JК
Dogs and Demons :: Керр Алекс
Страница: 10 из 270So in taking stock of where Japan is today, it is good to set economics aside for a moment and take a look at the land itself.
When we do, we see this: Japan has become arguably the world's ugliest country. To readers who know Japan from tourist brochures that feature Kyoto's temples and Mount Fuji, that may seem a surprising, even preposterous assertion. But those who live or travel here see the reality: the native forest cover has been clear-cut and replaced by industrial cedar, rivers are dammed and the seashore lined with cement, hills have been leveled to provide gravel fill for bays and harbors, mountains are honeycombed with destructive and useless roads, and rural villages have been submerged in a sea of industrial waste.
Similar observations can be made about many other modern nations, of course. But what is happening in Japan far surpasses anything attempted in the rest of the world. We are seeing something genuinely different here. The nation prospers, but the mountains and rivers are in mortal danger, and in their fate lies a story-one that heretofore has been almost entirely passed over by the foreign media.
H. P. Lovecraft, describing a creepy New England hamlet doomed to be the setting for one of his horror stories, would say, «On viewing such a scene, who can resist an unutterable thrill of ghastliness?» For a modern traveler seeking something of that Lovecraftian thrill, nothing would do better than a trip to Japan's countryside.
During the past fifty-five years of its great economic growth, Japan has drastically altered its natural environment in ways that are almost unimaginable to someone who has not traveled here. In the spring of 1996, the Japan Society invited Robert MacNeil, the retired co-anchor of The MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour, for a month's stay in Japan. Later, in a speech presented at the Japan Society in New York, MacNeil said that he was «confused» about what he saw, «dismayed by the unrelieved banality of the [800-kilometer] stretch from Hiroshima to Tokyo, the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble, unplanned, with tunnels easier on the eyes.»
Across the nation, men and women are at work reshaping the landscape. Work crews transform tiny streams just a meter across into deep chutes slicing through slabs of concrete ten meters wide and more. Builders of small mountain roads dynamite entire hillsides. Civil engineers channel rivers into U-shaped concrete casings that do away not only with the rivers' banks but with their beds. The River Bureau has dammed or diverted all but three of Japan's 113 major rivers.
When we do, we see this: Japan has become arguably the world's ugliest country. To readers who know Japan from tourist brochures that feature Kyoto's temples and Mount Fuji, that may seem a surprising, even preposterous assertion. But those who live or travel here see the reality: the native forest cover has been clear-cut and replaced by industrial cedar, rivers are dammed and the seashore lined with cement, hills have been leveled to provide gravel fill for bays and harbors, mountains are honeycombed with destructive and useless roads, and rural villages have been submerged in a sea of industrial waste.
Similar observations can be made about many other modern nations, of course. But what is happening in Japan far surpasses anything attempted in the rest of the world. We are seeing something genuinely different here. The nation prospers, but the mountains and rivers are in mortal danger, and in their fate lies a story-one that heretofore has been almost entirely passed over by the foreign media.
H. P. Lovecraft, describing a creepy New England hamlet doomed to be the setting for one of his horror stories, would say, «On viewing such a scene, who can resist an unutterable thrill of ghastliness?» For a modern traveler seeking something of that Lovecraftian thrill, nothing would do better than a trip to Japan's countryside.
During the past fifty-five years of its great economic growth, Japan has drastically altered its natural environment in ways that are almost unimaginable to someone who has not traveled here. In the spring of 1996, the Japan Society invited Robert MacNeil, the retired co-anchor of The MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour, for a month's stay in Japan. Later, in a speech presented at the Japan Society in New York, MacNeil said that he was «confused» about what he saw, «dismayed by the unrelieved banality of the [800-kilometer] stretch from Hiroshima to Tokyo, the formless, brutal, utilitarian jumble, unplanned, with tunnels easier on the eyes.»
Across the nation, men and women are at work reshaping the landscape. Work crews transform tiny streams just a meter across into deep chutes slicing through slabs of concrete ten meters wide and more. Builders of small mountain roads dynamite entire hillsides. Civil engineers channel rivers into U-shaped concrete casings that do away not only with the rivers' banks but with their beds. The River Bureau has dammed or diverted all but three of Japan's 113 major rivers.