Support for Japan

17 Mar 2011

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This week I have added a picture to my blog. The reason being that this image shows a traditional form of landscape architecture that has been practised in Japan for many centuries.

The threat from tsunamis has always been present in Japan, and the towns on the Sanriku coast in the northeast have been hit repeatedly and severely over the centuries. Before the times when modern materials and engineering techniques made the building of sea defence walls possible, Japanese people developed the matsubara. The matsubara was a plantation of pines, laid out on sandy promontories at the mouth of a river or of an inlet, and, ideally, stretching almost from one side to another. If a tsunami came in, the pines acted as a shock absorber, soaking up some of the energy of the waves as they bent and reducing its impact on the landward side.

This picture, taken last Friday at Natori in Miyagi Prefecture, clearly shows the matsubara having some effect even on a wave of such enormous size and force – you can see how the wave is much higher on the seaward side than on the landward, and how the pines are starting to bend. Sadly of course, the matsubaras of Sanriku were completely overpowered by the size of this tsunami, with consequences we have all witnessed with horror. But there may well be something to learn from this traditional technique in terms of our own disaster mitigation and, perhaps, if there had been a large and dense matsubara to protect the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor, the damage might have been less severe and it would have been easier to regain control of the situation after the tsunami passed.

LI President Jo Watkins has sent a formal message to the Japanese National Committee for IFLA, offered condolences for the terrible losses suffered and pledging help in way we can offer it.

On another very sad note, readers will recall that just before Christmas, LI member Jo Yeates was murdered in Bristol. A number of members have been developing plans to establish a memorial for her.  Subject to the agreement of her family, there will be announcement in due course about a fundraising appeal to create this memorial and we will keep you updated on this at the appropriate time.

One final thing to let you know about this week is that the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) is producing a briefing paper for MPS and Peers called ‘Landscapes of the Future’. POST is the UK parliament’s un-house source of independent balanced and accessible analysis of public policy issues related to science and technology. POST approached the LI for expert input into this briefing paper, which we provided, and we are now looking forward to the launch of the publication in June.

The five-minute video for the ‘Why Invest in Landscape’ campaign will go live in the next couple of days and you will be able to find it on youtube over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it, but more importantly – share it!

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