The perils of urban sprawl

Japan truly is a beautiful country. You might suppose that I always think this, having liked the place enough to want to spend years in it at a time, but unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Luckily, I was reminded of this fact today, when I went with a number of people in the local English conversation association to a glee club concert at Kwansei Gakuin University near Kobe. Almost as soon as the train pulled out of Osaka, suddenly the tracks were flanked by green, with tree-lined roadways, thoughtfully planted terraces, and ample park space in almost every direction. Such was the contrast from the city I had just left, that for a moment I wondered where I was.

The answer, of course, was Nishinomiya City, about halfway between Osaka and Kobe, just over the border in Hyogo Prefecture. And what a difference that made! I actually felt a slight twinge of guilt at having been surprised that a Japanese city could pull off urban planning competent enough to remember to leave space for people to breathe. Alighting from the train at Shukugawa Station, we made our way along a winding riverside park, up roads that had been widened with pedestrians in mind, to a university campus that was built, while not in traditional Japanese style, with attention to detail and a complete avoidance of the usual concrete bunkers of learning that seem to be the rage in this country.

All that just serves to drive home a point: Japan has some serious problems with urban sprawl. Matsubara, where I live, is crammed end-to-end with roads, buildings, elevated expressways, and more buildings. Such green as exists tends to be shunted into criminally small public parks, or over the wall in someone’s private garden. It sometimes seems like trees are treated as such a rarity that they must be kept together, apart from civilization… while every inch of human habitation must be paved over with concrete. All this makes for somewhat dreary scenery on my daily commute, and nature an entity that must be sought out to enjoy, rather than existing passively alongside everything else.

The sad thing is, it wasn’t always like this. In the foyer of Matsubara city hall is a wall of pictures taken just after the city’s incorporation in the 1950s, just over half a century ago. From the position of city hall, there was farmland in every direction, with the cities of Sakai and Osaka faintly visible on the horizon, and Matsubara proper a much more modest and uncrowded affair. You would scarcely guess this from the current situation, which has those same acres of farmland crammed from stem to stern with buildings of every description, an unbroken sprawl from Matsubara to Sakai to Osaka and back.

Everything changed at just about the same time that Matsubara City came into being: no longer saddled with the US Occupation, Japan aimed for the sky, and achieved spectacular economic growth – but along with this came people by the trainload from the countryside to work in the new industries, along with dramatically increased car use and the need for elevated expressways (in case you haven’t guessed, I rather despise them as a blemish upon the landscape).

Even today, with Japan in the midst of a decade-and-a-half economic slump and an ever-shrinking birthrate, the cities continue to grow, fueled by immigration from abroad and the continued decline of rural communities which lack enough jobs (or sustainable industries) to support their own residents. It’s gotten so bad that some villages and towns have been officially declared “depopulated” (that is, lacking enough full-time residents to warrant remaining as an independent municipality), with rural areas skewing disproportionately old as nearly all the youth have left in search of work. Some places, to stem the flow, have even begun promoting the rustic charms of “country living” (not to mention generous subsidies) in order to get people back into their emptying streets. The level of desperation would be comical, were it not so dire for the communities in question.

I sympathize with their plight, having spent a not-altogether-disagreeable childhood in Clayton, and sometimes even entertain the notion of moving out to the countryside: teaching in some remote school where I might be the only real live foreigner the students will ever see; settling down with one of the townsfolk and raising 2 kids – more than the national average – with better-than-average English; actually getting to know my neighbors; and spending evenings down at the local izakaya over a pint of happoshu. But then again, I also enjoy getting around by bicycle and not needing a car, so I suppose in the end it works out to a mostly even trade. But I digress.

In some ways, I understand the dilemma that Japan faces as a whole: being mostly mountainous, it has to be very conscientious in allotting what habitable area it has between open countryside, agricultural activity, and human residences / businesses / factories / roads / railways / etc. Be that as it may, the current line of thinking results in a dramatic segregation between nature and everything else, as though someone had erected an invisible barrier emblazoned (in whatever language of chemical signals it is that plants understand) with “NO PHOTOSYNTHESIZERS ALLOWED”. The sole open green space in my neck of the woods that doesn’t belong to tiny public parks belongs instead to criminally small rice paddies that at any rate get cut down at harvest time.

Instead of this arrangement, if Japan’s urban planners were to just stop trying to cram as many people as possible into as small a space as possible, I think they would find there was still plenty of leeway to plant more public green space and spread trees and such a bit more liberally throughout the landscape. That, in essence, is what made Nishinomiya such a shock to the system: it’s like somebody took a minute to think things through, and realized that it really would be a nicer place if people were given the space to actually live in the city instead of merely dwell there.

Make no mistake about it: Japan truly is a beautiful country, when it wants to be. And while it may have its fair share of spaces that rival the worst of American urban blight, there are places that are equal, if not superior, to what the North Country has to offer in the way of green, open space. The key is to get the mixture right – and that’s precisely why I’ve decided that the next chance I get I’m going off to explore southern Hyogo Prefecture and its eminently livable environs.