Japan is said to be a land of constant change, where city centers are perpetual construction sites and a house is ready for the wrecking ball after three decades. Venice has pretty much the same look in 2007 as it did in 1807. The Tokyo of 1958 has vanished so utterly, however, that Takashi Yamazaki had to re-create it on computer for his 2005 hit "Always — Sunset on Third Street."
But as Nobuo Onishi's documentary "Mizu ni Natta Mura (The Village that Became Water)" reminds us, one thing in Japan rarely changes: the determination of bureaucrats to carry through their construction plans, no matter how outdated or idiotic. Operate a nuclear reactor on an earthquake fault line? Why not! Build a new airport runway, even though the airport itself is a financial Titanic, headed for the bottom in a sea of red ink? Go for it!
The project that prompted his film, a dam in Tokuyama, Gifu Prefecture, was first proposed in 1957, at the beginning of Japan's postwar economic boom, when concrete was considered a symbol of progress and the negative environmental impacts of dam construction were not well understood — least of all by the bureaucrats who greenlighted the Tokuyama dam.