When Masahito Abe looks out at the sea that killed 40 of his neighbors just over three years ago, he is certain of one thing: At some point, perhaps long after he is gone, the ocean will again unleash a terrifying wave on his village.
Like dozens of other communities along the northeast coast of Japan struck by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Koizumi is now a wasteland. Grass and weeds grow where homes once stood.
No one will return to live in the low-lying neighborhood of Koizumi in Miyagi Prefecture, home to 60 percent of the 19,000 people who died in the disaster. However, if the government gets its way, this abandoned strip of land will be made tsunami-proof as part of a US$8.51 billion plan to defend 370km of coastline with hundreds of towering concrete walls.
The scale of the project, referred to by detractors as the Great Wall of Japan, is staggering even by the standards of a country where much of the coastline is already protected against storms and erosion by concrete walls.
Under government plans, 440 walls are to be built in the worst-hit prefectures of Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate. However, while Japan’s construction industry relishes the prospect of a huge payday courtesy of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, opposition among residents is gathering momentum.
“We want the government to change the shape of the coast, and redesign it so a tsunami would have minimal impact, not just build a lot of walls,” said Abe, an elementary-school teacher in Koizumi who moved his family to a hilltop 20 years ago in anticipation of a deadly tsunami.
Debate over the sea wall has proven so divisive among the village’s 1,800 residents — now spread out among eight temporary housing complexes — that some fear it will derail attempts to revive the village three years after the disaster wiped it from the map.
“I don’t want the sea wall issue to divide people here,” said Yoshitaka Oikawa, a local assembly member. “I can see the debate is already weakening their determination to rebuild their village together.”
By the end of the year, Koizumi’s displaced will have moved into homes being built in an area carved into a mountaintop 3km from the coast. The 14.7m wall below will do little more than protect rice paddies, at a cost of US$230 million.
“It’s madness,” said Abe, who wants the area to be an eco park.
Yet many of his former neighbors appear content to leave tsunami defenses in the hands of the authorities.
“The attitude seems to be that if the walls have already been planned and budgeted for, why interfere?” Abe said.
Christian Dimmer, an assistant professor in the urban studies department at Tokyo University, shares Abe’s concerns, but believes many residents were left with little choice when offered premium rates for their land by the government.
“In Koizumi, there are people who are happy to sell their land for seawall construction,” he said. “[They thought] they couldn’t do anything else with their land and needed the money to rebuild their lives elsewhere.”
Those campaigning against the wall have few allies. Miyagi Governor Yoshihiro Murai is in favor, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a residents’ forum that walls offered the best protection against a tsunami.
The prime minister’s wife, Akie, has cautiously allied herself with the sceptics, warning of the damage to ecosystems and tourism.
The 3,000 people of Fudai owe their lives to a 15m wall that was dismissed as a waste of money when it was built, at the then-mayor’s insistence, in the 1980s.
However, it was the exception. Most sea walls provided inadequate protection against the tsunami. In Kamaishi, the waves smashed through the city’s sea wall, then the largest in the world. Concrete barriers may even have caused deaths among people lulled into thinking they were safe.
“Sea walls have the potential to save lives wherever they are built, provided the tsunami does not exceed the simulated height and run-up pressures,” Dimmer said. “The problem is that you can’t predict how high the next tsunami will be, so walls can never give you 100 percent security.”
Campaigners estimate that it will take Japan’s taxpayers a quarter of a century to pay the bill for sea wall construction, which could eventually cover 14,500km of the country’s coastline.
“I don’t want the rest of the world to think of Japan as a concrete fortress,” Masahito Abe said. “The tsunami was a force of nature, so I can forgive it for the destruction and misery it caused. But for humans to ruin their own environment... I can never forgive that.”
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