Taniguchi was also inspired to use cement furnaces to aid in the disposal of household garbage.
In short, in a few months I might be able to read Taniguchi in Japanese.
Taniguchi traveled the world in search of ideas that would both make money and reduce the damage caused by industry.
Taniguchi was just 8 years old and just a mile and a quarter from ground zero when the atom bomb hit Hiroshima.
Taniguchi himself had no interest in whaling until he was forced to defend Japan's position, as a spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
But Japan's official passion for whaling is at odds with widespread public ignorance and apathy, says Tomohiko Taniguchi, an adjunct professor at Tokyo's Keio University.
In the longer run, by 2020 or so, Taniguchi envisions that there will be sufficient hydro and wind power to supply 500, 000 mainland cars with hydrogen.
"I heard that Iceland was planning to switch its economy over to hydrogen, and I realized we could do it way faster on Yakushima, " says Taniguchi.
First, however, Taniguchi must get bureaucrats to loosen overall restrictions that prevent, for example, the importation of fuel cell buses that already meet European and American safety standards.
Taniguchi has a reputation as an enviro-capitalist stretching back decades.
Now retired from the civil service, Taniguchi is among a small but growing number of critics within Japan who say it's time for Tokyo to stop hurting its image worldwide.
In addition to harnessing hydroelectric power from an existing 60-megawatt plant to make silicon carbide, used in various industries, Taniguchi realized he could make plenty of cheap hydrogen fuel with current technology.
By 2020 or so, depending on the progress of fuel cell technology, the last of the island's 9, 500 gasoline cars will be gone and only water-vapor-emitting fuel cell autos will remain, according to Taniguchi's plan.
It will take visionaries like Taniguchi to bring the hydrogen economy closer, say realists like Masasuke Takata, a professor at Nagoaka University of Technology in Niigata, and to keep the public's expectations a few notches below the utterly impossible.
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