Course of Rivers

Typhoon T06-07 ("Maria") is due here tonight but in leafy Chiba-ken we'll only get the edge of it - the eye of the storm is headed for Ise Bay and Nagoya. But we'll get some heavy rain I expect in the early hours.

A couple of days ago Edera and I walked down our little Sakuta River and we were shocked to see the scale of the earthworks and concrete pouring in progress on a flood protection scheme about a mile downstream from here. The river has already been straightened once before, but now from here down to the other side of Naruto they are building a channel about 50 metres wide with levees 3 metres high - it's the equivalent of a six lane motorway for a stream normally the size of a country lane.

Naruto was badly hit by floods in 1997 and I guess this is all the result of politicians promises then. Politics and the construction industry have ever gone hand in hand in Japan. In the early twentieth century for example huge diversion works took most of the Sumida River out of Tokyo and miles furher east. In Japan no-one wants to live near rivers, their capacity for flooding is far beyond anything we usually experience in Britain. Most big rivers in the mountains can rise twenty feet or more when an average typhoon arrives. In a big typhoon in the 1950's 200,000 houses were flooded in Tokyo and more than 2,000 people drowned across Japan.

So it's easy for me to say it who was never flooded out in his life but once rivers have been canalised like this they are gone for good. Actually come to think of it I can't think of a single natural lowland river that I've seen anywhere in Japan. Yes, when they've gone - they've gone