God’s little chopsticks

Every day, Mitsubishi cuts down 100-year-old aspen forests to make 8 million disposable eating utensils for you and me–and they say they’re protecting nature

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Back to Nussbaum or Ahead to Teen mothers

American and Japanese corporations are running neck and neck in their competition to see who can produce the world’s most absurdly wasteful, absolutely unnecessary paraphernalia, such as individually foil-wrapped tea bags, oversized compact disc packaging, and plastic wrapping for all. But Japan definitely reigns supreme when it comes to disposable chopsticks, or “waribashi,” as they’re known in the sushi bars, noodle shops, and fast-food joints ubiquitous to the island nation. Total world waribashi production stands at about 20 billion pair a year, most of which are used in Japan after they are imported from forests in such far-flung places as China, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Canada.

While restaurants in other Asian countries wash and reuse chopsticks, the Japanese “don’t want to use a chopstick that is used by someone else,” explained Yuki Komayima, former president of the Cana-dian Chopstick Manufacturing Company (CCMC), to the Vancouver Sun. Komayima added that Japanese people traditionally believe chopsticks to be “given by the gods.”

Such tradition, melded into modern industrial society, produces quite a twisted reality. A major player in today’s wari-bashi God Squad is the Mitsubishi Group, one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world, which owns a hefty chunk of CCMC. Mitsubishi created CCMC in a joint venture with a Japanese chemical corporation; they have now captured a third of Japan’s waribashi market.

According to the Rainforest Action Network, which is organizing a boycott to halt Mitsubishi’s forest destruction around the world, CCMC is clear-cutting vast swaths of aspen forests to produce 8 million pairs of chopsticks every day. CCMC feeds only the finest-grain aspen into its high-tech chopstick mill, leaving more than three-quarters of the trees in the field to rot or burn–outraging Canadian government foresters and activists alike. CCMC then ships the raw waribashi to Taiwan for finishing before they are imported to Japan. The waribashi are marketed with the motto, “chopsticks that protect nature,” and then promptly discarded after use.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate