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Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- hastily3114 4mo agoInteresting. I noticed that many people have hay fever in Japan, but I always just assumed it was genetic or something. I wonder if living there for a long time will make you more sensitive to pollen
- mc3301 4mo agoLots of people I know who moved here as adults have developed pollen allergies over the years. Some after a 2 or 3 years, some after 10.
- komali2 4mo agoI'd been wondering why my allergies go nuts every time I visit Japan, but never really suffered in other Asian countries. Cool to know now. Upside is I discovered the trick of just taking fexofenadine every single day which had the side effect of solving my chronic sinus infections.
- petesergeant 4mo agoMy quality of life is notably better from daily fexofenadine vs what I think was low-level allergies that I developed in my 20s to pets, dust, etc
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- timr 4mo agoAs someone who has suffered from hay fever for my entire life, and also lived in many different locations, almost every move came with a 2-3 year reprieve from my symptoms while my body "discovered" the fun new local allergens.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoSame.
- plutokras 4mo ago[flagged]
- tidenly 4mo agoI got hayfever on my 3rd year of living here, and it seems like quite a common pattern among immigrants I've noticed. I have hayfever back in the UK too, but I guess I didn't have a Cedar allergy - so it took time to develop.
- Markoff 4mo agoI would assume it has more to do with less exposition to hay/pollen in urban areas, for instance in years in Beijing I've had hardly allergies since it is not exactly green, though I went to parks, but here in Prague right now with everything blooming it's nuts. Actually now that I think about it never head really problems with allergies even in Southeast Asia, though I was in very green areas, maybe humidity helps as well?
- tpm 4mo agoI think the humidity has to play a role in that. Very dry air is not good for the nose even without allergies. This year the spring is very dry and also quite cold in Central Europe which makes things worse.
- Tor3 4mo agoIn Japan, however, it's almost always very humid. Today, for example, it's over 70% relative (when the sky was still clear and mostly blue, now it's raining so it's much worse). And, as said in that article, there's a lot of allergy in Japan. My wife (native) has a little bit of it, and I myself also reacted for a while, but given time it seems to have left me (as I mentioned elsewhere I grew up on a farm with exposure to everything and I never had an allergy before). There's one guy I know who lives more or less in the middle of a forest with both Sugi and Hinoki, and he's suffering a lot. But he still likes it much better there than in the huge city where he grew up. I noticed that among the locals in that place (just a bunch of houses, not even a village) I didn't see anyone else with that kind of allergy.
- mathieuh 4mo agoIt’s known that repeated exposure to allergens can cause allergic symptoms in people previously without them. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_fancier%27s_lung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_fancier%27s_lung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%27s_lung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%27s_lung I actually seemed to grow out of hay fever when I was in my early 20s. Perhaps coincidentally this is also around the time I developed an allergy to cannabis from overuse. Wonder if they’re related somehow.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoPoison ivy/oak sensitivity varies with lifetime exposure. On rare occasions, it is inverse: careful exposure can sometimes lead to resistance. More commonly: you get more sensitive over your lifetime, and some "once immune" people end up catastrophically changing due to incautious exposure. It's complicated.
- bobthepanda 4mo agoit's a bit of a balance. based on this advice, there was a long time recommendation to avoid giving young children peanuts. however, this advice was rescinded after it turned out to increase peanut allergies.
- jdshaffer 4mo agoYes. I developed hay fever after living here in Japan for a couple years. Was fine the first few years, though it was amusing to watch "yellow clouds of pollen" being blown from the trees with random gusts of wind. Now it's not so amusing. My car windows are dusted with a new layer of "light yellow" every couple days now (in season).
- zeafoamrun 4mo agoIt's super easy to be allergic to cedar pollen because it is such a fine pollen. I developed a cedar pollen allergy within a couple years of moving from somewhere with no cedar to a heavily forested area with cedar. No other allergies to anything, I don't think I'm particularly prone. I tried doing the allergy shots for it for a while but it didn't seem to do much. What works is staying inside with the house sealed up and air filters running, or just getting the hell out of town for a month+.
- expedition32 4mo agoAirconditioning 24/7 everywhere makes people weak is my theory.
- ielillo 4mo agoAC are the bane for allergic people. It dries the air and flares the nostrils
- pezezin 4mo agoI have been living in Japan for almost 8 years now, and I didn't have any allergy ever until a month ago when all of sudden it hit me like a hammer. Good god was it painful...
- themaninthedark 4mo agoSample size of 1, for a couple years in Japan had no issue but then hit like a truck. I have allergies to ragweed and didn't have spring allergies before that. Now back in the US and have spring allergies as well.
- pjc50 4mo agoJapan being 68% forest is an astounding stat.
- vkou 4mo ago75% of it is mountains, and not exactly inhabited.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoThe nation has also had declining population (hence deflationary housing) for years
- Markoff 4mo agoStill behind Finland (73.7%) and Sweden (68.7%) though and Laos (71.6%) as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
- Y-bar 4mo agoI don’t consider that a good Wikipedia article because it does a bad job distinguishing between natural forests and mono-/bicultural plantations of which there are vast areas of here. It’s quite like calling wheat fields ”grasslands”. Both fundamentally lack biodiversity.
- sandworm101 4mo agoNot really for a mountain island. Being near the coast means increased moisture and wind, which hits mountains to make rain. Take a japanese-sized slice off the coast of most countries and you will find lots of forrest. Think the pacific northwest, or the bits of hawaii not covered in lava. Then compare parts of the australian coast with no mountains.
- PyWoody 4mo agoMaine is 89.46% [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_territory_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_terr...
- lloydatkinson 4mo agoOnly two types of tree? Even in the 1970's surely that should have been cause for concern.
- Mashimo 4mo agoThis might have something to do with it: > When the sugi and hinoki forests were first planted in the 1950s and 60s, they weren't meant to stand forever. At the time, it was assumed they would be gradually cut down and replanted over time, as had been the case before the war. But as Japan's economy boomed in the late 60s and 70s, major cities like Kobe and Tokyo grew rapidly, and it ended up being cheaper to import wood from other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.
- thaumasiotes 4mo agoI don't get the relevance of "major cities grew rapidly". That can only mean that demand for wood spiked. There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.
- niemandhier 4mo agoIt does: Cheap rural workers could get better paying jobs in the cities so wages increased in rural areas to
- ZiiS 4mo agoIt required imported wood come what may, which opened up regulations and economies of scale that would have made importing wood expensive.
- martin_a 4mo ago> There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood. But isn't that what we're seeing around the world? Be it cheaper labor, political control or whatever else, imported goods can be cheaper than locally produced goods.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- flohofwoe 4mo agoHmm, most German forests are also vast monoculture 'tree farms' and have been for the last 250 years (also caused by large scale deforestation in the centuries before). In the Ore Mountains we also have those yellow clouds of pollen coming off spruce trees every few years, covering everything with a thin yellow dust layer, yet I'm not aware that the number of people with pollen allergies is exceptionally high (oth, maybe it was 200 years ago and by now the population has become immune, or maybe the tree pollen in Japan is just more aggressive...).
- alphabeta3r56 4mo agoGermany has half the percentage of forest as Japan
- thrownthatway 4mo agoContext: Germany, area 357,022 km2 (137,847 sq mi) water 1.27% Japan, area 377,975 km2 (145,937 sq mi), water 1.4%
- flohofwoe 4mo agoOn average sure, but there are regions in Germany with both high amount of forest areas and fairly high population density (e.g. Ore Mountain region up to 50% forest area and more than 200 people/km^2).
- iLoveOncall 4mo agoHayfever allergy rates are growing around the whole world, Germany included.
- postepowanieadm 4mo agoSpruce is also a problem in Poland, especially southern. Leaf trees have been replaced with "fast growing" spruce over a hundred years ago.
- idiomaddict 4mo agoI moved to Germany as an adult from a completely separate biome, and I’ve got terrible problems with allergies I never had in my home country
- closetkantian 4mo agoI first read about this in The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence by Gavin McCormick. Really good read.
- youre-wrong3 4mo ago[flagged]
- jplrssn 4mo agoI’ll bite: which ideology are you claiming believers in climate change are motivated by?
- youre-wrong3 4mo agolol “I’ll bite” that’s such a typical leftist reply.
- dv_dt 4mo agoHmm, I'm also wondering about studies about overly sanitized environments for children being correlated with higher allergy rates. I guess poking around for a good representative study, it's actually low diversity of microbial exposure, not "cleaning" per-se that is correlated - e.g this is one reason why households with dogs have lower allergy rates. A monoculture of certain tree species also implies less microbial diversity.
- DANmode 4mo agoIt can go the other direction, too: exposure to moldy home environments gave me (now resolved) food sensitivities, dust allergies, pet-associated allergies, etc. You can definitely undertrain, or overwhelm, the immune system if not cautious!
- Tangurena2 4mo agoDon't underestimate the amount of cockroach debris present in a modern home. There's a positive correlation between asthma and in-home roach population.
- kakacik 4mo agoMaybe some plywood cheap old US homes full of holes or crevices, but here in Europe if you have cockroach infection and not blind or similarly disabled, you know it. They are not exactly hiding in the evening/night.
- Terr_ 4mo agoI'd like to preemptively draw a line between two different kinds of hypothesis when it comes to hygiene: 1. The immune system is not being exposed enough to wild or even infectious content, and it needs more threats to fight off. 2. ("Old Friends") The immune system is not being exposed enough to commensal or even symbiotic organisms that we co-evolved with, throwing off its calibration and tuning. I instinctively prefer the second, the first seems a little too simple, like some some scaled-down version of "tough love" and "spare the rod[-bacteria], spoil the child."
- rimworld 4mo agoestimated 43% of the population --wow
- xchip 4mo agoThis article could have been summarized in three paragraphs. I'm really hating this trend of diluting content by giving useless testimonials, random anecdotes and delaying the resolution of the subject as much as possible.
- edent 4mo agoPeople like reading. You could summarise all of Ender's Game in a couple of sentences but, guess what, that wouldn't be particularly pleasurable. Not everything has to by hyper-efficient. More importantly, not everything has to be tailored specifically for you. It's OK that other people like reading long-form content.
- cratermoon 4mo agoHere, have a summary of In Search of Lost Time, courtesy of Wikipedia: The novel recounts the experiences of the Narrator (who is never definitively named) while he is growing up, learning about art, participating in society, and falling in love. Hope you enjoyed it, no need to thank me.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoYou're REALLY going to hate this one weird trick Jesus did with all of the Old Testament, then. (and preemptively, with the New Testament, too!)
- OutOfHere 4mo agoDoesn't pollen also have to do with the "gender" of the trees? In gendered trees, male trees emit pollen and female trees intercept pollen. Not all species of trees are gendered (dioecious) but various are. If reforestation uses male trees at the expense of female, then pollen count will be higher. Urban developers who make the mistake of using male trees, because they don't drop fruit/berries/seed pods, will make the residents suffer pollen. Sugi and hinoki apparently are not gendered -- they're monoecious.
- Tangurena2 4mo agoMost trees (about 75%) contain both male & female flowers. Of the rest, about half are species with separate male/female trees and about half have separate male/female flowers (on the same tree).
- niemandhier 4mo ago“Arboreal sexism” is a similar phenomenon: We prefer male trees in cities since they do not produce fruit that drop on the streets. The result is a much higher pollen load.
- vikramkr 4mo agoThat's not actually a thing. Very few trees we plant have specific male vs female plants. One of the few that does that gets brought up in this context, ginko, tends to have male trees preferred because the fruit kind of reeks. Ginkgo fruit is also toxic so you really don't want masses of it getting washed into local waterways in ecosystems the tree isn't native to - not a great time for the local wildlife. A significant supermajority of all the rest of the trees that you plant in cities are gonna have male and female flowers on the same plant or male and female structures within the same flower.
- dwa3592 4mo agothanks for this clarification. until today i was under the impression that they planted male trees only because they looked prettier and weren't as messy as the female ones (to reduce the cleaning bill of the local municipal)
- niemandhier 4mo agoCool, I did not know that this is so disputed a quasi factoid. Thanks for cleaning my brain! Germany has “Baumkataster” which are databases for public trees in cities, they save all kind of tree metadata but gender is missing … https://hub.arcgis.com/search?tags=baumkataster https://hub.arcgis.com/search?tags=baumkataster
- marcosdumay 4mo agoIt's not really disputed. It's something that happened in one small place or two that people insist on repeating on the internet as if it's some universal thing.
- simiones 4mo ago
- armada1122 4mo ago[flagged]
- pelasaco 4mo agoI think its the same in Germany no? Heuschnupfen is something that got worse over the time and if i remember correct is as well related with some reforest project..
- nelox 4mo agoThe Melbourne epidemic thunderstorm asthma event 2016: an investigation of environmental triggers, effect on health services, and patient risk factors https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30120-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
- newsclues 4mo agoWhat about nuclear bombs? No effects from nuking cities?
- IAmBroom 4mo agoPretty sure that effect has been well studied.
- crvdgc 4mo agoWhile in Japan, I heard an urban legend that, it typically takes 5 accumulated years for a foreigner to acquire hay fever in Japan.
- bschwindHN 4mo agoThat more or less checks out, in my case. I think it started in like 4-5 years for me and it's absolutely terrible in Tokyo in the spring time. Thankfully I moved to Okinawa where they didn't plant those trees, or if they did there are much less of them.
- NoImmatureAdHom 4mo agoThe article makes the argument "there is a lot of pollen" and separately "there exist monoculture forests / tree farms" in Japan. But what it doesn't do is: 1. Argue that the pollen is worse because of monoculture relative to polyculture forests (we could mix sugi and hinoki and...I assume net pollen would be the same?) 2. Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies. I mean, you might think that higher levels of exposure in childhood would lead to *fewer* people with allergies. So maybe a lack of forests in the past --> lots of people with allergies today? Why are the Japanese so allergic? This article is bad and the author should feel bad.
- pixl97 4mo ago>Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies. With pollen, particulate size tends to matter. Pine tree pollen is very rarely an allergen because the pollen grains are huge, and I believe the body catches and rejects these pretty easily. Tiny pollen grains and ones with particular shapes can get much deeper in the lungs and aggravate things more easily.
- saalweachter 4mo agoAlso, different species flower and release pollen at different times. A monoculture forest releases all its pollen at once, instead of a fraction of it always being in flower throughout spring/summer.
- anotherevan 4mo agoAllergies are weird. I definitely became more sensitive to hay fever after a gastric bypass. I have a friend who for no apparent reason developed strong allergies in their sixties. Particularly to goats milk. So much so that they will not go to a restaurant that has goat milk products (e.g.: halloumi cheese) in their kitchen due to one too many visits to the hospital emergency ward.
- Tor3 4mo agoMy father also developed allergies in his sixties. And it got worse and worse. Soon he was becoming lactose intolerant as well, and had to start with gluten-free food. He could never be near oranges, unless they were grown without pesticides - the remains on the outside was enough to trigger a reaction. Then he couldn't eat farmed salmon, though he could still eat wild salmon. But there was more and more wild fish he couldn't eat either, which did hurt a fish lover like him. And on and on it went, until he was severely limited to what he could eat and what he could get exposed to. Then one day he noticed that the mayonnaise he enjoyed every day contained a conservation additive (an E-type, as is how they're labelled in Europe) which he knew he used to have some reaction to in the past, another food product included it and he had avoided that one since like forever. So he quit the mayonnaise when he noticed that. But what happened next was astonishing - all his allergies, lactose intolerance and everything disappeared, and not much later he didn't have any issues with anything.
- goda90 4mo ago>Every year, an area is selectively clear-cut, removing sugi, hinoki but also other invasive species like bamboo. Broadleaf trees are left, and with more sun coming through to the ground, they grow back, along with other new seedlings either planted by staff or brought by birds or animals. In other parts of the world, some plantation -> forest projects don't remove trees but instead pull them over and leave them as logs with exposed roots. This provides new habitats for various plants and animals around the logs and the gap in the canopy. I'm curious if they've explored the impacts that approach would have.
- flakiness 4mo agoJapanese sugi forests are too dense. I don't think they have the space to lay these logs down.
- lazide 4mo agoA historically common way to clear certain kinds of areas in the US is to drag anchor chains with giant bulldozers. May still work?
- rsynnott 4mo agoIn this case they're trying to leave broadleaf trees alone, so probably not.
- mr_toad 4mo agoLog slides are potentially lethal in steep areas too. Whole buildings can get demolished if the logs roll down the slope.
- alsetmusic 4mo agoI was surprised to read that our allergies evolve, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. When I lived in the midwest of the USA, I hated mowing the lawn so much. I became a gunked-up mess with my sinuses packed with snot, regardless of antihistamines and (new at the time) allergy meds that presaged our present treatments. I'd lived in the Bay Area for one or two months before a neighbor in my apartment complex knocked to ask if it was standard to not have an air conditioner in the residence (something that had surprised me as well). She said that keeping the windows open was aggravating her allergies and it was the first moment that I realized I could breathe easily through my nose. I don't know what grows where I grew up that isn't here, but getting away from it really changed my quality of life. Severe allergies can be so intrusive that I'd consider moving out of the country if I was in the situation described in this article. But I only think that because I've experienced the effect of changing regions and experiencing a radically different outcome. If someone grew up with this being normal, they might never consider getting away. I certainly didn't think it could be better or worse if I lived someplace else.
- IAmBroom 4mo ago"Evolve" doesn't well describe the very real possibility that you were/are more reactive to species popular in the Midwest, but not the Bay Area. By "evolve", I thought you mean "change within the individual over their lifetime" - which also happens. I spent time in oxygen tents as a young child; I mostly suffer from (easily treated) sinus issues as an adult. Also, our drugs have improved mightily, but that's obviously not relevant for an increase in allergies amongst the population (separate from the above meaning of "evolve"). Edit: I guess I'm not sure what you meant by the word.
- saltybytes 4mo agoI was surprised to not find anything about possible cures or treatments in the article. I had bad allergies myself in my teenage years - unable to sleep for weeks - I finally sought help. The western medicine offers protein shots (similar treatment as to food allergies) but I heard good things about acupuncture. First, I was very skeptical about how needles could "help" with allergies. But about 2 months into the treatment (two sessions per week) the pollen season started. The air felt "heavy to breathe" but to my surprise I was not effected that year at all. After finishing the whole treatment I was allergy free for many years. Now I sometimes feel it on bad days with clouds of pollen hanging in humid air. My uneducated guess is, that my acupuncture treatment I received over 2 decades ago "wears off". I wonder if others experienced similar or if I was a statistical outlier to a well shaped Gauss curve?
- packetlost 4mo agoMy understanding is allergies can be partially managed with placebo affect (as can mild colds!) and that is likely the reason it appears to work.
- BobaFloutist 4mo agoI also understand that weight lifting can help reduce allergies, since the immune system is kind of a "luxury" system that cedes resources when the body is recovering from injury, and weightlifting is deliberate minor injury. Maybe acupuncture could work through the same mechanism?
- packetlost 4mo agoMaybe during treatment, but that mechanism wouldn't work months after stopping the treatment.
- amake 4mo agoI live in Japan and developed an allergy to cedar pollen after I came. I started sublingual immunotherapy (a pill of concentrated pollen you dissolve under your tongue) three years ago and now can make it through the pollen season symptom-free. Supposedly you even keep the immunity after stopping the medication, though I have not tested that yet.
- rouvax 4mo ago> A 1950s project is to blame Half-way through the article: "When the sugi and hinoki forests were first planted in the 1950s and 60s, they weren't meant to stand forever. At the time, it was assumed they would be gradually cut down and replanted over time, as had been the case before the war. But as Japan's economy boomed in the late 60s and 70s, major cities like Kobe and Tokyo grew rapidly, and it ended up being cheaper to import wood from other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia." As often in environmental health, the cost-benefit ratio is calculated after the exposure is widespread, i.e. too late.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agoI don't understand what you're saying, isn't it exact opposite - too early? by the time the 10-20 year timeline finished, situation changed enough for the plan to not be followed
- pugworthy 4mo agoThe US states of Oregon and Washington were major exporters of raw logs to Japan as well. The 1962 Columbus Day Storm [1] fell 11.2 billion board feet of timber, which flooded the market and initiated heavy overseas demand. Exports peaked in the 80's. But when the export levels fell and old growth timber became more scarce, local economies of exporting regions took a big hit. The port of Coos Bay for example had a big downturn with lumber being the primary cargo of ships. Coos Bay is the only deep-water coastal harbor in Oregon and the largest between San Francisco and the Puget Sound. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_storm_of_1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_storm_of_1962
- nekusar 4mo agoIt wasn't smoke – it was AISLOP
- cratermoon 4mo agoThe silver lining: hinoki wood has a pleasant scent and makes high quality timber. The cost is lower now with the excess coming to market. Oddly, Wikipedia calls it “slow growing”, contradicting the claim in the story it being planted to help rapidly reforest Japan.
- e40 4mo agoI really wish the planning of trees and bushes took into account allergies. In my area, there are a lot of trees that make my life hellish when those plants pollinate. The other day I thought I was coming down with a cold. Nope, just really bad allergies.
- cloche 4mo agoI lived in Japan from 2011-2016 and eventually needed to move away because my allergies were so bad. Many other foreigners would say things like "I never had allergies before I came to Japan". Unfortunately, I heard that the government previously investigated taking action but were lobbied against doing so by pharmaceutical companies that earn revenue from allergy medications.
- ianferrel 4mo agoMismanaged monoculture forests are one of the first examples of states seeking simplified legible solutions to managing complex ecosystems in Seeing Like a State.
- groby_b 4mo agoAnd oddly, Germany has the same pollen clouds, France has the same pollen clouds, the West Coast has them. (The three places I saw this year, at least). It's odd the BBC chose to anchor on Japan when it's really a widespread issue.