Spring in Japan — Blog

The Japanese will tell you that nothing quite heralds the coming of spring like the ume blossoms of February. In my opinion, however, there are no harbingers of the season better than the coveys of road construction crews, which can be spotted throughout country in the months leading up to April.

Easily recognizable by their white crowns and the vertical yellow stripes on their breasts and backs, the crews have a mating call that is quite distinct—ja-ja-ja-ja-jack, ja-ja-ja-ja-jack. The crews forage deep in the ground seemingly at random; and, having found what they are after, the will replace the top layer of earth with asphalt and quickly migrate off to only Mother Nature knows where.

Back in the days when I did a lot of translation work, there was a hackneyed phrase that I was often forced to render into English: utsukushii shizen ni megumareta (美しい胃自然に恵まれた, lit. “blessed with beautiful nature”). I would translate this in a variety of ways, such as “The prefecture is blessed with bountiful nature”; “The city is surrounded by an abundance of natural beauty”; or “The town is surrounded by beautiful nature.” Occasionally, I might slip something like “Located in an idyllic natural setting, . . .” into my translation, but I found that if I took too much poetic license, the translation would invariably come back to me with the complaint: “But, you left out ‘beautiful’.” Or, “You failed to mention ‘nature’!”.

The thing that exasperated me, though, when I was doing these translations is that I would gaze out of my office window and look at the jumble of telephone wires and cables, the scarcity of trees, the concrete poured over anything that wasn’t moving, the gray balconies and staircases stretching as far as the eye could see, and shout, “Where the hell is this ‘beautiful nature’? Tell me!! Where is it?!?!”

Having grown up on the west coast of the United States, I know what unspoilt nature is supposed to look like. In my twenty-plus years living in and traveling around Japan, however, I have yet to find a place that has not been touched by the destructive hand of man. Mountains that have stood since time immemorial are now “reinforced” with an ugly layer of concrete; rivers and creeks are little more than concrete sluices; and Japan’s once beautiful coastline is an unsightly jumble of tetrapods—concrete blocks resembling giant jacks—that are supposed to serve as breakwaters but may actually be causing greater erosion. One of Japan’s chronic problems is that, once something has been set into motion, it is often difficult to change course. As a result, by the early 1990s more than half of Japan’s coastline had already been blighted by those ugly tetrapods. I dread to know what the figure is today in 2017.

Were I to form my own political party, one of the first campaign promises I would make is to form a Ministry of De-Construction. The MDC would remove unnecessary dams, tetrapods, concrete reinforcements, and so on; the idea being to put Japan’s ever so important general construction industry to work by undoing all of their eyesores. Second, where the dams, reinforcements and tetrapods truly were necessary, I would ensure that they be concealed in such a way to look as natural as possible. Third, the cobweb of electric cables and telephone lines would once and for all be buried. Fourth, there were would be stronger zoning and city planning to reign in urban and suburban sprawl and create compact, highly dense cities that are separated from each other by areas of farming, natural reserves, and parks. Fifth, diversity would be reintroduced to the nation’s forests. No more rows upon rows of cedar that not only look ugly, but give everyone hay fever.

Unfortunately, none of these things are bound to happen anytime soon. The Japanese are so accustomed to being told in speeches and pamphlets that their town or city is blessed with beautiful nature that they have come to believe it despite what they surely must see with their own eyes.

Familiarity sometimes breeds content.