Fernando Kaskais posted: " Preparing the fields near Gotemba, Japan, in 2000. Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum As storms, droughts and floods become more intense, what can the world learn from Japan's profoundly wet history? by Giulio Boccaletti is an author, entrepreneu" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Preparing the fields near Gotemba, Japan, in 2000. Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
As storms, droughts and floods become more intense, what can the world learn from Japan's profoundly wet history?
by Giulio Boccaletti is an author, entrepreneur and senior executive. He is co-founder of the tech startup Chloris Geospatial, an honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and the author of Water: A Biography (2021). He lives in London.
In early June 2018, I landed at Kansai airport in Japan, with a full day of travel ahead. A few hours later, I was sitting on a Shinkansen – the high-speed train connecting Osaka to Tokyo. Jetlagged, I tried to concentrate on the countryside as it streamed by at over 300 km per hour. Water was everywhere: a steady flow of wetlands, historical paddy fields, embankments. It was a watery procession, occasionally interrupted by a tangle of power lines and packed houses, the scars of centuries of hydraulic struggle.
What I saw was the symptom of a universal story. All societies are locked in a dialectic relationship with water over time. It falls from the sky, comes from the sea, flows over land: floods, droughts, storms are expressions of Earth's climate. People respond, finding solutions to protect themselves. It is a story of action and reaction, of water encroaching on daily life, of catastrophic failures, of people organising to shift water's course or hold its force at bay. What propels this story forward over centuries is the fact that the solutions of any age are transformed – or rendered obsolete – by the changing expectations of those who follow, in a never-ending human dance with water.
Night Rain at Karasaki by Utagawa Hiroshige. Courtesy The Met Museum, New York
The traces of that dance are etched into the landscape and institutions of society: the memory of what past generations did shapes what current generations can do. The question, in an age of unprecedented climate change, is whether this past has anything to contribute to the struggle we face. As the floods and droughts that define the extremes of everyone's water experience become more frequent and intense than ever before, what role does our historical relationship with water play? As the music changes, do the steps we learnt over centuries help us in this new dance with water?
Answering this question is harder than one might think: the traces of past water solutions are often hard to detect. During the 20th century, most rich countries deployed exquisite skill and vast resources to sever their relationship with their water past, creating the illusion that water on the landscape is nothing more than a modern, inert stage on which life plays out at the rhythm of the industrial economy. They wished to engineer away water, along with its unpredictability, burying it under a modern control of nature. For the most part, they succeeded.
No one in London (or anywhere else in the developed world beyond the UK, for that matter) wades a river going to work. The ancient tributaries of the Thames – the Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn and the Westbourne – are lost inside the city's sewers. In the US, Manhattan has forgotten flowing water altogether, as 'Manahatta' – the island once watered by countless streams and springs – lies under a thick layer of 20th-century architecture. Most citizens of Tokyo or Osaka experience water from taps, a familiar jutting feature of bathrooms or kitchen walls everywhere in the rich world.
But as the train sped through Japan's constructed landscape, I realised that its relationship with water had a singular characteristic. Water, though controlled, had not disappeared. Japan's millennial landscape proudly bore centuries of visible scars from fighting with it. The past was in full view. Its legacy – the paddy fields, river development, levees constructed over centuries – seemed to be still central to the security infrastructure of the present.
Japan is not entirely alone in having integrated its water past visibly into the present. The Dutch, for example, rely on centuries of water management and associated historical infrastructure in their modern relationship to water. It is inevitable: the Netherlands is at the mouth of continental rivers and much of it is well below sea level, facing the same existential problems it faced in the 10th century. But it is an exception, alongside a few places like Venice, the ancient water city.
The country is supplied by infinite moisture
In most countries, water management is a modern solution to a contemporary problem. For the most part, the historical plumbing of Europe's landscape is buried under the cultivated fields of a land that enjoys a benign climate...
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