Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
change, the
zeitgeist
moves on, and criticism mounts. 'What's a river without fish?'
was the accusatory question levelled at local government officials. Komatsugawa and
similar projects were condemned. 'People have begun to realise', wrote the
influential landscape designer Yamamichi Sh z
2
in 1992, 'that
shinsui
[affection-
for-water] and similar projects interfere with rivers and cause considerable
dislocation' (Yamamichi 1992:28). In response to this criticism, the ward office
decided to convert another redundant irrigation channel into a new fish-friendly
waterway. The result is Ichinoe, a 3.4-kilometre-long stream completed in 1996 at a
cost of over ¥300 million (£1.5 million at 1995 exchange rates). Fish are
periodically released into the waters, and, although pumps are needed to keep the
water flowing, there are no installations for water purification. The stream is cleaned
occasionally, when the water is considered too dirty. Signs explain that fish do the
cleaning (see
Figure 8.1
). The landscape remains unnaturally neat and
bureaucratically precise, a thoroughly artificial creation of a supposedly natural space
(see
Figure 8.2
). While some residents had been unhappy earlier with the river
without fish, others now, according to ward officials, are upset that the water in
their stream is too dirty for children to play in. They accuse the ward office of being
parsimonious, unwilling to find the extra funds to install a water purifier.
In the eastern suburbs of Tokyo, the local government in Edogawa Ward has
responded to criticism of the sterile aquatic environment of the Komatsugawa by
introducing fish into a nearby water course, but in doing so it has retained a
landscape idiom reliant on a traditional symbolic approach. By contrast, in the
western suburbs of Tokyo, re-landscaping work on a number of waterways has been
undertaken according to an ideology of concern for ecosystems. In this chapter,
these two projects involving waterways and fish within the predominantly urban
context of industrial Japan are placed alongside two campaigns to reintroduce (or,
more properly, to introduce) animals into an urban environment. The aims of the
four projects and the approaches adopted vary widely, from the recreational and
aesthetic to the educational, all of them heavily mediated by human agency. Each of
these projects involves a greater or lesser degree of manipulation or extension of a
'traditional approach' to animals and river landscapes. This traditional element
expresses itself in the use of symbol; not symbol as pictorial device for idea or
concept but symbol as synecdoche, the one standing for the totality. Even ideas cast
largely within an ecocentric framework are expressed through an essentially
anthropocentric use of symbol. In the process new values are attached to traditional
symbolic associations, and selected animals are imbued with a new symbolic meaning,
that of nature resurgent.
