Kitakyushu
From 'Sea of Death' to OECD Green Growth Model City—Kitakyushu spent ¥804 billion cleaning up Yawata Steel's pollution while quadrupling GDP, proving environmental recovery and economic growth aren't incompatible.
Kitakyushu is the greatest environmental comeback story in industrial history. In the 1960s, the city's Dokai Bay was nicknamed the 'Sea of Death'—so polluted by effluent from the Yawata Steel Works and surrounding chemical plants that nothing could survive in its waters. Soot blackened the sky in seven distinct colors, each shade corresponding to a different factory's emissions. Children suffered respiratory diseases. The city was Japan's economic miracle made toxic.
The reversal began with women. The Sanroku Women's Association and Tobata Women's Association organized grassroots campaigns starting in the 1950s, producing a documentary called 'We Want Our Blue Sky Back' that was screened across Japan. Their two-decade campaign forced Yawata Steel and the municipal government to invest ¥804 billion in pollution prevention between 1972 and 1991. The result: SOx emissions dropped 98%, over 100 fish species returned to Dokai Bay, and GDP quadrupled during the same period—demolishing the argument that environmental protection and economic growth are incompatible.
Kitakyushu then did something unusual: it exported its expertise. Since 2010, the city has implemented over 192 environmental projects in 78 cities across 16 countries. The OECD named it one of four Green Growth Model Cities alongside Paris, Chicago, and Stockholm. The Eco-Town Project, launched in 1997, turned the city's industrial waste streams into recycling industries.
The city's arc—from fishing village to steel capital to toxic wasteland to global environmental model—compresses into one municipality the industrial trajectory that most nations take centuries to complete. Kitakyushu proves that ecological succession applies to cities: disturbed ecosystems can recover, but only when the organisms within them force the change.