Aquarter of a century ago, engineers straightened out stretches of the Kushiro River, which had meandered some 160km under Hokkaido's big sky in northern Japan, flowing through green hill country and rural towns, winding through the nation's largest wetland and this port city's downtown before emptying into the Pacific Ocean.
Soon, work is to start again. But this time bulldozers will be moving earth to put curves back in a stretch of the river that had been straightened out, restoring its original sinuous shape.
For decades, Japan pursued economic development at all costs, but it is now emphasizing the importance of protecting the environment. So under a 2003 law that aims to reverse decades of destruction, the Kushiro River will be the first of perhaps many straightened rivers to regain some of its original curves.
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE ,KUSHIRO, JAPAN
Still, in a country famous for heedlessly paving rural areas in concrete to create jobs and to buttress the half-century rule of the Liberal Democratic Party, some environmentalists and local residents are skeptical of the new projects. With no rivers left to straighten, they say, the authorities nowadays are simply starting to curve them instead. Can politicians and bureaucrats be trusted to repair nature?
"Well," Kazuaki Saito, 47, a farmer whose land abuts the stretch to be curved, said of the project, "it's human egotism, and it's for the sake of spending money."
Toshihiko Yoshimura, a river planning official with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, said the project was endorsed by a committee of officials, experts and citizens, as required by the 2003 law, to avoid wasteful projects.
"Naturally, we've received opinions to the effect that this is being done to create jobs," Yoshimura said. "If we're told that this is not needed, we have no intention of doing it by force."
The restoration of rivers and wetlands has become big business in the US and Europe. In Japan, where the rivers have one of the highest proportions of dams in the world and virtually all have been channelized in one way or another, there was a great need for restoration.
But environmentalists, lawyers and some politicians have warned that the restoration effort could become a pretext to finance the same kind of boondoggles that lay behind river-straightening in the first place.
"Words like `nature' and `restoration' resonate emotionally," said Kohei Sekikawa, 70, a leader of the Senkon Natural Environment Association, a private group opposing work on the Shibetsu River.
"But in reality, depending on the place, restoration work could be good in some cases, and it could lead to further environmental destruction in other cases," he said.
Even more than other rural regions in Japan, the island of Hokkaido -- thinly populated and mostly agricultural -- has long depended on public works that have often clashed with its natural beauty.
North of here, in Shiretoko, a small mountainous peninsula that was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005, there are 123 dams on 44 rivers. In the town of Utoro on the peninsula, almost everything about the Pereke River, where salmon swim upstream to spawn, seems to have been made artificially, including a concrete floor, walls and access ramps for the fish.
Here in Kushiro, the river was channelized when the priority was to develop the area economically. Upriver, stretches were straightened to prevent flooding of potential farmland. Few people gave a second thought to the Kushiro wetland just outside this city -- currently 2,020 hectares that are home to 2,000 species of wildlife, including sea eagles, the red-crowned crane and the huchen, Japan's largest freshwater fish. In fact, plans called for turning the wetland into an industrial area, though that never happened.
REFASHIONED
The straightening upriver made the Kushiro flow more rapidly and carry more sediment downstream. The wetland, which has shrunk by 30 percent in six decades, began drying up, as often happens when rivers are channelized. To try to reverse this, and to prevent sediment from reaching the wetland, a 1.6km portion upriver will be refashioned into its original 2.7km meandering course at a cost of almost US$8 million.
It is not clear what effect the project will have overall on rehabilitating the wetland, said Yoshimura, the river planning official.
"For now," he said, "we are doing what we can."
But Trust Sarun Kushiro, a private environmental group that was a member of the committee that endorsed the project but voted against it, said that the reshaping would have little positive effect and that the construction itself would harm the environment. Stanching the flow of sediment from farmland and forests upstream is more important, it argued.
And in a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was stirring up, the Ministry of Agriculture had a project farther upriver that was sending mud and sand downstream, where Yoshimura's ministry is to curve the river, said Takuo Sugisawa, 61, the trust's secretary-general.
To rehabilitate farmland that had gradually become wetland, the ministry was draining existing land and moving earth there.
"The sediment flowing from upriver will quickly pile up where the river will be curved," Sugisawa said, adding that they would eventually bury the Kushiro wetland.
To prevent that, workers will eventually have to remove the sediment that is bound to pile up in the recurved stretch, he said.
"So in the name of river management alone, they will be able once again to create public works in the form of removing soil," he said, walking along an asphalt road and across a bridge built to let trucks and bulldozers move earth for the curving project. "Public works will just keep going round and round and round."
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