Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [20]
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:
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