In this, Japan teaches us a lesson about a cultural problem that every modern state faces: how to rise above antiquated cultural attitudes that have dangerous consequences for modern life. Another case in point is the «frontier mentality» that still makes so many Americans cherish the right to possess firearms. The right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment made sense for poorly protected frontier communities, but in modern America it leads to the slaughter of thousands of people every year. No other advanced nation would tolerate this. Yet Americans still find it impossible to legislate gun control. From this we may see that Japan is very unlikely to rethink its environmental policies, for the very reason that channeling small streams into concrete chutes is something learned not from the West but from Japans own tradition. As with other stubborn cultural problems, change will come when enough people become aware of them and demand solutions. Unfortunately, as we will see throughout this book, change is the very process that Japan's complex systems work to prevent at all costs.

In Kamo no Chomei's time, changes caused by nature seemed to be irrevocable acts of karma. There was simply no alternative but to submit to impermanence. With the help of modern technology, however, it seems possible to banish impermanence once and for all, and thus the concept of impermanence has mutated into a relentless war on nature. The self-pitying perception that Japan, punished viciously by the elements, is «a hard place to live in» features in the media and in school curricula, and serves as the official reason that Japan cannot afford the luxury of leaving nature alone.

A 1996 editorial in the major daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun says it well: «This country is an archipelago of disasters, prone to earthquakes, typhoons, torrential rains, floods, mudslides, landslides, and, at times, to volcanic eruptions. There are 70,000 zones prone to mudslides, 10,000 to landslides and 80,000 dangerous slopes, according to data compiled by the Construction Ministry.» In the numbers quoted at the end of the editorial, the reader may experience a true Lovecraftian «thrill of ghastliness»: these official figures tell us that the Construction Ministry has already earmarked tens of thousands of additional sites to be covered in concrete in the near future.

Everywhere in Japan, one encounters propaganda about the rivers being the enemy. Typical of the genre is a series of advertisements written in the guise of articles called «The Men Who Battled the Rivers,» which ran every month from 1998 to 1999 in the influential opinion journal Shincho 45. Each article features antique maps and paintings or photographs of the tombstones of romantic personalities in history, such as the sixteenth-century warrior Takeda Shingen, who subdued dangerous rivers. The message was that fighting against rivers is traditional and noble.

Agencies with names like the River Environmental Management Foundation, whose money comes from the construction industry and whose staff have descended from the River Bureau, pay for «nature as the enemy» ads, and cultural figures happily lend their names to these ads. In the West, we are so accustomed to seeing and hearing «save the earth» preachments in magazines and on television that it may be hard to believe that the media in Japan are following a different tack, but it is indeed different. Here is an example of what the Japanese public reads every day in popular magazines and newspapers: a long-running river-works series printed in Shukan Shincho magazine was called «Speaking of Japan's Rivers.» The September 9, 1999, issue features a color spread of the award-winning writer Mitsuoka Akashi standing proudly on a stone embankment along the Shirakawa River in Kyushu. In the first few paragraphs, Mitsuoka reminisces about his childhood memories of swimming in the river; then the article gets to the point:

It was in 1953 that this Shirakawa River showed nature's awesome power and unsheathed its sword. It was on June 26, 1953. That natural disaster is known as the June 26 River Disaster. At the time, our house was near Tatsutaguchi Station near the riverbank. At about eight o'clock at night there was a loud rumble. The steel bridge had been washed away. We rushed to the station platforms but the water level kept rising, so we took refuge at Tatsuyama hill just behind. I could hear people in the houses along the riverbank screaming «Help!» and before my eyes I saw one house and then another washed away. But there was nothing we could do.

Mitsuoka concludes: «For me, Shirakawa River has much nostalgia, for [I remember] the surface of the water sparkling when I was a little boy. At the same time, it was a terrifying existence that could wipe out our peaceful lives in the space of one night. With regard to Shirakawa, I have very complicated emotions in which both love and hate are mixed.» It's a sophisticated message reminding the public that Japan has no choice but to hate its rivers, that they are dangerous and need to be walled in or they will unsheathe their fearful swords. Similar warnings of nature's destructive power, issued by respected intellectuals, flood the media.

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 only once every few centuries. The majority of registered voters in the area signed a petition requesting that the project be put to a referendum, but it moves forward regardless. So weak is Japan's democracy in the face of officialdom that in twenty-five out of thirty-three such cases, between 1995 and 1998, legislatures have refused to conduct referendums.

So Japan has staked its position at the far end of the pave-and-build spectrum. Redressing old mistakes is not on the agenda; the momentum within Japan is for increasing, rather than decreasing, humanity's impact on its mountains and seas. Even as Japan fell deeper and deeper into recession during the 1990s, it continued to provide more funding for civil-engineering works than ever before. In 1994, concrete production in Japan totaled 91.6 million tons, compared with 77.9 million tons in the United States. This means that Japan lays about thirty times as much per square foot as the United States.

In fiscal 1998, spending on public works came to ?16.6 trillion (about $136 billion at 1999 exchange rates), the kind of money that dwarfs the cost of building the Panama Canal and far surpasses the budget of the U.S. space program. It meant an almost incalculable quantity of concrete and metal structures overlaying rivers, mountains, wetlands, and shoreline, in just one year-and a "poor" year at that, since Japan was mired in a recession. One can only imagine what heights the expenditures may rise to when the economy begins to grow again.

Meanwhile, through its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), Japan is exporting the building of dams and river works to Asian countries such as Indonesia and Laos, where cash-starved governments welcome ODA largesse regardless of need. Through ODA-funded projects, Japanese construction firms profit during a time of economic downturn at home while establishing themselves abroad at ODA expense. Igarashi Takayoshi, a professor of politics at Hosei University and the author of a book on Japan's construction policies, commented, «They are exporting the exact same problems Japan has at home to the rest of the world.»