Chinese Pollution

Scientist Says Pollution From China Is Killing a Japanese Island’s Trees

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Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

Osamu Nagafuchi, second right, an environmental engineer, checks a monitoring station around Yakushima to measure levels in the air of ozone and sulfur emissions, which are typically the byproducts of burned coal or automobile exhaust.

By MARTIN FACKLER

YAKUSHIMA, Japan — A mysterious pestilence has befallen this island’s primeval forests, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides. Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he knows the culprit: airborne pollutants from smog-belching China, hundreds of miles upwind.

For years, Mr. Nagafuchi’s theory was ignored by fellow scientists and even mocked by bureaucrats in the national government who administer the forests on this southwestern island. But Japan has begun taking his warnings more seriously, as the nation has been gripped by a national health scare over rising levels of potentially dangerous airborne particles that have swept into other parts of Japan and that many now believe were produced by China, its huge and rapidly industrializing neighbor.

These fears have reached a new level recently as China itself has issued more public warnings about the growing health risks from its cities’ gray, soupy air. While Mr. Nagafuchi and a small number of collaborators say their research is not politically motivated, they admit that they may be finding more receptivity among a public that already resents China for supplanting Japan as Asia’s largest economy, and for what is seen as its haughty attitude in a territorial dispute over islands both countries claim.