One particularly outspoken chap told me, «I don't trust us, the Japanese people. We get carried away to the extreme. It starts off small. It ends up by going the whole hog.» I think it's in their culture. Whatever they do, they carry it out to the apex, whether it's making samurai swords or computer chips. They keep at it, improving, improving, improving. In any endeavor, they set out to be No. 1. If they go back to the military, they will set out to be No. 1 in quality, in fighting spirit. Whatever their reasons, they have built total dedication into the system, into the mind.
Total dedication drives Japan's self-sacrificing workers, and underlies the quality control that is the hallmark of Japanese production. But the tendency to take things to extremes means that people and organizations can easily get carried away and set out to «improve» things that don't need improving. Recently, driving home from Iya Valley, I passed a small mountain stream, no more than a meter wide, which the authorities had funneled into a concrete chute, flattening the mountain slopes down which it flowed and paving them for fifty meters on each side. One could see the «fail-safe» mentality of the Construction Ministry's River Bureau at work: if ten meters of protection will prevent a landslide for a hundred years, why not fifty meters, to make sure there will be no landslide for a thousand years?
Take the ideology of «An Archipelago of Disasters» and marry it to «Total Dedication.» Sweeten the match with a dowry in the form of rich proceeds to politicians and bureaucrats. Glorify it with government-paid propaganda singing the praises of dam and road builders. The result is an assault on the landscape that verges on mania; there is an unstoppable extremism at work that is reminiscent of Japan's military buildup before World War II. Nature, which «wreaks havoc» on Japan, is the enemy, with rivers in particular seen as «the true bane of Japanese life,» and all the forces of the modern state are made to focus on eradicating nature's threats.
In the coming century, under pressure of population, erosion, and climatic changes, nations will be making crucial decisions about the proper way for people to live in their environment. Two opposing schools of opinion and technology will influence these decisions: the natural-preservation group (which at its extreme includes the «tree huggers,» who fight to preserve the environment at all costs); and the pave-and-build group, represented at its most far-reaching by the planners of massive dam systems on the Yangtze or the Mekong River, who seek to dominate nature with big man-made structures.
In the West, most governments are trying to chart a middle course, with environmental protection given high priority. They are decreeing the removal of shoreline buttresses and funding vast projects to undo mistakes already made. In Florida, for example, there is now a multibillion-dollar program to remove some of the drainage canals in the Everglades and restore them to their natural condition. «If someone's got a dam that's going down,» U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told his friends, «I'll be there.» But Japan's Minister of Construction will very definitely not be there. He's busy planning Japan's next monster dam system, similar to the one at Nagara, this time on Shikoku'sYoshino River, another mega-project designed to protect against a flood that comes only once every few centuries. The majority of registered voters in the area signed a petition requesting that the project be put to a referendum, but it moves forward regardless. So weak is Japan's democracy in the face of officialdom that in twenty-five out of thirty-three such cases, between 1995 and 1998, legislatures have refused to conduct referendums.
So Japan has staked its position at the far end of the pave-and-build spectrum. Redressing old mistakes is not on the agenda; the momentum within Japan is for increasing, rather than decreasing, humanity's impact on its mountains and seas. Even as Japan fell deeper and deeper into recession during the 1990s, it continued to provide more funding for civil-engineering works than ever before. In 1994, concrete production in Japan totaled 91.6 million tons, compared with 77.9 million tons in the United States. This means that Japan lays about thirty times as much per square foot as the United States.
In fiscal 1998, spending on public works came to ¥16.6 trillion (about $136 billion at 1999 exchange rates), the kind of money that dwarfs the cost of building the Panama Canal and far surpasses the budget of the U.S. space program. It meant an almost incalculable quantity of concrete and metal structures overlaying rivers, mountains, wetlands, and shoreline, in just one year-and a "poor" year at that, since Japan was mired in a recession. One can only imagine what heights the expenditures may rise to when the economy begins to grow again.
Meanwhile, through its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), Japan is exporting the building of dams and river works to Asian countries such as Indonesia and Laos, where cash-starved governments welcome ODA largesse regardless of need. Through ODA-funded projects, Japanese construction firms profit during a time of economic downturn at home while establishing themselves abroad at ODA expense. Igarashi Takayoshi, a professor of politics at Hosei University and the author of a book on Japan's construction policies, commented, «They are exporting the exact same problems Japan has at home to the rest of the world.»
At international forums, Japanese participants are usually to be found speaking warmly in favor of environmental protection. And while these individuals are often sincere – even tragically sincere – their speeches and papers should not blind us to the path that Japan as a nation is following. Projects such as the destruction of wetlands at Isahaya, the damming of river systems at Nagara, the blasting of forest roads, and the armoring of the seashore are not marginal ones. They lie at the core of modern Japanese culture. Bureaucrats educated in the best universities plan them, consulting with the most respected professors; the finest engineers and landscape artists design them; top architects draft far-reaching civil-engineering schemes for the future; companies in the forefront of industry build them; leading politicians profit from them; opinion journals run ads in their pages in support of them; and civic leaders across the nation beg for more. Building these works and monuments consumes the mental energies of Japan's elite.
This means that Japan's money, technology, political clout, as well as the creative powers of its designers, academics, and civic planners, will be exerted in favor of pave-and-build-on a massive scale – during the next few decades. Scholars and institutions seeking to predict the way the world is going have overlooked one simple truth: the world's second-largest economy – Asia's most advanced state – is set firmly on this path.
One can already see the effect on Japan's intellectual life. While expertise in the technologies of protection of wetlands, forests, and seacoasts languishes at a primitive level, land sculpting heavily influences the direction of study both in the humanities and in engineering. The design of land-stabilizing material has become a specialty of its own. Gone are the days when the Construction Ministry simply poured wet concrete over hillsides. Today's earthworks use concrete in myriad inventive forms: slabs, steps, bars, bricks, tubes, spikes, blocks, square and cross-shaped buttresses, protruding nipples, lattices, hexagons, serpentine walls topped with iron fences, and wire nets. Projects with especially luxurious budgets call for concrete modeled in the shape of natural boulders.
Land sculpting has also become a hot topic in contemporary art. The photographer Shibata Toshio has built an international reputation with his images that capture in black and white the interplay of cement textures laid down over Japan's newly molded mountains and seasides. Shibata is documenting the haunting visual results of this disaster, and his work is very ironic. Yet foreign critics, faithful converts to what they believe is «Japanese aesthetics,» and ignorant of the ongoing calamity on the ground, fail to get the point. Art critic Margaret Loke enthused, «For the Japanese – who seem to bring a graphic designer's approach to everything they touch, from kitchen utensils to food packing to gardens – public works are just another chance to impose their exquisite sense of visual order on nature.» Japan is indeed imposing its exquisite sense of visual order on nature, on a scale almost beyond imagining.