The other day, I heard an interesting story about hay fever on a radio program. As you know, quite a few people in Japan are suffering from hay fever and are obliged to wear masks. There are so many people wearing masks that you can't distinguish a bank robber in a crowd. Hay is not actually the criminal in Japan's case and everyone knows that the real culprit is cedar pollen. Where did it come from then? About two thirds of Japan's land is forest and almost half of it is artificial, cedar forest. Originally, cedar is not a strong tree and less than 20% is the natural ratio of cedar trees against other trees including maple, beech and so on. It was the government official who started to plant cedar after The World War II. It was not a bad decision in the beginning because cedar was useful as a building material, but the problem, which can be called as their crime, was that they kept planting cedar trees over and over again after they found that too many cedar causes a lot of problems -- unnaturally increased cedar trees produce much pollen every year causing hay fever. As they are originally weak trees with short roots, mountains of ceder forests can easily cause landslides and floods. Also, Japanese cedar trees as building materials are out-pushed by foreign, reasonable trees.
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