The impulse to subdue natural forces arises in every traditional society, from the Egyptians and the building of the Pyramids to the Chinese and the construction of the Grand Canal. In China, legends teach that Yu, one of the mythical first emperors in 3000 B.C., gained the right to rule because he tamed the Great Flood. Japan, too, has a long history of restructuring the landscape. It began in the eighth century, when the capitals of Nara and Kyoto were laid down according to vast street grids, tens of square kilometers across, on what had been semiwild plains. Another spate of civil engineering took place at the end of the Muromachi period, in the late sixteenth century, when warlords mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers through the corvee to dig moats and build gigantic castles, the walls of which can still be seen today. Hideyoshi, one of the generals who unified Japan at this time, changed the course of the Kamo River in Kyoto, moving it somewhat to the east of its former channel. During the Edo period (1600-1868), cities poured so much landfill into their harbors that the livable area of ports like Hiroshima, Osaka, and Tokyo nearly tripled. Historians cite landfill as an example of a technology in which Japan had long experience before Perry arrived.
With the advent of modern technology, every society made mistakes. The United States, for example, embarked on enormous civil-engineering programs, such as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Intended to address urgent needs for water and electric power, some of these programs were not wholly beneficial, although it had been claimed that they would be. After a certain point, however, Americans reconsidered these projects. In other East Asian nations, environmental destruction, serious as it is, slows down when it ceases to be profitable. Not so in Japan. It is tempting to blame this on an evil Western influence, but that does not explain Japan's rampant and escalating assault on its rivers, mountains, and coasts, which is so at variance with anything to be found in the West.
In this, Japan teaches us a lesson about a cultural problem that every modern state faces: how to rise above antiquated cultural attitudes that have dangerous consequences for modern life. Another case in point is the «frontier mentality» that still makes so many Americans cherish the right to possess firearms. The right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment made sense for poorly protected frontier communities, but in modern America it leads to the slaughter of thousands of people every year. No other advanced nation would tolerate this. Yet Americans still find it impossible to legislate gun control. From this we may see that Japan is very unlikely to rethink its environmental policies, for the very reason that channeling small streams into concrete chutes is something learned not from the West but from Japans own tradition. As with other stubborn cultural problems, change will come when enough people become aware of them and demand solutions. Unfortunately, as we will see throughout this book, change is the very process that Japan's complex systems work to prevent at all costs.
In Kamo no Chomei's time, changes caused by nature seemed to be irrevocable acts of karma. There was simply no alternative but to submit to impermanence. With the help of modern technology, however, it seems possible to banish impermanence once and for all, and thus the concept of impermanence has mutated into a relentless war on nature. The self-pitying perception that Japan, punished viciously by the elements, is «a hard place to live in» features in the media and in school curricula, and serves as the official reason that Japan cannot afford the luxury of leaving nature alone.
A 1996 editorial in the major daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun says it welclass="underline" «This country is an archipelago of disasters, prone to earthquakes, typhoons, torrential rains, floods, mudslides, landslides, and, at times, to volcanic eruptions. There are 70,000 zones prone to mudslides, 10,000 to landslides and 80,000 dangerous slopes, according to data compiled by the Construction Ministry.» In the numbers quoted at the end of the editorial, the reader may experience a true Lovecraftian «thrill of ghastliness»: these official figures tell us that the Construction Ministry has already earmarked tens of thousands of additional sites to be covered in concrete in the near future.
Everywhere in Japan, one encounters propaganda about the rivers being the enemy. Typical of the genre is a series of advertisements written in the guise of articles called «The Men Who Battled the Rivers,» which ran every month from 1998 to 1999 in the influential opinion journal Shincho 45. Each article features antique maps and paintings or photographs of the tombstones of romantic personalities in history, such as the sixteenth-century warrior Takeda Shingen, who subdued dangerous rivers. The message was that fighting against rivers is traditional and noble.
Agencies with names like the River Environmental Management Foundation, whose money comes from the construction industry and whose staff have descended from the River Bureau, pay for «nature as the enemy» ads, and cultural figures happily lend their names to these ads. In the West, we are so accustomed to seeing and hearing «save the earth» preachments in magazines and on television that it may be hard to believe that the media in Japan are following a different tack, but it is indeed different. Here is an example of what the Japanese public reads every day in popular magazines and newspapers: a long-running river-works series printed in Shukan Shincho magazine was called «Speaking of Japan's Rivers.» The September 9, 1999, issue features a color spread of the award-winning writer Mitsuoka Akashi standing proudly on a stone embankment along the Shirakawa River in Kyushu. In the first few paragraphs, Mitsuoka reminisces about his childhood memories of swimming in the river; then the article gets to the point:
It was in 1953 that this Shirakawa River showed nature's awesome power and unsheathed its sword. It was on June 26, 1953. That natural disaster is known as the June 26 River Disaster. At the time, our house was near Tatsutaguchi Station near the riverbank. At about eight o'clock at night there was a loud rumble. The steel bridge had been washed away. We rushed to the station platforms but the water level kept rising, so we took refuge at Tatsuyama hill just behind. I could hear people in the houses along the riverbank screaming «Help!» and before my eyes I saw one house and then another washed away. But there was nothing we could do.
Mitsuoka concludes: «For me, Shirakawa River has much nostalgia, for [I remember] the surface of the water sparkling when I was a little boy. At the same time, it was a terrifying existence that could wipe out our peaceful lives in the space of one night. With regard to Shirakawa, I have very complicated emotions in which both love and hate are mixed.» It's a sophisticated message reminding the public that Japan has no choice but to hate its rivers, that they are dangerous and need to be walled in or they will unsheathe their fearful swords. Similar warnings of nature's destructive power, issued by respected intellectuals, flood the media.
The media campaign is related to Japan's special Law of Inertia as it applies to bureaucratic policy. Newton's law is that an object will continue to move in the same direction at a constant speed unless it is acted on by an outside force. In Japan, the rule has a special and dangerous twist, for it states that if there is no interference the object (or policy) will speed up. Former prime minister Lee KwanYew of Singapore once commented: