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Japan’s natural state

The Kokai River flows below me toward the pink horizon to the southwest. Its flooded waters surge over a small diversion dam before bending west and exiting my view behind a concrete embankment, the future site of yet another bridge. I’m relaxing atop a raised levy system that runs the length of the river, winding in lockstep, a serpentine mound of earth lining each river bank. The levies cut through rice paddies, farms, and the small rural towns that populate the southern part of Ibaraki prefecture, 40 kilometers north of Tokyo. From this vantage I can see it all. Mt. Tsukuba looms over the landscape to the east. The lights on its peak are beginning to greet the evening patrons of the railway tram that runs base to summit service. A huge hall with jutting roof beams entirely out of scale with traditional Japanese architecture sits adjacent to the river, home to some kind of religious group. I try to frame a picture of the massive building, some architect’s idea of Japanese style in the medium of concrete and glass, but I can’t seem to get Mt. Tsukuba in the picture without a row of power line towers in the background of the shot. I give up and get back on my bike.

To the north I can barely make out the town of Ishige, my adopted home for the year, where the romantic silhouette of a seven story castle bisects the glowing neon of two Pachinko parlors in the foreground. This is too often the rural landscape of modern Japan, and the cause of my lament.I’ve spent the majority of my free time this fall exploring the area that surrounds Ishige, which sits in the middle of the vast lowland plain that surrounds Tokyo. It doesn’t take long when leaving the capital for the grid of the city to be replaced by the grid of the countryside, the flat expanse of rice paddies intricately manicured through the ages. The concrete waterways, levies, and flat roads don’t do much to inspire the imagination, but do make for some enjoyable cycling. My mission has been to find something distinctive, a place that sets itself away from the sameness that has come to dominate Japan.Foreigner’s visions of Japan may be that of ultra modernity; a high-tech fueled landscape of bullet trains and sleek design. To a certain degree this vision is true. I soaked up these images my first year, enjoying the foreign mystique of a new land. But there is another vision; a pastoral scene of rice paddies, quaint gardens, and mist shrouded mountain forests. This is Kurosawa’s Japan and it is on life support, in danger of being forever consigned to the post cards and calenders of souvenir shops.What I’ve found in my nine months of living in the countryside is a string of two lane highways, none moving very fast, some that abruptly end. I’ve found diversion dams, concrete spillways and hundreds of bright blue pump stations. There are empty mountain roads with hillsides layered in concrete, fortified coastlines littered with tetrapod rip-rap, and power lines criss-crossing the entire scene. It’s impossible to drive anywhere without seeing our human footprint. Roads feel like a background loop in an old black and white movie. Ramen shop, pachinko (slot pinball casinos), MacDonald’s, ramen, electronics store, ramen, repeat. It’s numbing.

The odd thing about Japan is that the further you get from large cities the more construction you tend to see. My rafting job last summer brought me often to the mountains of Gunma prefecture where I would take driving excursions high into the mountains to try to find the remote, pristine places I knew had to exist. This hunt often yielded only larger dams, more elaborate road projects, and longer tunnels, all with dwindling traffic flow. It leads a nature-lover to ask why? Why are there over budgeted road projects to no where, yet it still takes me three hours to drive 100km between major cities on a two-lane “highway”? Why are hundreds more dams, concrete river containment projects and other habitat destroyers in planning stages in the country that eats the most fish? Why does Japan continue to ruin its coastlines for generations to come with ugly tetrapods, despite growing evidence that they cause more erosion than they prevent?
The answer is Japan’s bureaucracy, perhaps the world’s largest and most stubbornly unchangeable. This institution, combined with the powerful construction industry, has been steamrolling over Japan’s natural beauty for decades, and today much of Japans domestic economy depends on it. Japan has become addicted to building.The construction industry grew quickly after the war as it stepped up to face the gargantuan task of rebuilding a bombed-out nation. It was then further inflated by modernization efforts of the 60s and 70s. But then a strange thing happened. During the 1980s every indicator showed Japan to be a modernized, industrial country able to compete economically with other great powers on equal footing. In other countries this stage of development brought with it a slowdown in building, a shift from infrastructure development to maintenance. This is not the case in Japan. Construction efforts barreled ahead at full steam and continue to do so to this day. Japan is a post-modern nation with development goals of a pre-industrial nature, and the bureaucracy is at the reigns.Japan’s bureaucracy is difficult for Westerners to fathom. More often it is the bureaucrats, not elected officials, who write, introduce, and defend legislation in the Diet, Japan’s house of parliament. The distance between lawmaking and Japan’s complacent constituents creates a hazy system of accountability. After laws are created and funds are allocated, it is nearly impossible to retract them, even after conditions change.

In my two year stay, I’ve been able to observe how funding and construction projects effect one another. Each city, ward, and prefecture have their given budgets. This money is to be used in a given year and does not carry over to the following fiscal calendar. Starting around October, construction starts everywhere. Sidewalks are torn up, half finished bridges resume building, and road work increases, all in an effort to use up the remaining budget. The bureaucracy doesn’t look favorably on unspent funds, viewing miserly local governments as ungrateful and deserving of less money the following year. All levels of government get caught in a yearly spending trap which over time has prevented any grand planning vision, the type of planning that will improve people’s standard of living and make Japan a more attractive travel destination. Japan’s high cost of living is often attributed to its land constraints and lack of natural resources, but truly has more to do with this bureaucratic waste and a lack of foresight.

All this brings me back to the river side. Maybe all this complaining is just another example of a foreigner misinterpreting Japan. As the West slowly gained access as the Edo period came to an end, it was thought that the Japanese were nature loving people. This assumption was based on a semantical error between tennen (nature) and shizen (the way things are, natural states). Nature doesn’t need trees and pristine coastlines; nature is the way things progress, however these progressions take shape. I look around at the concrete lined river and power lines, at natural Japan, and sigh. The castle on the horizon is no castle at all, but a community center. It has an auditorium, small library, and a museum about the area. It remains empty most of the time. As my apartment sits in its shadow, it has become the symbol of my frustration, a heat and labor energy drain on this small town that is already clinging to survival on rice farm subsidies and, of course, construction. It is one of the many glaring reminders scattered throughout Japan of overzealous plans to modernize a modern country. But as no one ever seems to kick up any fuss, perhaps these are not reminders of anything, but merely the way things are.



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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 6:08 am and is filed under Brooding in Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One response to “Japan’s natural state”

  1. Thanh says:
    November 15, 2011 at 11:04 pm

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