The tsunami barrier construction program was announced just a few months after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March, 2011, resulting in the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster. Work has been underway and is expected to be completed in another two years.
The cost of the program is estimated to be in the neighborhood of 820 billion yen ($6.8 billion), but the figures are still not finalized because the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Land says that at least 14,000 kilometers of the country’s 35,000 kilometer coastline needs protection.
But opposition is still very strong against the massive tsunami wall undertaking, with critics arguing it is a massive waste of money, most of which will be taken from regional budgets. Opponents also argue the walls will damage the scenery and marine ecology along the coastline, and in reality, will not be totally disaster-proof.
As was mentioned in a previous Digital Journal story in June, 2014, the governing Liberal Democratic Party promoted the walls as part of a public works project, promising some jobs, at least for a short while. But many residents look at the prospect of a wall as being akin to be in a prison.
Kazutoshi Musashi, a fisherman in the northern port city of Osabe, doesn’t like the prospect of a 41-foot high wall blocking his view of the sea at all, “The reality is that it looks like the wall of a jail,” said Musashi, who lived on the seaside before the tsunami struck.
Seawalls are a paradox
Many experts look at seawalls as being a paradox, being that they may reduce damage caused by the tsunamis, but they also instill a certain amount of complacency in residents. And this complacency is the real danger when natural disasters occur. It has been seen in the U.S. during hurricanes, when families opt to stay in their homes rather than evacuate because they have “ridden out hurricanes” in the past.
In the town of Iwanuma, a seawall 24-feet high had been constructed years earlier to stave off erosion. The seawall did help to slow the wall of water in 2011, as did the stand of pine trees planted along the coast. But the waters still swept inland for three miles. Tsuneaki Iguchi was the mayor of Iwanuma at that time.
After the city repaired the seawall, Iguchi told reporters, “We don’t need the sea wall to be higher. What we do need is for everyone to evacuate. The safest thing is for people to live on higher ground and for people’s homes and their workplaces to be in separate locations. If we do that, we don’t need to have a ‘Great Wall.”
Margareta Wahlstrom is head of the U.N.’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. She talked with news media before a recent conference in Sendai convened to draft a new framework for reducing disaster risks. She said one of the most important things people need to remember is that, “there’s a bit of an over belief in technology as a solution, even though everything we have learned demonstrates that people’s own insights and instincts are really what makes a difference, and technology, in fact makes us a bit more vulnerable.”
The over-riding concern with many experts is that with the public’s impression of safety being so high, they really don’t know what to do in a real catastrophe, and that has been proven to be true many times over around the world. Even Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife, Akie, is not happy with the seawalls. In pointing out the public’s feelings of safety, she said the walls would prevent residents from looking out for future tsunamis.
“Please do not proceed even if it’s already decided,” she said in a speech in New York last September. Instead of a one-size-fits-all policy, she suggested making the plan more flexible. “I ask, is building high sea walls to shield the coastline really, really the best?”
It comes down to the realization that no amount of construction will eliminate the need for being observant. Nature will not change, and we have to learn to co-exist with it, rather than railing against its temper tantrums.
