Posted in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, FEATURES, HABITAT, LAM MAGAZINE, PLANNING, PLANTS, REGION, RESILIENCE, SHORELINE, SOIL, TRANSLATED, WATER, tagged agriculture, Akira Miyawaki, biological legacies, black pine, Coast, coastal, earthquake, ecotone, embankment, Eri Ishimori, fauna, flood wall, flora, forest, forest walls, Great East Japan Earthquake, Hurricane, Iwanuma, Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, Kathleen Gmyrek, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Makoto Nikkawa, Miyagi Prefecture, Miyawaki method, Morino Project, morning glories, Nate Berg, natural disaster, planting, Potential Vegetation Method, saplings, satoyama, seawall, Sendai Coast, SHORELINE, trees, tsunami, volunteers, wave barrier, Yokohama National University, Yoshihiko Hirabuki on January 25, 2018|
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As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
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BY KATHLEEN GMYREK
Iwanuma is a quaint and quintessentially Japanese beach town on the Sendai Coast, a two-hour train ride north of Tokyo, in Miyagi Prefecture. Rolling sand dunes line the coast, and a thin forest of black pines spreads inland to a wide band of rice paddies and modest farmhouses. Like dozens of small communities along this stretch of coast, it’s been farmed for hundreds of years, left mostly to itself as Japan developed and urbanized.
When the Great East Japan Earthquake pushed a tsunami against the coastline on March 11, 2011, Iwanuma was washed over by waves that rushed inland for miles and destroyed almost everything in their path. The parts of Iwanuma inundated by the tsunami were mostly agricultural lands, but the death toll still reached an estimated 180 people. In all, more than 15,000 people died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. Most drowned.
It was a devastating catastrophe for a country all too familiar with disasters, natural and human-made. But it was also something of an alarm to many people in seismically hyperactive Japan who have become newly energized by efforts to prevent similar destruction from the inevitable tsunamis of the future. One approach has gained considerable attention: the accelerated planting of “forest walls” as wave barriers. Hundreds of thousands of saplings have been planted (more…)
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