ICHIHARA, Chiba Pref. -- People here see some dramatic shifts in their city's landscape. Like a time-lapse film, valleys are buried, and small mountains are razed only to have new knolls swell up in their place.

But this is no welcome natural geological wonder. If anything it is a miracle wrought by the capricious consumption patterns of modern day Tokyo and morally bankrupt waste disposal companies.

These geological changes are due to garbage.

Chiba Prefecture in general and Ichihara in particular are favorite dumping grounds for shady industrial waste handlers.

Over the past decade, this area just outside the city of Chiba has been ravaged by illegal dumping and unscrupulous waste handlers who store mountains of rubbish.

Fed up with waiting for the central government to add teeth to the nation's waste legislation, the prefectural government is aiming to pass an ordinance in March to close loopholes and stunt the growth of these mountains of trash.

"Ichihara is representative of the prefecture's industrial waste problem," said Kenichi Ono, section chief of the prefecture's industrial waste management division.

Sparsely populated areas with cheap land and good highway access from Tokyo are prone to exploitation by waste handlers.

Ichihara boasts the prefecture's largest municipal area, and is second only to Yokohama in the six prefectures in the Kanto area, according to a local citizens' group. Yet it ranks as only the sixth most populous municipality in Chiba Prefecture, with a shade under 280,000 people.

Ono said the prefecture faces three types of threats from industrial waste handlers. One is the stealthily digging and burial of garbage under cover of darkness or in rural areas. The second is firms that store industrial waste in mountainous proportions claiming they will one day dispose of or recycle it. The third is what he calls "guerrilla" disposal activities, or random illegal dumping.

Recently there has been a shift from the first to the latter two, he said, and this is visible in Ichihara.

The numbers speak for themselves.

"There is more waste piled at just two (storage) sites in Ichihara than on all of Teshima Island," said Isamu Katada, a resident following the garbage issue for two decades.

The two biggest mountains of garbage in the rolling hills inland from Ichihara's port are believed to total 600,000 tons. Kagawa Prefecture's Teshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea -- the nation's most notorious illegal dumping site -- totaled just 500,000.

Every year nearly 400 million tons of industrial waste is created in Japan.

Around 80 million tons of this originates in Tokyo, of which a quarter ends up in Chiba Prefecture and 15 percent of that in Ichihara, Katada estimates.

National government data from December show that Chiba Prefecture accounted for roughly 20 percent of the reported illegally dumped garbage in 2000.

Garbage problems abound throughout the prefecture, but Ichihara shoulders a disproportionate share of the burden. More than a fifth of the prefecture's known 155 "self-processing disposal sites" are located in this city, officials said.

Under current waste disposal law, firms are allowed to operate disposal sites to process their own garbage. Here they can burn up to 200 kg of refuse per hour and store nonburnable garbage before delivering it to certified dump sites.

But some of these companies accept waste from others for a fee.

At the dumping peak, dozens of trucks would cart waste to the area in the wee hours of the morning, said Tomoko Yamamoto, an Ichihara Municipal Assembly member.

"There is one 20-meter valley, around 10,000 cu. meters -- that was filled with garbage in a month," she said.

Yamamoto and her group, Ichihara Citizen Network, have been vocal in the battle to stop garbage from inundating the city.

To members of her group and residents like Hiroshi Kuramoto -- who live within spitting distance of some of the waste operators -- the looming mountains of trash and nearly 3-meter steel fences that hold them back are sinister.

He said the stench has driven some people away.

"The prefecture is too polite. It issues improvement demands that read like a joke. They say, "You are burning more garbage than you are allowed. Please stop," Kuramoto said.

He and others want to see more action.

With 56 civil servants in its industrial waste management division, and roughly 100 working on industrial waste issues, Chiba has allotted more resources to the problem than any other prefecture, officials said.

To stem the flow of waste, the prefecture has assigned 18 people to a 24-hour patrol team. that operates in 16-hour shifts.

Ono and others at the prefecture admit that a prompter response and more manpower initially might have minimized the problem's proportions now.

But the government is limited in what it can do, he said. Typically it orders operators to improve their practices and reduce their stored waste, but often to no avail.

In the end a police investigation might lead to an arrest, but then who will remove the garbage, he asked.

The prefectural patrols, 24-hour toll free phone lines and other steps are beginning to pay off, he and others say.

The number of illegal dumpings in the prefecture in 2001 reached 306 as of November and was likely to double the 160 from a year before.

"But this is good because the volume being dumped is one-tenth of (what it was) before," said the prefecture's Takayuki Takaoka.

In these numbers officials see frustrated waste handlers being driven from the prefecture.

They also harbor big expectations for the ordinance on the horizon.

The planned legislation would require companies aspiring to process their own waste to obtain prefectural permission and prevent garbage from being received between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Akira Namiki is one of those on the front lines of the "garbage war." He is a member of the prefectural waste patrol. He said he worries about being pricked by an errant syringe at an illegal dump site, as well as violence from the waste handlers. He and his partner are occasionally confronted by an upset employee, sometimes with a knife in hand.

But at the end of the day it is about money, said Namiki's partner, Kenichi Oshio.

"If Japan's industrial waste problem is to be solved, then some type of system that makes appropriate disposal of waste economical, and dumping of it unprofitable, will have to be created," he said.

He, for one, hopes that the proposed law will be a step in that direction.

Yet some citizens worry that it might be too little too late, that the garbage in the ground and in the sky is already poisoning the city.

"This is a problem that our generation created. We need to solve it, but the negative effects of it will probably be felt by our children and maybe even theirs," said Kazue Suetsugu, a member of the citizens' network.