This Land is Your Land

#180 by Toshio Yamane

Toshio Yamane (山根 敏郎, born 1953) is a Japanese photographer known for his depictions of human intervention on the natural enviornment. Much of Yamane’s work centered on landfill projects in Tokyo Bay that lead to the construction of several aquariums and indoor simulations of seaside environments. Yamane's photographs were exhibited with those by Yūji Saiga, Naoya Hatakeyama and Norio Kobayashi in an exhibition, Land of Paradox, that travelled around the US in 1996-1997. #180 was photographed circa 1986 and depicts the waters around Tokyo being reclaimed for development and overtaken by new construction. In this work, we see life that used to flourish now engulfed in plastic, suggesting that nature is being drained for the use of humans. Yamane uses a perspective that makes us, the viewer, feel as though we are standing in this scene and ourselves complicit in the destruction of the natural environment.


Land Reclamation in the Tokyo Bay

The Tokyo Bay is the third largest closed-off bay in Japan with an area of 1380 square kilometers. Amazingly, as of 2012, a total of about 250 square kilometers of land has been reclaimed from the Tokyo Bay, roughly 15% of the original bay area. The physical landmass of Tokyo along the Western edges of Tokyo Bay began to grow when Edo was established in the early 17th century as the de facto capital of Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate. The greatest demand for land in postwar Japan came from the fast-growing heavy industries such as oil refineries, ship building, steel factories, chemical productions, and power plants. The initial boom of industries in the 1950s created severe pollution problem and occupied huge amount of space in the central wards of Tokyo Metropolis. As a result, rapid land reclamation started in the 1960s and 1970s, both to accommodate the growing production and to facilitate the exodus of heavy industries to periphery regions like Yokohama, Kawasaki, Chiba, and Ichihara. 

Here the habitat is born without biological history - an embryo whose genealogy can be traced back to nothing more than a concept. Within the glass boxes of the aquariums, waves crash on a mechanized beach; live fish and plants thrive in a computer-controlled oasis. Each morning, a switch is thrown, and everything comes to life. - Land of Paradox catalogue

Around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the waste produced by the tremendous growth in population, industry, and consumerism was growing faster than Japanese infrastructure could handle. In order to combat the building up of trash, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has built waste processing plants that pulverize and incinerate waste, which is then used to build terrestrial space in the bay. The disposal site and adjacent Central Breakwater landfills will become parks in the future. Landfill construction of one of these parks in the Central Breakwater began in 1973, not long after Tokyo Gov. Ryokichi Minobe declared a “war on garbage.” While the Central Breakwater landfill project has yet to be completed, Tokyo has continued to "grow on its own trash." At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, over one thirds of all 44 venues were located in landfill property of the Tokyo Bay. In these rehabilitated areas, the Tokyo Government is working to rebuild "natural" environments such as aquariums off the destroyed remains of the actual natural environment.

How different are we from fish swimming around synthetic rocks? We, too, roam through an illusory Eden - Land of Paradox catalogue

This page has paths:

This page references: