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MAINICHI SHIMBUN THURSDAY, November 27, 1997 |
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| It began with a foreign gentleman
she saw in the streets of the old capital of Kyoto. He was wearing a Japanese kimono, and wearing it stylishly. In his hand was something wrapped in a purple furoshiki. "That looks great!" she thought. There was something fresh and smart about the way he casually used a traditional wrapping cloth. "I'll try it once," she thought. She went home and rummaged through a drawer for an old furoshiki, wrapped some bath articles in it and went off to the public baths. She found the furoshiki handy and easy to use. It looked great with jeans. And now five years have passed since Chizuko Morita, a 50-year-old copywriter who lives in Kita-ku, Kyoto, established the Furoshiki Society. That was the summer of 1992, the year of the original Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. "A few wrapping techniques can give things an air of fashion. It would be a shame to waste a remarkable cultural tradition." This was the idea that first got Chizuko hooked on furoshiki, but it also got her thinking about the excessive and wasteful packing that was all around her. Buy a bottle of sake and you get a box and wrapping paper and a paper bag. The plastic bags she had accepted unthinkingly at supermarkets suddenly seemed wasteful. Chizuko has hosted chat seminars on furoshiki, and she has proposed new wrapping ideas and innovative uses for furoshiki in daily life. In five years, the Furoshiki Society has expanded to 200 members, and it has helped to nurture a new consciousness about the environment. Of course there are limits to what you can do by using a furoshiki. "More people are using furoshiki now, but packaging is just as excessive as it ever was," says Chizuko. A careful look around will reveal an astonishing amount of superfluous wrapping. One survey has shown that 60 percent of the volume of household trash is discarded packaging. ChizukoĠs group conducted a survey of the toxic materials contained in plastic shopping bags. They collected 25 types of plastic bags and had them scientifically analyzed with the help of Professor Hiroshi Takatsuki of the Environment Preservation Center of Kyoto University. Three of the bags were found to contain toxic heavy metals that can pollute the air if they are incinerated carelessly. Chizuko and her group requested that shops using those bags stop doing so. "We think that one small piece of cloth can help us to save the Earth from pollution," Chizuko says. Such thinking should be at the fore as representatives of some 170 nations gather in Kyoto on Dec.1 for the environmental conference COP3. The delegates will spend 10 days discussing post-2000 reduction targets for greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the first of a four-part series on the COP3 conference.) |
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E-Mail CXV00174 nifty.ne.jp |