The Great Wall of Japan

By Todd Crowell

KAMAISHI, Japan

More than 30 years ago the northern Japanese city of Kamaishi set out to build at a cost of $1.6 billion what would become, according to the Guinness Books of World Records, the largest and, presumably, the strongest seawall ever built.

The massive seawall was completed three years before it would experience its ultimate test, the 9-point Richter scale Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that battered Kamaishi and shoreline communities in three prefectures on March 11, 2011.

Across the three hardest-hit prefectures -- Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate -- more than a million homes and buildings were destroyed. Some 18,000 people died in the deluge, while 2,000 remain missing. More than 200,000 were evacuated.

The Kamaishi seawall built at such great expense utterly failed to hold back the surging tide, which at an estimated 30 feet high overwhelmed the 20 foot-high breakwater. About 90 percent of the other seawalls along the northeast coast suffered similar fates.

In what might be called a triumph of faith over experience, the Japanese government is planning to erect a nearly 250-mile long chain of breakwaters mostly along the "tsunami coast" of northeastern Japan, which was so badly ravaged during the quake and tsunami.

The $6.8 billion seawall project is part of the government’s multi-billion reconstruction budget, much of which currently remains unspent, as the localities debate whether to abandon communities close to the shoreline and move farther inland -- or build the walls so that they can feel secure against another tsunami.

The ministry of agriculture reported in 2012 that 14,000 kilometers of Japan’s 35,000-kilometer coastline was vulnerable to tsunamis -- in other words, fully a quarter of the coastline must be built. Work is underway on some of the first 460 segments although two-thirds have yet to be built.

Kamaishi Mayor Takenori Noda said, "I believe that the breakwater’s presence did give people a false sense of security" -- a view echoed by many critics of the project. Indeed, there has been some evidence that the walls contributed to creating even larger monster waves by channeling them.

Another voice raised in opposition to the seawalls over other means of protection is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife Akie, who says the seawalls contribute to a sense of complacency.

People of Kamaishi had experienced tsunamis before and were prepared for it. Few parts of the hilly town were more than a couple hundred meters from wooden ladders from which they could escape from the surging waters to higher ground if sufficiently warned. 

That was amply demonstrated by what has come to be called the “Kamaishi Miracle.” All the 3,000 school children at an elementary-junior high school built right at the water’s edge had made it to higher ground and safety, the older children carrying some of the youngsters piggy-back.

Critics say that the government, in promoting the seawall, is simply trapped in old thinking and by an almost reflexive inclination toward pouring cement -- which at least provides some jobs to locals and profits for construction companies that are major supporters for the Liberal Democratic Party.

Supporters say that a new seawall would provide protection against lesser tsunamis. After all, the Great East Japan Earthquake was an event expected to occur only once in a thousand years. Also, much of the reconstruction amounts to repairing existing walls.

Once again, for a variety of reasons, Japan is putting its faith in concrete, even though seawalls did almost nothing to prevent the destruction of the Great East Asia Earthquake.