If a company has announced plans to construct a large factory in your community, would you support this addition?

If a company has announced plans to construct a large factory in my community, I would support, rather welcome, this addition to my area. It would help my community become economically flourish, and would contribute to revival of manufacturing industry in Japan.

Located in the edge of the Metropolitan Tokyo area, my community has considerable number of residents to spend time in commuting to Tokyo, where there are a lot of better and wider range of job opportunities. Long commuting time forces some wives to work as a part timer. The factory would also result in community flourishment with accompanying advent of shops and restaurants targeting the workers. More people means greater spending and economic growth.

A significantly important role in employment and prosperity that manufacturing used to play in Japan has completely disappeared about 30 years ago, when Japanese companies began factory transfer to neighboring countries with cheaper labor cost. However, discouraged by higher and higher labor cost and expense to meet the increasingly severer environmental regulations there, a trend to come back to Japan has just begun. The construction of a large factory in my area would add a momentum to this tendency.

Some environmental experts may concern about emission of hazardous pollutants, but it is a story of the past. Long years of environmental diseases have been motivating the Japanese government and manufacturers to develop state-of-the-art environmental protection technologies. Companies’ fear about negative reputation by environmental-conscious consumers also contributes to development of more sophisticated technologies. It results in almost no pollutant emission from factories in Japan.

In conclusion, the construction of a large factory would provide only advantages and no adverse effect at all in my community.