From www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,46991-1,00.html

Keiko Saito wasn't concerned when a plastic-waste compacting plant
opened down the street from her house in Suginami, a well-to-do Tokyo
suburb. After all, the government had reassured residents that the
neatly landscaped facility posed no danger. But soon after the plant
started running four years ago, Saito's breasts began swelling
painfully, as if she were pregnant. Her testosterone level shot
through the roof. Whiskers sprouted on her chin, forcing Saito, now
age 63, to start shaving. Her hair tested positive for arsenic, lead
and mercury--all at high levels. She has to concentrate to avoid
slurring her words and sometimes has trouble thinking clearly. "I
feel," she says slowly, "as if I am standing in the middle of a
mist."

More than 400 people living near the Suginami Waste Transfer Station
have reported frightening symptoms since the plant opened, according
to the Society to Get Rid of Suginami Sickness, a citizens' group.
Local doctors are baffled, but Atsushi Katsuki, a specialist in
environmental science at Takachiho University in Tokyo, thinks the
problem is massive over-exposure to chemicals. He cites the waste
station as the likely culprit. "It should be closed immediately," he
says. A series of surveys by Tokyo city uncovered more than 90 toxic
substances around the site, including dioxin, one of the deadliest
known to man. But nobody, from ward bureaucrats up to the head of
Japan's Environment Agency, suggests closing it. "Unless we can
pinpoint the cause," says agency chief Kayoko Shimizu, "we can't
formulate a policy."

This is ground zero in Japan's toxic waste wars. Tragically, the
country has been here before. It was the searing images of the nerve-
damaged children of Minamata Bay in the 1970s that helped awaken the
world to the threat of mercury pollution. Today, some
environmentalists and scientists warn of a potentially more
devastating crisis. After decades of ignoring the dangers of toxic
chemicals and hazardous waste, Japan is pockmarked with thousands of
dangerous hot spots--from leaky garbage dumps and clandestine toxic-
waste sites to aging incinerators belching dioxin. The nation's
incinerators churn out almost 40% of the world's emissions of dioxin
and furan--a related contaminant--according to a report issued last
year by the United Nations Environment Program. Earlier this month,
four Greenpeace activists scaled a building beside an incinerator
facility in Tokyo and dropped a protest banner proclaiming Tokyo the
world's dioxin capital. Even the Americans have gotten a whiff. An
incinerator spewing dioxin-laden exhaust onto the grounds of a U.S.
Navy base south of Tokyo has turned into a sore point for U.S.-Japan
relations. Angered by Tokyo's reluctance to take action, the U.S.
recently filed a lawsuit in a Yokohama court demanding closure of the
facility.

Dioxin and many of the other poisons are hard to detect, and their
impact on health is tough to pin down ...