Open the Isahaya Bay drainage gates!
The Saga District Court ruled yesterday that the government’s 253-billion-yen Isahaya Bay drainage project had caused major environmental damage, ordering the government to open the drain gates that dried up a big area of the bay in 1997:
Presiding Judge Ryuichi Kamiyama recognized that the dike’s closure of the bay was substantially responsible for the “devastated environments for boat fishing, clam fishing and aquafarming.”
The judge also harshly criticized the government for failing to follow up on the Environmental Dispute Coordination Commission’s request to conduct a mid- to long-term assessment of potential damage from the reclamation project.
He said the government’s lack of effort to document possible damage “almost constitutes interference in the claims of the plaintiffs and betrays the rules of faith at a trial.”
Although the court acknowledged that periods of red-tide outbreaks grew longer in the Ariake Sea after the government closed the dike in 1997, it said there was insufficient scientific evidence to confirm a correlation between the project and damage in the entire area.
About 100 fishermen who gathered outside the court building applauded the ruling and called on the government not to appeal.
“The court finally recognized the critical realities of our sea, where we can no longer catch fish and harvest seaweed,” said a weeping 49-year-old seaweed farmer and resident of Shimabara, Nagasaki Prefecture.
It is a major victory for citizens fighting against environmentally destructive public works projects, and hopefully the government will choose not to appeal the decision.
Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
The original idea was to provide new fields for farmers in the area. But the number of farmers, which had begun to drop in the 1960s, fell rapidly thereafter, and was reduced to almost half between 1985 and 1995. That nobody would farm these new fields posed a serious problem for MAFF, because the Isahaya drainage project, at ¥237 billion, was a very large civil-engineering program, a keystone of the ministry’s construction budget. So it relabeled the plans a “flood-control project,” even though experts believed that the last flood, in 1957, had been of the sort that comes only once every hundred years.
Major projects involve decades of bargaining with vested interests as to the amount of their payoffs, or “compensation,” and at Isahaya this long preparatory period ended in the early 1990s. The fishing and farming groups in Isahaya could not refuse a largesse that amounted to hundreds of millions of yen. But this compensation was the gold for which such local groups sold their souls to the devil, for once they received the payoff they could never refund it. Many towns in Japan, having decided to reconsider a dam, nuclear plant, or landfill they have agreed to, learn to their sorrow that the citizens have received more money than they can possibly repay. In the late 1980s, a group of environmentalists began to object to the Isahaya drainage project. Opposition grew, but MAFF went on steadily building the seven-kilometer dike that shut the wetlands off from the sea. By the time the villagers began to question the project, it was too late.
Enter the Environment Agency, whose role shows how the Construction State has led to strange mutations in the shape of the Japanese government, rather like those crabs that grow an enormous claw on one side while the other side atrophies. While the River Bureau of the Construction Ministry, originally a minor office, has burgeoned into a great empire with a budget surpassing those of many sovereign states and with almost unlimited power to build dams and concrete over rivers, the Environment Agency has shriveled. Starved of a budget and without legal resources, it has ended up a sleepy back office with a dusty sign on the door and very little to do, having been reduced to rubber-stamping the projects of its bigger and stronger brother agencies.
In 1988, only a year before construction of the Isahaya dikes was to begin (but decades after MAFF began planning and negotiating the payoffs), the Environment Agency made a “study” of it all, followed almost immediately by approval with a few minor restrictions. When MAFF closed the dikes in April 1997, it was clear that the Environment Agency’s study had been a cursory travesty. Assailed by the media, the only comment of agency chief Ishii Michiko was this: “The result might have been different if the assessment had followed today’s environmental standards…. But it is unlikely that we will ask the Agriculture Ministry to re-examine the project.”
In other words, although the Environment Agency was aware that the drainage of the Isahaya wetlands was a disaster, it did not move to stop the project. And why should it? Allowing Japan’s last major wetland to die shouldn’t concern anyone. MAFF chief Fujinami Takao commented, “The current ecosystem may disappear, but nature will create a new one.”
Closing the drainage gates did indeed cause horrible problems for the ecosystem, but some scientists believe that re-opening the gates and flooding the reclaimed land will eventually improve the situation.
