Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

One can already see the effect on Japan's intellectual life. While expertise in the technologies of protection of wetlands, forests, and seacoasts languishes at a primitive level, land sculpting heavily influences the direction of study both in the humanities and in engineering. The design of land-stabilizing material has become a specialty of its own. Gone are the days when the Construction Ministry simply poured wet concrete over hillsides. Today's earthworks use concrete in myriad inventive forms: slabs, steps, bars, bricks, tubes, spikes, blocks, square and cross-shaped buttresses, protruding nipples, lattices, hexagons, serpentine walls topped with iron fences, and wire nets. Projects with especially luxurious budgets call for concrete modeled in the shape of natural boulders.

Land sculpting has also become a hot topic in contemporary art. The photographer Shibata Toshio has built an international reputation with his images that capture in black and white the interplay of cement textures laid down over Japan's newly molded mountains and seasides. Shibata is documenting the haunting visual results of this disaster, and his work is very ironic. Yet foreign critics, faithful converts to what they believe is «Japanese aesthetics,» and ignorant of the ongoing calamity on the ground, fail to get the point. Art critic Margaret Loke enthused, «For the Japanese – who seem to bring a graphic designer's approach to everything they touch, from kitchen utensils to food packing to gardens – public works are just another chance to impose their exquisite sense of visual order on nature.» Japan is indeed imposing its exquisite sense of visual order on nature, on a scale almost beyond imagining.

At the far reaches of the Construction State the situation reaches Kafkaesque extremes, for after generations of laying concrete to no purpose, concrete is becoming a purpose in its own right. The River Bureau prides itself on its concrete technology, the amount of concrete it lays down, and the speed at which it does so. «In the case of Miyagase Dam,» one of its publications brags, «100,000 m 3 of concreting was possible in one month. While this record numbers third in the history of dam construction, the other records were set through seven-day workweeks. So this is the best record for a five-day workweek.» At times, the fascination with concrete reaches surreal heights. In June 1996, the Shimizu Corporation, one of Japan's five largest construction companies, revealed plans for a lunar hotel – with emphasis on new techniques it has developed for making cement on the moon. «It won't be easy, but it is possible,» said the general manager of the company's Space Systems Division.