KJ
Selections
NAKAUMI
Gavan
McCormack (from KJ#37,
Inaka double issue)
In 1963, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries gave the go-ahead
for a project for the re-development of Lake Nakaumi in western Japan.1
Nakaumi is Japan's fifth largest lake, and if the adjacent Lake Shinji
is taken into consideration, the combined lake area ranks second in
Japan, after Lake Biwa in Shiga (just east of Kyoto) and slightly above
Kasumigaura in Ibaraki (just east of Tokyo).2
The combination
in this lake system of the river-waters flowing into Lake Shinji and
the sea-waters flowing into Nakaumi is responsible for a particularly
fertile, brackish, lake environment, where river and sea fish and marine
life converge, and human settlements grew around them because of their
rich variety of food sources. However, the topography and dimensions
of this area as settled by the ice age has been under pressure in the
late 20th century. Once 97 square kilometres, the human interventions
of recent decades have reduced Nakaumi to 88.5km2, and would
reduce it much further, to just over 70km2 in the near future.
Nor is it merely the dimensions that have to be revised in the geography
texts; in future they may well have to revise even the category of lake
to which it belongs, from brackish to fresh. The scale of change underway
and being planned is momentous, and Lake Nakaumi and Lake Shinji have
gradually emerged at the centre of debate about politics, ecology, direction,
and value in late 20th century Japan.
This has long been
a prosperous area. Here in ancient times the state of Izumo flourished,
thanks to the combination of strategic location at the centre of the
Japan Sea coast, safe harbour (even now the fishing port of Sakai Minato
is regarded as one of the finest on the Japan Sea coast), rich fisheries
and fertile farmlands. Izumo's wealth and resources were recorded meticulously
in the year 733, when it was noted that the area was rich in agricultural,
forestry and fishing products, and famed for its pottery, sake and iron-ware.3
Agricultural produce included rice, wheat, millet, soya beans, azuki
beans, daikon, melon, sweet potato, mulberry and hemp, its rivers in
spring were busy with the traffic of ships loaded with timber from the
forests, and its lakes and rivers were teeming with marine life, including
dolphin, shark, mullet, bass, herring, black bream, trepang, and whitebait
in Lake Nakaumi, bass, gray mullet, shrimp, various shell-fish in Lake
Shinji, and sweetfish (ayu), dace, roach, carp, salmon, trout,
and eel in both.4 The fresh-water cockles (shijimi)
of Lake Shinji were, and still are, renowned throughout the country
as the perfect taste and nutrition complement to a bowl of soy-bean
paste soup.
The city of Matsue,
in pre-modern times the capital of Izumo, sits between the two lakes,
on a 7 kilometre long stretch of the Ohashi River. Till the rail connection
reached there in 1908, it was a busy port for river, lake, and sea craft.
Early 20th century studies of the Nakaumi fish industry listed significant
catches of sardines, turbot, rock cod, herring, sea bass, grey mullet,
bass, 'konoshiro' herring, black bream, octopus, garfish (sayori),
flathead, whiting, trepang, crab, shrimp, goby (hase), eel, carp,
clam, ark shell, cockles (shijimi).5 By some accounts there
were no less than 155 different varieties in Nakaumi.6 Farmers
in the vicinity commonly collected the various grasses (moba or
sugamo) from the lake, or the abundance of sardines, and use
them as fertilizer, and the waters were so rich that it was said that
it was enough for a fisherman to work for one day to be able to eat
for three, or that for each bucketful of water, there was a bucketful
of fish, or that if one baited ten hooks for eel, one would catch ten
eels.7 Lake Shinji was one of the country's major sources
of cockles, along with Lake Hachirogata in Niigata and the Tone River
just east of Tokyo, but Hachirogata was gradually drained and 17,000
hectares (170 square kilometres) of land reclaimed between 1957 and
1976, while the Tone River, which had once supplied 20,000 tons of cockles
to Tokyo annually, was blocked by a barrage cutting off the flow of
waters from the sea; today only Shinji remains.8
After the First
World War, the bed of the river between the two lakes was dredged to
allow the passage of larger, modern vessels, and sections of the lake
began to be reclaimed. During the 1920's a three kilometre-long breakwater
was built off the port of Sakai Minato. As these works proceeded, signs
of disruption in the delicately balanced natural order began to appear:
as the flow of sea-water in and out of Nakaumi was impeded, sediment
began to build up, and as the natural barrier between the (mostly) fresh-water
Shinji and the brackish Nakaumi was removed, salt began to spread through
Lake Shinji and to affect adjacent farm land. To cope with that, and
to further the development of the region as a whole, various projects
were considered during the 1930's, and resumed after the end of the
War in 1945. In the early postwar decades, the memory of the semi-starvation
to which war and defeat had reduced the country in 1945 was strong,
and the search for 'food security', and ways to increase productivity
of grain was a major political priority.
In 1963, under the
general title of 'National Nakaumi Land Improvement Works', the Ministry
of Agriculture launched a series of major works:
Installation of
a major sluice gate so that the inflow of sea water into Nakaumi could
be regulated and/or blocked; Drainage of around one-quarter of Nakaumi's
waters to create an area of 2,540 hectares of new farmland; Progressive
reduction in the salination level of the lakes so that the brackish
waters would be eventually turned into a huge reservoir (2.7 billion
cubic metres) of fresh water); Adaptation of this huge new source of
fresh water for agricultural purposes to be used both on the newly drained
farmland and the adjacent agricultural land.9
It was a package
designed to serve many ends, but in its promise to create both land
and water, thereby enhancing food supplies while also weaving a technological
net of control over a complex and occasionally troublesome nexus of
sea, river and land, it was irresistibly attractive. When the works
began in 1963, few had any quibble with either the end or the means.
However, the assumptions on which the whole project was based soon changed
drastically; what had seemed perfect sense in the early 1960's as the
nation mobilized around the goals of 'high growth' and income doubling
came to be seen as absolute 'non-sense' in the cold light of low (or
zero-) growth, post-bubble Japan.
By 1969, wartime
and early post-war food shortages had turned to food sufficiency and
then surplus, under-production to over-production, and rice farmers
were being urged, and even paid and compensated, to take their fields
out of production. Tokyo had shifted from a policy of maximizing self-reliance
to one of maximising imports, with food being at the centre of this
strategy. By the mid-1990's, nearly 800,000 hectares of rice paddy land
was lying idle throughout the country as a direct result of this policy,
and in Shimane Prefecture a far greater acreage was being abandoned
than stood to be created by the expensive project. Much of the land
reclaimed from the lakes over the preceding decade sat idle and deteriorating.10
As the national
priority to agriculture of the 1950's was reversed from the 1960's,
the idea of high growth industrialization took hold and began to transform
the economy even of rural prefectures such as Shimane. Under the Comprehensive
National Development Plan (Zenso) of 1962, the designation of
'New Industrial City' or 'New Industrial Region' was attached to those
cities or regions designated for key roles under the new plan. Shimane
joined the contest to gain the much-desired designation, and eventually
was successful in July 1966, when the 'Nakaumi District' was designated
a 'New Industrial Region'. As the last of fifteen such regional centres
to win the nomination, Nakaumi was assigned an extraordinary future:
following massive investment in transport and communications infrastructure,
education, power and water, it would become the base for the industrial
development of the Japan Sea coast region; the industrial output of
the region would grow from 41.5 billion yen in 1960 to 154.6 billion
by 1970 ( by four times), and to 397 billion (by 9.6 times) by 1980.11
Like much of the
Japanese regional development planning of this time, however, this was
a fanciful script devised by bureaucrats rather than actually a plan.
It maintained some life during the early 1970's, when Nakaumi was listed
as a potential 'middle-scale waterfront industrial base', but the nation's
top business leaders were sceptical, when they were not downright opposed,
to sites such as Nakaumi being designated a 'New Industrial' region,
and few of the designated sites ever realized the promise outlined in
these bright bureaucratic dreams of development.12 The bottom
line was that the fiscal burden on such communities to provide the necessary
infrastructure was immense and commonly could only be met by borrowing,
and even after massive public debt s had been incurred private corporations
often found no compelling economic reason to re-locate their operations
to relatively 'out-of-the-way' places like Nakaumi. After the oil shocks
of the 1970's, the grand design of a Nakaumi chemical and heavy industrial
complex was quietly abandoned, but the plan to drain and reclaim was
not. Instead, the Ministry of Agriculture and the two prefectures began
to consider various other designs for what to do with the newly created
land. One idea was to substitute dairy farming, silk culture, flower
and vegetable production for the initial rice-based plan.13
By 1988, 76 billion
yen had been spent and the Nakaumi works were 70 per cent complete,
but the further the works advanced, the greater grew the doubts as to
their wisdom and need in the changed circumstances.14 With
the completion of the series of dikes around the island known as Daikonjima
(350 ha) which sat off the north-west shore of Nakaumi, the flow of
sea water was reduced to a single aperture, surmounted by the 414 metre-wide
Nakaura lock (whose ten gates are to be closed when the signal is given
for the drainage to begin). As the flow of waters through Nakaumi was
so restricted, especially in the sheltered waters between the Shimane
Peninsula and Daikonjima the fish began to die, due to the combination
of reduction of flow, proliferation of sediment and of pollutants blocked
from discharge into the sea, eutrophication and the spread of 'red tides'
and the consequent disappearance of the once bountiful sea grasses.
Known as Honjo Sector, this area adjacent to Daikonjima had always been
regarded as the richest fishing grounds in the Lake, and therefore the
richest fishing grounds in inland Japanese waters. When the Nakaura
Lock is turned to stop the flow of sea water altogether, the whole of
this Honjo Sector is to be drained and reclaimed.
As the works proceeded,
opposition mounted, and quickly spread both locally and nationally.
From at least the early 1970's, the national government's Environment
Agency took a critical position, as did prominent business leaders,
including the heads of the country's main business federations, and
from time to time even prominent conservative politicians such as Nakasone
Yasuhiro, when head of the Administrative Management Agency in 1981.15
By then, the works were well advanced, and as the realization spread
that the closure of the Nakaumi Lock might be imminent the local opposition
began to mobilize. From 1981 organizations such as the Lake Shinji Fisheries
Cooperative declared their outright opposition to desalinization. The
major concern was the effect of the plan on the quality of water in
the lakes, but there were also worries over economic losses due to decline
in the fishery industry, and to the impact both on local finances and
on the local environment in the sense of possibly increased threat of
flood damage.16 Lessons from elsewhere were studied with
apprehension by the Nakaumi local residents. After the Tone River lock
closed off the flow of sea water in 1971, levels of BOD in Lake Kasumigaura
(Ibaraki Prefecture) more than trebled and the fish and shijimi in the
lake all died.17 Public opinion surveys found a massive majority
opposed to the project, and the proportion in favour oscillating between
nine and fifteen per cent. In 1984-5 a petition of opposition was signed
by 320,000 people, more than half the population of the towns and cities
affected. By 1985, 70 per cent of Nakaumi suffered from oxygen depletion
for a full nine months, from March to December.18 Once one
of the most popular swimming spots on the Japan Sea coast, swimming
had often to be forbidden for health reasons from the 1970's.19
Shinji's 'harvest' of cockles was in steady decline, ark shells (asari),
once supplying 60 per cent of the entire Japanese market, had disappeared,
and the number of confirmed varieties of fish in Nakaumi had been drastically
reduced, with popular species such as plaice, turbot and flathead disappearing.20
A study commissioned by the Ministry predicted that the most important
fish and crustacean resources of the lake, including cockles, would
not survive 'closure'.21 In 1988 a call for an ordinance
to protect the local environment, in other words to stop the works,
was signed by 43 per cent of the people of the lake-side constituencies,
and as the movement gathered strength one neighbouring town council
(located on the Tottori prefectural side), Yonago, unanimously called
for the issue to be put to a local referendum.22
Under these pressures,
the project underwent a major transformation: the 1,700 hectare Honjo
Sector works were suspended, although other sectors continued. There
was no precedent at this time for a major public works programme being
blocked, or even significantly modified, by public pressure, although
some, such as the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport
at Narita, had been much delayed and occasioned widespread disturbances.
What happened at Nakaumi in 1988 was, therefore, immensely significant;
the bureaucrats were at least partially and temporarily blocked. The
desalination works were frozen, and the process of draining and reclamation
confined to relatively minor sections of the lake. A joint advisory
committee was established, representing the Ministry of Agriculture
and the two prefectures (Tottori and Shimane).
From 1988 to 1995
a stalemate continued. The Joint Advisory Committee submitted its report
in October 1990, recommending that, for the usable block of 1,400 hectares
at the heart of the Honjo sector, 500 be set aside for agricultural
purposes, and 900 for the creation of an 'international resort city'
which would combine research, especially in the natural sciences, with
tourism, sports, etc.23 This was a tacit recognition at the
official level that the project could no longer be justified in terms
of the need to expand food supply. The vision of transformation into
an industrial base had also long faded. The new vision epitomized the
thinking of the 1980's 'bubble' in terms of aspiration to shift the
focus of economic expansion into the resort and leisure sector. The
'Technopolis' and the 'Resort' were the two favoured growth patterns
of the bubble years, both known in retrospect for their signally high
rate of failure and their large contribution to the accumulation of
public debt, rather than for their positive accomplishments. In the
context of the late 1980's, however, it is not surprising that the case
for reclamation of these lakes shifted from agriculture to 'hi-tech'
and 'hi-touch'.
The works were suspended
for seven years, during which time the case against them strengthened
and the movement grew more resolute. Since the absurdity of the huge
and expensive public effort to create new land, nominally at least for
agricultural purposes, was obvious, the announcement by the Shimane
Governor in December 1995 that, despite the transformed circumstances,
the project would be revived, caused widespread shock and indignation.
Despite the avowed interest in political and bureaucratic circles in
turning the new land into either a 'Silicon Valley' technopolis or a
'Disneyland'-type resort, however, the initial terms of the national
project, to create new land for agricultural purposes, could not be
ignored, and so the formal recommendation for re-opening of the project
was couched in highly unconvincing terms of agricultural policy.
From 1995 the Shimane
Governor's office, strongly backed by local business interests, took
the key role in pushing to re-open the works. It was plainly difficult
to justify the project in anything like its initial terms, but the case
that Governor Sumita (Nobuyoshi) put forward had to be based on agricultural
considerations. A powerful argument based on fiscal concerns was also
developed to reinforce it. He began to talk of the problems of global
food-shortage looming in the coming century, and of the building of
a cattle industry, and of the possibilities of large-scale dry-land
farming, including specifically cabbage and 'white spring onions' (shironegi),
a prospect he believed might be attractive enough to draw back significant
numbers of young people to settle in the district.24 The
argument on fiscal grounds was based on the contention that it might
be cheaper to proceed to completion of the works, and then recover at
least some of the costs by sale of the new land, than to stop and permanently
freeze them, or to undertake the task of demolishing the existing works
and 'restoring' the lakes. So far, the prefecture had spent just over
50 billion yen, completion as planned would require a minimum of an
additional 30 billion, and probably another 100 billion on top of that
to reclaim the whole of the designated area. If the works were stopped,
Sumita argued that the people of the prefecture might find themselves
obliged to repay, with interest, all moneys received from central government
sources, that is to say actually borrowed from the people's savings
under the so-called 'Fiscal Investment and Loan Plan'.25
Sumita returned constantly to this theme of the impropriety of abandoning
a project already in such an advanced state, although in a newspaper
discussion with Hobo Takehiko, Shimane University professor and prominent
opponent of the project, he conceded that, under present circumstances,
a project such as the Nakaumi works would be most unlikely ever to get
off the ground.26
As the Governor
and his associates relied on these two key arguments, however, insisting
that the project was worthy of being considered the 'grand plan of the
century' (hyakunen no taikei),27 the opposition movement
that had been temporarily victorious in blocking the project in 1988
entrenched itself locally, while also developing influential national
and political linkages. The anti-works case was developed and refined
out of countless public seminars, workshops, pamphlets, and petitions,
and innumerable hours of voluntary, painstaking effort aimed at generating
democratically a vision of local economy and ecology.
They begin by dismissing
the Governor's agricultural argument. Late 20th century Japan was undeniably
dependent on the food producers of a vast region, including both the
techno-farmers of Californian agribusiness and the small farmers of
East and Southeast Asia, but the scale of the Nakaumi reclamation was
far too tiny to make any significant impact on this, even if there really
was such an intention on the part of government and bureaucracy. To
produce domestically the 40 million tons of fodder consumed by Japanese
domestic livestock would require an additional twelve million hectares
of land, the equivalent of the whole of Japan; in such scale the projected
Nakaumi reclamation would amount truly to 'chicken feed'.28
Furthermore, the idea that a Nakaumi beef industry could be established
which would contribute to Japan's food self-sufficiency flew in the
face of the fact that the beef industry was highly dependent on imported
corn fodder, while the other commercially viable local products "things
like ginseng, peony, and tobacco" likewise had little relevance to global
food problems.
Perhaps the most
telling point made by critics of the plan is that fishing grounds of
potentially greater economic significance and unquestionable environmental
sustainability were to be destroyed, and indeed had already been partially,
although probably not irrevocably, destroyed, to achieve the dubious
benefits promised. It is enough to read the accounts given by local
fishermen and residents, remembering the teeming abundance of the lake
they once knew, to appreciate the obsessive and irrational quality of
the bureaucratic commitment to drain and reclaim, and to understand
some of the growing anger of the local communities. As Honda Katsuichi,
well-known journalist and critic of the project, argued in a discussion
with Governor Sumita, it is precisely Japan's river-mouths and brackish
coastal lakes that traditionally provided the richest sources of calcium
and protein for Japan's common people, and as the global competition
for the resources of the high seas intensified, such domestic sites
would become ever more precious.29 Even in contemporary market
terms, Shimane University's Hobo Takehiko estimated that the fishing
industry makes far better sense than the prospective grazing industry.
The Shimane Prefecture's published plan for the reclaimed land (March
1996) estimated a gross agricultural income for the Honjo site of 5.3
billion yen, of which actual 'income' (after deduction of costs) would
be about 900 million. If the fishery industry was re-established in
the once teeming lake waters, a gross income of about 1.3 billion would
be enough to yield an equivalent sum, and the view of fishery experts
is that such a goal would be quite realistic.30 In other
words, if a small part of the effort directed at the reclamation works
were to be turned to helping the traditional fishing industry of the
lake to recover, the contribution to feeding the people of the 21st
century would be at least no less than that achieved by drainage and
reclamation, and the economic returns could be just as great, without
the environmental disruption. Commonly, however, the bureaucratic framework
for thinking about 'modernity' and for setting the objectives of development
has been drawn uncritically from the very different Western context.
If the 21st century does, as Governor Sumita believes is possible, prove
to be a time of food shortage, it is likely to be Japan's current access
to 28 per cent of global marine products which will come under threat
as world stocks in the main ocean fisheries are depleted.31
There are also serious
concerns about the deterioration in quality of the water in the lakes.
Despite the ultimate promise of an enormous new supply of fresh water
promised by the project, a continuing deterioration in water quality
both in the lakes and in the adjacent ground-water was feared to be
more likely. Few were reassured by the prefecture's assurances on this
count, and the Ministry of the Environment in Tokyo has ordered further
studies, while the flourishing community of 5,000 who live on Daikon
Island, a delicate volcanic structure with a circumference of a mere
6 kilometres which abuts the Honjo works site, fears that the precious
supply of fresh water contained within the island's cone might even
leak out as the works continue, devastating their economy.32
Opposition to the works is almost total in such communities.33
On the fiscal question,
opponents have no real counter to the Governor's dire projections, save
to say that it makes no sense to throw good money after bad; if the
project is better not continued, then a final full-stop should be put
and whatever adjustments are necessary be made.
But even deeper
issues are involved, for the evidence is that the resumption of works
which the Governor is urging is massively unpopular. The opinion surveys
have long recorded very negative popular views of the project.34
By the mid-1990’s, a maximum of 21 to 24 per cent were in favour of
the project, a proportion which slowly declined as the Governor revealed
a progressively more uncompromising stance and as the opposition movement
widened and deepened its support base.35 A June 1996 survey
by the Asahi Shimbunfound that opposition was running at 51 and
54 per cent respectively in Shimane and Tottori prefectures, with only
22 and 12 per cent respectively being in support, and only one per cent
agreeing with the Governor that it was necessary to create agricultural
land by reclamation.36 A petition calling for a poll of local
residents was organized during 1996 and quickly gathered the necessary
support to be formally presented to the Governor, continuing to amass
well over half a million signatures by March 1997, enough for the Ministry
of Agriculture to have to say that it 'could not ignore' it as an expression
of local sentiment.37 The Governor, however, remained adamant,
insisting that it was his constitutional and legal responsibility to
make the decision. Protest meetings drew unprecedented gatherings of
up to 1,600 people (in August 1996), with all political parties other
than the LDP represented, and with the Nakaumi issue coming to be seen
nationally as symbolic of the uncontrolled excesses of public works
and their environmental damage. In the October 1996 general elections,
pro-dam candidates from the lake-side electorates won 31 per cent of
the vote, opposition candidates 68 percent.38
During 1996 not
only did the six non-LDP parties and the national media gradually turn
to embrace the anti-Nakaumi works cause, but even senior ministers in
Tokyo made statements critical of the project and its prefectural backing.
The major financial daily, Nihon keizai shimbun (7 January),
declared that 'There should be no development plan in a democratic society
which is not able to be chosen by the local people' and the Mainichi
shimbun in an editorial described the project as 'a stupidity filled
with policy contradictions'. The Environment Ministry described the
report emanating from the Shimane Governor's office as 'not enough to
stand up to any expert assessment'. The Minister, Mr Iwatare Sukio,
declared that he would do 'everything within my powers' on the matter,
and on 18 March ordered a further investigation of water quality in
the lakes. The Minister of Agriculture, Mr Ohara, stated (26 April)
that the prefecture could not just say dismiss these demands without
explaining itself and getting a positive response from the people resident
in the district, while the immensely powerful Minister of Finance, Mr
Kubo Wataru, on 26 April declared that, on the eve of what had been
declared to be 'Year One of Fiscal Reconstruction', the country did
not have the reserves to proceed with plans not wanted by the local
people.39 When a 'Dietmen's Association to Protect Lakes
Nakaumi and Shinji' was formed in February 1997, its advisers included
two former Prime Ministers (Hata and Murayama) and some of the leading
figures from all the non-LDP parties.40
At Nakaumi, as at
the Nagara River barrage (in Mie prefecture), the Nibutani Dam (in Hokkaido),
and the Isahaya Barrage (in Nagasaki Prefecture), the accumulated contradictions
of public works policy have come to a head. Younger bureaucrats are
aware of the growing pressures for change and of the anomaly of Japanese
practice, particularly on water issues, among advanced industrial countries,
but the challenge of contradicting their bureaucratic seniors, their
sempai, is considerable, and the fear of undermining the finely
articulated national system of bureaucratic-led government also inhibits
them. To negate something to which their seniors and predecessors have
committed themselves over three decades is enormously difficult, and
the difficulty is compounded by the billions of yen of public monies
that have been poured into the project. To 'build' has been the point
of public works; how now can it be possible deliberately to demolish
what has been built? The 'works' are large and conspicuous, and the
manipulation of nature is a sort of engineering triumph. The symbolic
significance of a decision to abandon them, in due course to demolish
them, is very heavy, and the ramified bureaucratic system resists it,
but at some point the public works juggernaut, which has reduced Japan's
finances to parlous state while devastating the national environment,
will have to be halted: the question is where and when. At places like
Nakaumi, the interest politics of the bureaucratic-construction industry-
entrenched Liberal-Democratic Party local political machine has come
up square against Japan's maturing civil society.
This project, originally
designed to increase national food self-sufficiency in rice, has developed
into one that is destroying a major fishing industry and diminishing
sustainability. Reflecting shifts in emphasis on the part of the national
planners in Tokyo, the rationale for Nakaumi has shifted over the decades:
from the national need to create additional fields to grow rice to the
idea of building a heavy and chemical industrial base, to growing flowers
and vegetables, to building a new city that would combine elements of
a technopolis and a resort: but the drive to build has never faltered.
The purpose of construction is construction itself. Despite the shifts
in purpose and zig-zags in representation, despite the scepticism and
outright opposition of business, media and academic leaders, and the
continued criticisms levied by the Environment Agency, and in particular
despite the strength of local opposition, the juggernaut project rolls
on.
1 See map.
2 Kawana Hideyuki,
'Nakaumi Shinjiko no tansuika mondai', Dokyumento - Nihon
no kogai, vol 7, Dai kibo kaihatsu, Ryokufu shuppan, 1992,
247-326, at pp. 248-9.
3 This resume account
of details from the Izumo fudoki taken from Naito Masanaka, 'Nakaumi
Shinjiko shuhen chiiki ni okeru sangyo no shiteki tenkai', in Shimane
daigaku kisuiiki kenkyu senta, ed, Nakaumi Shinjiko to sono ryuiki
- yutaka na shizen to bu nka o mirai ni ikasu, Matsue, 1993, pp.
113-138, at 123-5.
4 The Izumo chroniclers
also list local fauna, including bears, wolves, boars, deer, rabbit,
fox, flying squirrel and monkey, and bird-life including eagle, falcon,
dove, pheasant, lark, quail, thrush, hawk, grosbeak, wild geese, gull,
swan and mandarin duck.
5 Details of fish
catch at the various fishing ports on Nakaumi as of the first decade
of the 20th century given at Naito, p. 129.
6 Jumin asesu "Shirabeyou!
Minna de Nakaumi" kikaku, 'Sakai minato shi Sotoe no gyoshi no minasan
kara no kikitori', 10 May 1996, in Utsukushii Nakaumi o mamoru
jumin kaigi, ed, Shirabeyou! Minna de Nakaumi, vol 1, 31 January
1997, p. 22.
7 Shirabeyou, pp 38-9,
53, 77, 106.
8 Naito, p. 153.
9 Hobo Takehiko, 'Nakaumi
tochi kairyo jigyo o meguru jumin undo', Toshi mondai, October 1996,
pp. 1-7, at p. 1. And for a detailed account of the origins and evolution
of the plan, Kawana, pp. 248ff.
10 Hobo Takehiko,
'Nakaumi kantaku no saikai o fusegu tame ni', Shukan kinyobi,
31 May 1996, pp, 14-17; also Hobo, 1 December 1995, p. 16.
11 Kawana, p. 262.
12 Kawana, p. 266;
Miyamoto Ken'ichi, 'Kokyo jigyo no kokyosei to kankyoken', Kankyo
to kogai, vol 26, no 1, Summer 1996, pp. 2-7, at p. 4.
13 A 1971 plan: for
details, see Kawana, pp. 264-5.
14 Hobo Takehiko,
'Sore de mo kankyo hakai no jigyo ha ugoku', Shukan kinyobi,
1 December 1995, pp. 14-16.
15 Kawana, pp. 261,
266ff.
16 Kawana, p. 275;
Hobo, 'Nakaumi tochi kairyo ...', p. 2.
17 Kawana, pp. 282-3.
18 Shirabeyou, p.
53.
19 Shirabeyou, p.
54.
20 Shirabeyou, p.
54. The precise dimensions of the decline are disputed. There were still
77 different varieties, according to Shirabeyou ..., pp. 14-15, but
Kuwana cites a source to the effect that in 1984 only 56 varieties could
be confirmed, compared to an average in other inland lakes of 19. (Kuwana,
p. 284). All sources attest to steady and continuing decline.
21 See table in Kawana,
p. 285.
22 Hobo, ibid, p.
2.
23 Hobo, 1 December
1995, p. 15.
24 Sumita Nobuyoshi
and Hobo Takehiko, 'Nakaumi kantaku ha hitsuyo ka', Asahi
shimbun, 24 April 1996.
25 Ibid.
26 ibid.
27 quoted in Hobo,
'Nakaumi tochi kairyo ...', p. 5.
28 Hara Takeshi, '"Kankyo
to kyosei" no shakai e okii na ippo o', Shukan kinyobi, 31 May 1996,
pp. 18-20, at p.20.
29 Sumita Nobuyoshi
and Honda Katsuichi, 'Nakaumi kantaku jigyo saikai shi hatachi ni
aru hitsuyo ga aru no ka', Shukan kinyobi, 9 August 1996, pp. 68-71.
30 Hobo, 'Nakaumi
tochi kairyo jigyo ...', p. 6.
31 Hobo, 'Nakaumi
kantaku no saikai ...', p. 16.
32 'Naze ima nakaumi
kantaku', part 2, Asahi shimbun, 3 July 1996.
33 Hobo, 'Sore
demo kankyo hakai ...', Shukan kinyobi, 1 December 1995,
pp. 15-16.
34 Kawana, passim.
35 For results of
surveys in August and October 1995 and February 1996 (by NHK, Sanin
Central TV, and Mainichi shimbun respectively), see Hobo, 'Nakaumi
kantaku no saikai ...', p. 15.
36 'Nakaumi no
mirai watakushitachi ga erabu', Asahi shimbun, 15 June 1996.
37 Hobo Takehiko,
'Shinjiko Nakaumi kantaku mondai', Shukan kinyobi, 7 March
1997, pp. 30-31.
38 ibid, p. 31.
39 Various sources,
cited in Hobo, 'Nakaumi kantaku no saikai ...', p. 15, and (concerning
the Ministry of Agriculture) 'Naze ima Nakaumi kantaku', part
2, Asahi shimbun, 3 July 1996.
40 Hobo, 'Shinjiko
Nakaumi ...', Shukan kinyobi, 7 March 1997, pp.30-31, at
p. 30. 10
Gavan
McCormack is Professor of Japanese History at the Research School of
Pacific & Asian Studies, The Australian National University, and
author of The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, among other thought-provoking
books. See also "Food Water Power People" (KJ#35), and "Capitalism Triumphant?"
(KJ#14)
Copyright
held by the author
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