Word: kuroda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...long after my talk with Fay, I encountered Japanese primatologist Masazumi Mitani, who along with Suehisa Kuroda established the first research camps at the edge of the Ndoki region in 1987. Since then, the Japanese researchers, in cooperation with Congolese scientist Antoine Ruffin Oko, have conducted a groundbreaking survey of animal populations in the Ndoki and have closely studied the primates, including gorillas and chimps. Mitani told me the animals were indeed unafraid of humans, but warned that conditions in the region were "very, very difficult." Knowing the extreme privation Japanese primatologists regularly endure, I took these cautionary words very...
...real barrier. Unnavigable and meandering, it is 3 m (10 ft.) deep in places and spreads out into swamps several kilometers wide. Even at its shallowest points, it can take eight hours to cross on foot and is impassable much of the year. We use a pirogue that Kuroda's team has built to resupply his tiny station. Parched by the precarious walk to this point, we cool ourselves with the absolutely pure waters of the Ndoki as we pole through the river grass. Fay thinks he knows why the Pygmies have historically kept to the west side...
...consequences. More recently, however, Japan has begun to turn around. The nation imposed a moratorium on ivory imports, altered fishing practices that threaten sea life, and has begun to discuss reducing its consumption of tropical woods. Part of the credit for the change must go to Yoichi Kuroda, a Japanese environmental activist who exposed the mayhem wrought by Japan's hunger for timber...
Japan had only a tiny environmental movement when Kuroda founded the Japan Tropical Action Network in 1987. One of his first projects was to document Japan's huge role in the tropical-timber trade in a study published by the World Wildlife Fund. To make sure the message hit home, Kuroda staged a series of publicity stunts in Tokyo. In 1989, he marshaled the press in front of Marubeni, a timber importer, and presented bewildered officials with a giant cardboard chainsaw as a grand prize for rain-forest destruction...
Cheerful and cherubic, Kuroda still leads the life of an ascetic. A fellow environmentalist observed, "If the high-powered conservationists out of Washington had to live in his apartment with his income, they would quit in five minutes." Kuroda is pleased that his government has begun to respond to his campaign, but he shows no sign of quitting. "Japanese people have a responsibility for the destruction of Sarawak's forests," he says. "If they can understand that, the forests can be saved...