Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 35

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 12)
Nukes and Niigata – Addendum II


The Kanbara region of Niigata in earlier days. “Transformed into a lake following collapse of the Hisoyama drainage canal. From Hakusan looking toward Tagoshima,” from the photo collection Kanbara Showa no Kiroku (Kanbara: A record of the Showa years) by Fumio Saito.

Previously, in the second installment of the “Nukes and Niigata” series in this column, I mentioned Kakumihama in the town of Maki (now Nishikan-ku, Niigata City), one of the venues for Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival 2012. And in the previous “Nukes and Niigata – Addendum I,” I wrote how Tohoku Electric Power’s plans to build a nuclear power plant there were stymied by a local, legally sanctioned referendum, the first of its type in Japan.

In May this year, I went to see Kakumihama for myself. I’d run out of time to make it quite this far last year during the Water and Land festival, and Kakumihama felt like unfinished business. Then came an invitation from Fumio Saito, a resident of the Maki neighborhood of Fukui who has been photographing his birthplace for many years. I also wanted to see with my own eyes the impact of makuridashi, the devastating “roll-back” erosion that had caused the residents of once-bustling Kakumihama to abandon their village.

Rendezvousing at Niigata Station with local artist Morito Yoshida, we split into two vehicles and headed straight for Maki, having been joined by Water and Land producer Hiroyuki Ogawa, and Chisato Kaise, Niigata-based scholar of artist Taro Okamoto who this year published Okamoto Taro no Kamen (The Masks of Taro Okamoto).

Hitting the road running from the central city to the coast, we immediately began to notice sand piled up on the verge. According to Morito, though Niigata is more famous for its snowy winters, at this time of year (May), sand blowing in from the coast will block the road if left untouched, so is swept off at regular intervals. That day was cloudy and windy, and the stretches of reddish, dead pines here and there, originally planted as wind and sand protection and now buried in mounds of sand, already hinted at the desolation to come in Kakumihama.

Another surprise discovery was that contrary to Niigata’s widely accepted status as one of Japan’s premier rice-growing regions, this is what it is actually like: sandy soil where land adjoins coast, only barely maintaining its present form thanks to years of soil improvement, major civil engineering works, and the tireless pumping of water, day and night. Turn off these pumps and the city of Niigata would be submerged. No doubt the decision to call the art festival “water and land” also came from the idea of taking the inevitable burdens of battling water and sand and wind and turning them into culture and cultural creativity/imagination.

Yet the Kakumihama that greeted us on our wind- and rain-lashed arrival possessed a terrible harshness that would pose an insurmountable challenge to any sort of culture.

The sheer, frightening force of makuridashi turned out to transcend anything of my knowledge or imagining. A narrow sealed road along the cliffs had probably once been laid for preparatory work on the Maki nuclear plant. However the asphalt had collapsed completely at an acute angle to almost the middle, broken pieces falling on the beach below. This scene continued endlessly. In some places there were even thick steel rods buried along the road, perhaps for reinforcement, now standing bare and sticklike, staring out to sea. This was due not only to the inevitable deterioration of age and neglect, but also the fearsome force of makuridashi. Meanwhile, on the other side of the road trees and grass grew in lush proliferation, and it was hard to imagine that people had once made their lives here. All that remained were a few buildings managed by Tohoku Electric Power. A security guard emerged from one of these, so we told him we had come to research the area for a local history. “Take care now, the road’s fallen away,” he called as we carried on past, pushing through wind and rain to our destination.

To be honest, I was amazed that anyone would even attempt to operate a nuclear power plant in a location like this: enclosed on three sides by hills, a road winding between them the only lifeline, and on the other side, open sea with the ferocious makuridashi waves still eating away the land. Incidentally, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, which has the world’s largest generating capacity of any nuclear plant, is about an hour from here by car. After leaving Kakumihama, Morito and I headed there too. Chancing upon a tour of the site, we took in the fort-like breakwater being constructed to mitigate tsunami risk, and were subjected to a lecture on the safety of the plant. But having just seen Kakumihama, a place forced by erosion to retreat a whole 500 meters from its original site, such efforts seemed futile to say the least (incidentally, no photography was permitted on the site).

They say that nature nurtures culture, but it’s not that nature has ever been especially well disposed toward culture. After all, nature spares no thought for human convenience. That this merciless quality can be carried over into the domain of culture has probably never been any more than resignation of sorts on our part. Both temporally and spatially, enough physical distance is required to allow such acceptance to mature. In the mines of old, starting with the traditional tanko-bushi sung by miners, such distance was still just feasible. Laboring in a coalmine made for an extraordinarily hard life, but there is a fundamental difference between manually excavating coal, and managing the generation of electricity by nuclear fission. Culture born out of distance is unlikely to emerge from the maelstrom of atomic fire.

Thus for humans Niigata is an unforgiving land. But to detach themselves somewhat from those conditions, and elevate their own endeavors to the realm of culture, people needed something not confined solely to the natural world. I only learned on this visit that photography has flourished in Niigata since the early days of the technology, and the photography studios in each area have apparently served as museums capturing in memory the history of changing towns.


Fumio Saito’s photo-collection, Kanbara Showa no Kiroku (Kanbara: A record of the Showa years).

Fumio Saito, who invited me to Niigata on this occasion, is another in this long line of Niigata photographers. Saito recently compiled and published a photo collection titled Kanbara Showa no Kiroku (Kanbara: A record of the Showa years) covering the period from the mid-1940s to the start of the Heisei era (1989).

Saito’s book opens with the era of a thriving water-based culture centered on the Yoroi-gata lagoon, compensating for the difficulty of cultivating the peat bogs. It then documents the dramatic improvement of the land that turned wet paddy fields into dry; the complete draining of Yoroi-gata (1968), which had boasted a surface area of 270 hectares; the felling of the hazaki, trees for drying harvested rice that shaped the singular landscape; the construction of highways and interchanges; and the proposed nuclear plant, from efforts to attract it to the area (plans for its construction were unveiled in 1971) to the protests against it (the 1996 citizens’ referendum) – Saito adding to his own photos those of his late mentor Yogoeimon Ishiyama, who introduced him to photography, in a single, splendid pictorial account of how transition in the Niigata landscape has at the very same time meant a radical transformation of the local area itself.


At her hearthside, Yono Kawaguchi shows a letter from the president of Tohoku Electric Power immediately after construction of the nuclear plant is announced. (Kakumihama) All photos below: From Fumio Saito’s photo-collection Kanbara Showa no Kiroku (Kanbara: A record of the Showa years).


Protest sign appears at the Kakumi Mikata bus stop after construction of the nuclear plant is announced. (June 1969, Gokahama)


Sign promoting nuclear power generation. Another sign claimed earthquake proofing at nuclear power plants to be failproof.


On the day of Japan’s first citizens’ referendum on a nuclear power plant, people formed a long queue at the Maki council offices to cast their vote. (August 4, 1996, Maki council offices)

Fumio Saito was born in 1933. In 1963 he went to work for the Niigata Sakura Color Laboratory, leaving in 1976, the same year he opened the photo store Shashin no Saito in his hometown. The store closed in 2004, but the Sato house, the former home of the village headman, on which he began preservation while running the store, now attracts a new generation in the Fukui neighborhood of Maki, serving as a hub for weaving together the culture and memories of earlier times.

Talking to Saito-san while sitting around the inexpressibly lovely glow of the iron kettle and hearth that form the beating heart of the house, sampling kensa-yaki (a local dish of rice coated with miso and grilled on the hearth), and hot sake served in bamboo pipes, I felt I was beginning to understand, just a little, exactly how Maki had succeeded in fending off the proposed nuclear plant.

For Saito, who says he took an incredible 70,000 analog photos, photographs are the very stuff of memory. And “stuff” takes up physical space, making it difficult to shift. People do not readily walk away from land for which photos remain as memory, as substance. In this sense, it is no doubt highly symbolic that it was the photos buried under silt and rubble that people who had lost their land to the huge tsunami following the Tohoku earthquake first tried to recover.

In contrast, anything can be built on a site devoid of memories. Doing so not only erases memories, but alters things to make it seem as if what is built was there to start with. A nuclear plant was planned for Kakumihama ironically because it was deserted following a total loss of the land from the effects of makuridashi. The most unsuitable conditions in terms of land for building a nuclear power plant were thus exactly the conditions most preferred when planning a nuclear power plant. (To be continued)

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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