The use of pesticides has rapidly increased in Japan since the end of World War II,
significantly reducing work burdens and boosting food production. In the meantime,
pesticides, responsible for poisoning and environmental pollution, have for many years
posed grave issues that have had to be tackled by scientists of rural medicine for a long
period. The Japanese Association of Rural Medicine, founded by the late Toshikazu
Wakatsuki, has grappled with those issues for many years. Above all, the association has
fulfilled its social obligations, such as by bringing the toxicity of organic mercury to
light in animal tests to prompt the government to prohibit its use, and by casting light
on birth defects caused by defoliants aerially sprayed during the Vietnam War to urge U.S.
military forces to break off herbicide warfare. As it has become possible to make less
toxic pesticides available for farm work in recent years, death-inducing accidents have
seldom occurred during the spraying of pesticides, and the association’s activities are
now at a low ebb. Now that pesticides, which after all are biologically toxic compounds,
are openly used on farms, there is the need to pay constant attention to their impacts on
the human body and the environment. In the future, it is necessary to epidemiologically
probe into chronic impacts on the human body and contribute to the prevention of pesticide
poisoning in Southeast Asia.