Along the Riverbank

Took a walk with Edera along the Sakuta towards Naruto this afternoon. The river is just one long building site these days, a new temporary works access road (super-highway might be a better description!) runs along this bank and pile drivers and earth moving equipment are everywhere.

At one point one length of the 'new river bed' is standing in the middle of an area of tanbo like a soccer stadium. It must be four times as wide and twice as deep as the curent river with a new road along the bank and, of course, concrete lined and treeless to appeal to the engineer's sense of 'neatness'.

Somehow it really left us feeling depressed. And not just the complete lack of any aesthetic value either. What the heck is such a huge expenditure on a massive drainage scheme about? OK - there were floods downstream ten years ago after a big typhoon but is that really a good reason to build a 'motorway scale' project in a small valley? The existing river is far from natural, I'd guess it was straightened and piled about forty years ago, but at least on a reasonable scale.

To be honest it is all modern Japan at its very worst. Grossly over-engineered and costing far more than was ever reasonable to spend, another few billion yen loan for the taxpayer to pay interest on in the excuse of generating jobs and corporate profit. This kind of stuff even went on back in the Edo-era when new rice fields were the limits of civil engineering ambiiton and it has just got worse and worse in the last fifty years. No suprise that the civil engineering industry here is the biggest in the world, contracts are completely closed to foreign companies so that prices are rigged and - huh! forgot to mention it - the industry pays a 1% levy on contracts into the ruling LDP party slush fund. Pure pork barrel politics and there isn't a darn thing you can do about it ...