Mitsubishi Man

Forest and Bird, Volume 23, Issue 1, 1 February 1992, Page 6

Mitsubishi Man

A COMIC BOOK has recently been doing the rounds in Japanese schools. It was sent to every school by the Mitsubishi Corporation in an attempt to counter negative publicity about the company’s involvement in tropical rainforest logging. The star of the comic is Hino, a rather woolly-minded Mitsubishi executive who spends his time investigating charges against his company and then absolving it of all blame. As Hino flies over the devastated forests of SouthEast Asia he decides that most of the deforestation is caused by slash-and-burn farming.

He meets a "world-famous botanist" who tells him that Mitsubishi’s logging practices are perfectly sustainable. Hino concludes that the criticism levelled at his company is purely a result of Japanbashing. Now some facts. Mitsubishi is the second largest Japanese importer of tropical timber — over one billion cubic metres in 1990. A quarter of it was from Sarawak and most of the rest was plywood from Indonesia. None of this was from a plantation or sustainable source. Mitsubishi also imports woodchips from clear-felled beech forests in Chile and is a partner in a clear-cut operation in British Columbia.