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The Japanese are waging a war on crows. Because they dispose of food leftovers and ordinary garbage in the same bags in Japan, unlike in Korea, the bags are targeted by hungry crows. Garbage bags torn by crow attacks make a mess of the alleyways. In response, some have come up with such ingenious ideas as covering garbage bags with netting or concealing them with yellow vinyl, which confuses crows because of their eyesight.
From the perspective of Korea, which has made separate disposal of food waste mandatory, Japan looks like an environmentally developing country. The Japanese government has for years been debating charging for plastic bags in convenience and department stores. A conclusion has yet to be reached in the face of pros and cons.
But it would be a misjudgment to see Japan a developing country in environmental terms based only on those examples. Japan is advanced in the sense that it strongly regulates other environmental issues like air and water pollution that are directly related to public health. It is just that the Japanese government and officials exercise extreme prudence before imposing an additional burden on citizens.
Japan must seem sluggish and inflexible to Korean officials, who are world leaders in railroading things through regardless of the inconvenience to the public. Korean officials pushed ahead with the separate waste disposal without proper preparation, and now plastic waste food containers spread a nasty smell in the neighborhood, and when we leave home for the office in the morning, we often meet a neighbor carrying a stinking waste food bag in the elevator. A government with any consideration for the public would have installed waste food disposal facilities that stop offensive odors and supplied food dehydrators to households.
The Ministry of Construction and Transportation does not permit advance viewings of model apartments in popular areas in the name of preventing congestion from viewers. Korean civil servants keep prospective buyers of apartments that cost their entire assets from looking at a model apartment even once. Congestion could be prevented by advance booking. But to our civil servants, who are accustomed to having their way, that would look unreasonable.
This month, they introduced a point system whereby buyers are given priority for a lot depending on how long they have not owned a home, how long they have paid prescribed sums to save for a deposit and the size of their dependent family. All that is needed is an apartment purchase application prepared by the computer. If an applicant wins a lot based on an application with wrong entries, the allotment is not only nullified but the winner is banned from buying another apartment for up to 10 years. If an application is prepared wrongly, it should be enough to disqualify it, but civil servants are not content with that.
The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy, which has banned the use of traditional weights and measures like don and pyeong in July, is just as cold-hearted. A 25.7-pyeong apartment must be recorded as 85 sq.m.: it's illegal to add ¡°25.7 pyeong¡± even in brackets. All such policies have wonderful justifications, but it's difficult to find any spirit of public service. Under the ¡°participatory government¡±, civil servants behave like the masters.
The column was contributed by Cha Hak-bong from the Chosun Ilbo's Business Desk.
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