Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [22]
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!
2. Environment
Cedar Plantations and Orange Ooze
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
– Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát
In the construction frenzy described in the previous chapter, we can see that Japan's economic woes are linked with deep cultural trouble. The sterility of Japan's new landscape, so far from everything the nation once stood for, denotes a true crisis of the spirit. Something has driven this nation to turn on its own land with tooth and claw, and simplistic reasons like «modernization» do not explain it.
In seeking the roots of today's crisis, we need to take another look at what happened in the nineteenth century, when Japan first encountered the West. Japan woke from centuries of isolation to find itself a poor and weak nation in a world where many ancient kingdoms were rapidly being swallowed up by European colonial powers. Shocked at the nation's precarious position, Japan's new rulers set out on a crash program to