Nose, a small town on the northern outskirts of Osaka, first put the fear of dioxin into nation's consciousness last year. Now, just 10 months later, another dioxin scare has hit the headlines. This time, the site is Tokorozawa, the Saitama bedroom community on the northwestern outskirts of Tokyo. The scale of the dioxin contamination, authorities say, is different, but the root is the same: garbage incineration.

Given the carcinogenic nature of dioxin, Tokorozawa has once again given us a wakeup call on the lifestyle we Japanese have long taken for granted -- one dependent on the assumption that garbage, if neatly wrapped in a vinyl bag and properly placed on the doorstep, will be collected and safely disposed of. The crude reality is that Japan is a crowded island nation, and there aren't many landfills where garbage can be dumped and forgotten about. The alternative is incineration, and Japan is by far the biggest incinerator of garbage in the developed world.

To minimize the emission of dioxin and other harmful chemicals from both household and industrial garbage, the government has sought to build cleaner, more efficient incinerators and eliminate the small, dirty burners that cannot meet dioxin-emission standards. These clean-burning incinerators should reduce dioxin emissions to acceptable levels sometime in the future, but this is cold comfort to those residents who now live in close proximity to the heavy polluters.