting garbage" crossed the border in a more tangible form that cannot be described by carbon figures. Domestic treatment and awareness-raising alone, as in the past, could never compete with it, and it posed new questions such as "Who is responsible?" and "With whom should we collaborate?

This phenomenon was rooted in the global structure of rapidly growing Asian metropolitan areas, where emissions are discharged into the ocean without being fully processed, and then carried by ocean currents to the Japanese archipelago. The Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, in particular, are convergence points for wastewater, and without international agreement, there is not even a hint of a solution. Prof. Yamaguchi's research has made it clear that Japan's oceans are not just a natural resource, but a "borderline" where the world's unconsciousness drifts ashore.

It was like a "rejection letter" from the sea to human society, a voice hidden in the silence of the sea.