A When their seaside structures have faced the erosive effects of ceaseless waves and damage from periodic storms, people have acted to protect their expanding economic and territorial interests, typically by hardening harbors and coastal settlements with breakwaters and seawalls of wood, stone, concrete, and steel. The manifestations of this love are too numerous and too variedand too fascinatingto present a full survey here, but I would like to conclude by introducing this phenomenon as a next-stage evolution of tetrapod-generated ecologies, moving onto land and inhabiting the world of popular culture and consumer goods in which tetrapods have become cute and cool. Part of. They could not afford the air conditioning needed for concrete homes in Okinawas heat and humidity, stone structures were associated with traditional Okinawan graves and prewar fuuru (pigsty latrines), and timber was, on balance, less expensive. But probably the greatest cost Japan pays for its years of prodigal concrete use is the loss of priceless coastal scenery.. Even if Japan Tetrapod Corporation had been able to lease its tetrapod molds to local construction companies, there was no locally owned, large-scale cement production in Okinawa until 1964. In places like Sendai, coastal engineers are creating more holistic systems to help fend off environmental threats, incorporating various layers of breakwater barriersTetrapod clusters a few miles out to sea, sturdier sea walls lined with native trees and vegetationin order to provide multiple stop gaps against the tempests of wind and water. It is no wonder that dams, highways, and coastal armoring appear more cutting-edge than most residential and commercial buildings in this local manifestation of what critics refer to as Japans Construction State.[9] Ironically, whereas Okinawa was behind the mainland in tetrapods per capita because of U.S. bases before reversion, it is now ahead of the mainland in tetrapods per capita, in part because of the compensation politics of U.S. bases after reversion. [25] yama Kens post is archived at http://s04.megalodon.jp/2009-0429-1819-50/portal.nifty.com/2008/02/15/b/. 1961. The highlights of the history of wave blocks in Japan presented by the NSNBK in an illustrated pamphlet produced for its fiftieth anniversary follow a thematic arc starting in the 1960s with depictions of research and development, coastal preservation policy statements, and various coastal engineering projects and then moves on to foreground the harmonious protection and even enhancement of natural environments through wave block technologies from the 2000s. This pastime represents a very particular human adaptation to the way marine life has adapted to the presence of tetrapods. The document " Coastal Dune Protection and Restoration" from Woods Hole Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension provides excellent details and illustrations of the process. Not too long after this interview, on February 15, 2008, yama posted on the popular website Daily Portal Z patterns and photos for making a tetrapod from a sheet of paper. 2010. huntington financial advisors address; importance of tyler's model in curriculum development; australian pine cone deaths per year; how to wear medals on a blazer uk In addition to stuffed Tetrapods, the company also sells a range of Tetrapod-themed t-shirts, including one that plays on the iPod font. They cost less than seawalls and provide roughly equivalent (or . [17] Links to a PDF for Shizen to tomoni and to the NSNBKs fiftieth-anniversary materials are available from its homepage at http://www.shouha.jp/. Nihon Shha Nagatame Burokku Kykai. Advantages Effective at protecting the base of the cliff. This latter phenomenon opens the way to the creation of artificial reefs, a whole other category of wave blocks and business that the NSNBK website features. Ganbokens impulse for comprehensive and in-depth recording of data about the hobbyist object is classic otaku and, as someone researching the world of tetrapods, Im grateful for it. Tsunamis pose a substantial threat to coastal communities around the globe. [8] Fudo Tetra itself offers twelve different types of wave-dissipating blocks, including the Tetrapod, the granddaddy of them all. The occasion for the participation of the twelve researchers who presented six papers was the coastal damage caused on September 26, 1959 by Typhoon No. Hosoi, Masanobu, Yasuteru Tominaga, Hiroshi Mitsui, and Tsutomo Kishi. It is still active today with more than seventy-seven thousand total visits. Japan, on the other hand, has what Fuminori Kato of the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management describes as steep coasts, where mountains run directly into the sea and tectonic plates meet nearby. Loving and Loathing Japans Concrete Coasts, Where Tetrapods Reign. The Asia-Pacific Journal 5 (7). Trapping sand to rebuild eroded shorelines or maintain current shoreline form. Shizen to tomoni [With nature]. Thats what can mean the difference between life and death.. [12] The majority of sandy public-access beaches on Okinawa Island, on the other hand, have been engineered, shaped by the effects of groins, seawalls, and jetties constructed from the shoreline. The Allied occupation of Japan had just ended in 1952, and it was not until 1955 that the Japanese governments Economic White Paper announced that Japans per-capita gross national product had surpassed its prewar levels. Nine years after introducing the tetrapod at the Fourth Conference on Coastal Engineering, Danel followed up at the Eighth Conference in 1962 with a report assessing how well the fifty-five tetrapod installations around the world had performed over several years of service. McCormack, Gaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZJRFwJMFqE. The first Japanese presenters appeared at the Seventh Conference held in The Hague, Netherlands, in August 1960. ABSTRACT As the Armor shape has a significant effect on the reduction of wave overtopping, this study compares the performance of various shapes of concrete armored blocks of X block and Tetrapod. Post-World War II reconstruction further sharpened this convergence of economic-driven human settlement (including artificial interferences such as dams for hydropower and upstream flood control projects) and geographical-meteorological conditions prone to threatening this pattern of rapid growth. For some fans, its emotional and physical. For as many photos I have taken of picture-postcard landscapes, seascapes, and cultural sites, there are as many images of urban ephemera, coastal effluvia, and junkyards. Consider one of several examples from Okinawa, three breakwaters situated in Naha Port. Life with Tetrapods: The Nature of Concrete in Okinawa. Revolving around invasive tetrapodsabove, below, on, and in between themwe witness the interaction of many invasive species (including human), arguably forming new ecologies that neither exist naturally nor are consciously human-made, something we might identify as a formation born of naturally evolving unnatural selection. The answer is likely economic. With increasing capital and government-directed initiatives for port development, all that was needed was a company to exploit this opening. This photo essay seeks to make some of these circumstances and forces visible through, ironically, what the images might lead us to think about beyond their overt visual content. I concur with the decision to discontinue participation inSBP or RCSBP and have signed this statement voluntarily and of my own free will. [26] Tetogurumi Official Web Store is at https://tetogurumi.thebase.in/. In recent years, environmental activists and local residents have demanded the curbing of the use of tetrapods and their removal from some areas. Their attitude is one that feels more practical, and bleak, than anything ever expressed in the US when it comes to natural disaster prevention. In Japan, this technique can be found in some locations, but the severity and frequency of natural disaster means that it simply cant provide enough support to be used as a primary means of protection. Rather, the molds used to make them, available from Fudo Tetra in sizes from 0.5 to 80 metric tons, are leased, and the concrete is poured onsite. Moreover, 1950s Japan was still a time of getting by and making do, not one of adopting cutting-edge industrial innovations for coastal protection. tetrapods coastal protection advantages and disadvantages . Hom-ma, Masashi, and Kiyoshi Horikawa. One of the main features of the Tetrapod is its shape, providing a better breakwater effect. (While the Institute says that somewhere between 8-10 percent of Japanese coastlines are covered by concrete armoring, other outlets have estimated it may be upwards of 50 percent.). Tetrapods and other types of [concrete] armoring can cause more damage than they prevent, because they alter ocean currents and disrupt the natural cycles of erosion and deposition that form and reshape coasts, Stephen Hesse argues in a 2007 Japan Times article. They are particularly prevalent for industrial and technological objects, but not limited to obvious and globally popular hobbyist items like trains, planes, and automobiles. Still, it is no surprise that inhabitants of Japan, geographically squeezed into settlement on coastal plains while at the same time exposed to seasonal typhoons and occasional tsunami, have operated under a bunker mentality and have enthusiastically deployed coastal armoring as a key defense against natures maritime threats. Only by reading the text does the viewer realize that what at first glance appears to be a visual record of environmental damage caused by artificial marine structures is the oppositeit is presented as proof of side benefits to nature, of collateral undamage. [3] Danel and his team aimed to improve on three main aspects of the walls: their hydraulic properties (stability of components, overall strength of structure, reduction of wave overtopping, wave reflection), construction properties (weights of materials, ease of fabrication, simplicity of installation), and cost. In hopes of encouraging more nuanced thinking about the relationships between natural and built environments, I consider the ways local wildlife and human culture have, for better or worse, reacted and adapted to the spread of this curious concrete form. Tetrapods protecting a marina on Crete, Greece. Unfortunately, the tetrapods did nothing to mitigate the slumping. With limited local timber suitable for construction and a rise in prices in the mid-1960s for timber imported from mainland Japanlimited by U.S. policy on Japanese business in Okinawaconcrete became more cost-effective than timber. These safety concernsfalls against the concrete, cuts from barnacles, slipping and getting trapped under water and drowningare also cited by those who oppose tetrapods for environmental and aesthetic reasons. (Tetrapod, iPod, get it?) His photos were accompanied with text describing quasi-erotic attraction for the objects, proclaiming that after that [writing an article on appreciating out-of-water tetrapods] my passion for tetrapods hasnt cooled. In its brief historical outline of wave-dissipating blocks in Japan, the Nihon Shha Nagatame Burokku Kykai (Japan Wave-Dissipating Block Association; hereafter, the NSNBK) highlights the 1960s as the decade of their rapid spread in Japan, following the 1960 publication of government plans for coastal protection and the first of a series of seaport development plans in 1961 (Nihon Shha Nagatame Burokku Kykai 2017, 4).