Dogs and Demons - Керр Алекс. Страница 13

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.

At the far reaches of the Construction State the situation reaches Kafkaesque extremes, for after generations of laying concrete to no purpose, concrete is becoming a purpose in its own right. The River Bureau prides itself on its concrete technology, the amount of concrete it lays down, and the speed at which it does so. «In the case of Miyagase Dam,» one of its publications brags, «100,000 m³ of concreting was possible in one month. While this record numbers third in the history of dam construction, the other records were set through seven-day workweeks. So this is the best record for a five-day workweek.» At times, the fascination with concrete reaches surreal heights. In June 1996, the Shimizu Corporation, one of Japan's five largest construction companies, revealed plans for a lunar hotel – with emphasis on new techniques it has developed for making cement on the moon. «It won't be easy, but it is possible,» said the general manager of the company's Space Systems Division. «It won't be cheap to produce small amounts of concrete on the moon, but if we make large amounts of concrete, it will be very cheap.»

The Ministry of Construction, like many businesses and public institutions in Japan, has its own anthem. The lyrics of this Utopia Song, unchanged since 1948, include «Asphalt blanketing the mountains and valleys ... a splendid Utopia.»

Japan will not have long to wait for Utopia. At home, the Construction Ministry is well on its way to blanketing all of the country's mountains and valleys with asphalt and concrete. The next challenge will be the natural landscapes of Southeast Asia and China, which are already destined for numerous dams and roads paid for by ODA money.

And then – it shouldn't take many more five-day workweeks – the moon!