Around 350 kilometers of seawalls have been built since 2011 — with another 80 kilometers under construction — at a budget of. ¥1.3 trillion (roughly $12 billion). Designed to protect Tohoku from any future tsunamis, these grey giants are at once visually striking and horrific eyesores that seem engineered to erase the existence of the sea.
Where the walls protect residential areas, homes are dwarfed by them, blocking the ocean entirely from view and estranging valuable fishing ports from the communities that work in them. Stranger still are the places where the walls seem to have no obvious purpose, protecting areas of land where people no longer live. Their mute, imposing presence gives the sense that Tohoku has been transformed into a large prison complex, intended as much to keep residents locked inland as to keep the sea separated from them.
The walls also pose an interesting question: Are they a premonition of our future under climate change? With more extreme weather and sea levels expected to rise by the end of the century, coastal communities around the world will increasingly need to reckon with the destructive power of the sea and defend against it. Sea walls seem an obvious answer. (📸: @oscar.boyd)
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AloJapan.com