Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [32]
A full-color advertisement sponsored by the Electrical Resource Development Company, in the popular weekly Shukan Shincho in December 1995, was typical of the propaganda effort. In front of a photograph of a large hydroelectric dam stands the attractive Ms. Aoyama Yoshiyo, who is traveling in the mountains of scenic Wakayama. «Ah,» says Ms. Aoyama in the text. «What lovely cedar trees. They're so nicely tended, and their trunks, shorn of branches, grow up tall and straight to the sky. And there is such abundant water here, of course, the result of this being a region of high rainfall. Why, it's just perfect for an electrical generating station!» When she reaches her destination, Ikehara Dam, she exclaims, «My, there's no water in the river on the other side of the dam. When I asked where the water went to, I found that it now takes a shortcut via a winding river on the other side of the dam. Where the old river was,» she cries with delight, «is now the area below the dam where there is a sports garden and places for relaxation.» One of these places for relaxation is a golf course, which the electric company kindly contributed to the village when it built the dam. "If I'd known about the golf course, I would have come a day earlier," Ms. Aoyama concludes.
You can hardly pick up a major magazine without coming across this sort of thing – the public-relations barrage is nearly overwhelming. In contrast, scattered citizens' groups bravely take on the government or companies in certain isolated cases, but there is no strong movement on a national scale.
Japan's schools are instilling a mind-set in children that accepts every dam as glorious, every new road as a path to a happy future. This locks Japan permanently into its «developing country» mode. When the U.S. Department of the Interior ordered the dismantling of Maine's Edwards Dam (which was more than a century old), church bells chimed and thousands cheered at the sight of their river regaining its freedom. In Japan, where civic organizations continue to raise flags and beat drums to announce the latest civil-engineering monuments, such a reaction would be unthinkable. «Welcome to Hiyoshi Dam!» proclaims Ninomachi, the local citizens' magazine of my town of Kameoka. We see glossy photos of concrete-flattened mountainsides, and learn that Hiyoshi is a «multipurpose» dam providing not only flood control but a visitors' center that allows the public to learn and to play: «We expect that it will play a large role in improving local culture and activity not only in the hometown of Hiyoshi but also in the surrounding regions.»
Dams like Hiyoshi are precisely where Japanese children go to learn and play, and they certainly contribute to culture-indeed, they are rapidly becoming the culture, with schools, courts, and industry all functioning as one closely knit whole. Allan Stoopes, who teaches environmental studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, told me that his students want to subscribe to journals published by «green» groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, but they dare not, for fear universities and companies will learn of it and turn them down when they apply for jobs. Citizens' groups such as those that fought the Minamata and Itai-itai cases for four decades truly deserve to be called heroic.
Millions of Japanese who do not have a clear sense of the mechanisms involved nonetheless grieve at the steady disappearance of all that was once so beautiful in their environment. Since I began writing in Japanese ten years ago, my mailbox has been full of letters from people who share my concern: One tells me how his hometown has become ugly, another describes how she came home to find her favorite waterfall buried in a concrete coffin. The letters frequently say, «I feel as you do, but I never dared to voice it before.» In a typical letter to me, Ms. Kimoto Yoko writes: «I have come to realize that Japanese themselves do not realize how ugly their surroundings have become. I was of course one of these people that didn't realize it. When I talked to people around