Several days after a storm caused the Kinugawa River to overflow its banks and destroy communities in Ibaraki Prefecture in September, the infrastructure ministry held on-site meetings to look into what went wrong.
One problem was the loss of a sand embankment in the city of Joso that acted as a natural levee. A company had shaved off the top of the embankment when it installed some solar panels, and Joso's mayor said it undermined the city's flood defenses. A year earlier, he had asked the ministry to build an artificial levee along the compromised portion, and the government answered that there was little it could do since the land was private property, but it did receive permission from the owner to deposit sandbags along the river. Obviously, they didn't do any good.
This was the story reported by the media, but according to Atsuko Masano, a journalist who specializes in civil engineering, the ministry's responsibility for the disaster goes deeper. Kinugawa is designated as a Class 1 river, which means the central government is tasked with its ongoing maintenance. Well before the solar panel company scalped the embankment, it was being reduced by other businesses who used the sand for construction projects. The ministry had acknowledged years ago that this stretch of the Kinugawa was dangerous and had intended to strengthen the levee system, but it never got around to it. When interested parties questioned this lack of initiative, some blamed the Democratic Party of Japan, which had cut back on public works projects during its brief tenure as the ruling party.