Ominous Views of Japan's New Concrete Seawalls
The last paragraph is interesting to me, cause it’s like, yeah, you’re giving up an important part of your culture, but then again, that important part of your culture has caused people to die needlessly.
The traditional Japanese way of dealing with this while retaining harmony with the sea is to engrave large stones as a warning to your future descendants, and then live above that waterline. When it has actually been followed, it has been reasonably successful.
Of course, something like this was going to happen. As climate change continues, this sort of cyberpunk-industrial monstrosity - right down to the construction companies benefiting from it, and the urban city dominating the decisions of the countryside - will continue as well.
These structures feel poorly integrated into their surroundings. They could have put earthen embankments behind them, or put walking paths on top of them.
And if they are reinforced concrete instead of regular concrete, they won’t last more than a five decades or so before breaking apart.
Worth pointing out that “gratuitous, overengineered concrete construction along the rural coast” – seawalls, tetrapods, those mountainside roads familiar from anime (where America might just use netting or fences to restrain falling rocks) – is the classic Japanese pork-barrel/stimulus spending project. Was an important part of Japan’s Cold War political structure, with the ruling pan-establishmentarian LDP spending to shore up support in rotten rural districts to counter Communist strength in the cities.