Japan Rethinks a Dam, and a Town Protests
Published: October 15, 2009
NAGANOHARA, Japan ? The clatter of construction machinery still fills this forested mountain
gorge, where legions of men in hard hats busily pour concrete, clear hillsides and erect a huge,
unfinished bridge whose concrete supports tower over the valley floor like crucifixes in an
immense graveyard.
It seems an apt analogy. Japan’s new government has suspended the $5.2 billion Yamba Dam being
built here and turned this valley four hours north of Tokyo into a symbolic final resting place for
the nation’s postwar order, which relied on colossal public works spending.
The Democratic Party government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has chosen this dam as the
first of 48 national government-financed dams that it wants to scrap, worth tens of billions of
dollars. Canceling it is widely seen here as the first major test of the new government’s ability to
deliver on campaign promises to revitalize Japan’s ailing economy by ending wasteful projects, and
in the process break the grip of the central planners in Tokyo’s powerful ministries.
Decades of pouring concrete have been widely blamed in Japan for cluttering rural areas with
needless dams and roads to nowhere. They have also saddled the country with the developed
world’s largest national debt ? nearly twice its $5 trillion economy. Mr. Hatoyama’s party has
vowed to replace Japan’s postwar “construction state” and the jobs it created with something
closer to a European-style social welfare system.
The Democrats, who won a landmark election over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party in late
August, have also promised to scrap planned airports and highways. But dams are particularly
symbolic because they were favored as a means of flood control and power generation by Japan’s
central planners, who have dammed almost every major river in the country, some more than once.
Japan had around 60 large dams under construction in 2005, making it the world’s fourth largest
dam-building nation, according to The International Journal on Hydropower and Dams, despite
having a land area smaller than California’s.
But the Democrats have run into opposition from an unexpected quarter: the small hot springs
town of Naganohara, part of which would be submerged by the reservoir created by the dam.
In what has become a David and Goliath battle, the town of 6,400 residents has put the new
government on the defensive. Many residents complain that the town’s livelihood now depends on
the dam, and particularly the compensation payments and construction jobs that accompany it.
“If the dam gets canceled, how are we going to eat?” asked Naganohara’s mayor, Kinya Takayama,
who noted that the dam was first proposed 57 years ago.
Tempers flared last month, when angry residents rejected an offer to meet the new minister in
charge of public works, Seiji Maehara, who visited the dam site.
Facing a wave of news coverage sympathetic to the town, Mr. Maehara signaled that even after
canceling the dam, Tokyo would finish relocation of the affected townspeople and complete the
roads and bridges that will link the new neighborhoods on higher ground.
That construction would cost $850 million, in addition to the $3.6 billion spent on the project so
far. This, and about $1.8 billion in compensation that Tokyo might end up paying to Gunma
Prefecture, where Naganohara is located, and other local governments could mean that canceling
the dam would prove more expensive than completing it.
