A few days have passed since the Kobe District Court issued its landmark ruling that the central government and a local expressway corporation should reduce vehicle exhaust emissions on National Highway No. 43 in the city of Amagasaki in Hyogo Prefecture. Sufferers from pollution-related asthma and other lung ailments throughout the nation are rightly overjoyed at this first-ever case of a court in effect ordering the government to take steps to reduce exhaust emissions. It is too soon to say, however, that the ruling cleared the air over the actual extent of the government's responsibility for, well, clearing the air.

To be sure, in his ruling on the suit filed in December 1988 by sufferers of diseases related to air pollution Judge Shogo Takenaka did place the onus directly on the government and the Hanshin Expressway Public Corp., saying they have a duty to prevent air pollution. He also ordered the compensatory payment of 210 million yen to 50 residents of Amagasaki who have various respiratory illnesses, acknowledging a link between their health problems and vehicle-exhaust fumes.

The 11-year-long legal battle thus appears to have ended in victory for the plaintiffs, despite the defendants' dubious arguments that pollution in the area actually was less than in some other places and that there was no cause-and-effect relationship between the dirty air and the plaintiffs' ailments.