KUSHIRO (JAPAN) - A QUARTER of a century ago, engineers straightened out stretches of the Kushiro River, which had meandered some 160km under Hokkaido's big sky here in northern Japan.
Soon, work is to start again. But this time bulldozers will be moving earth to put curves back in a stretch of the river that had been straightened out, restoring its original sinuous shape.
For decades, Japan pursued economic development at all costs. Under a 2003 law that aims to reverse decades of environmental destruction, the Kushiro River will be the first of perhaps many straightened rivers to regain some of its original curves.
Still, in a country famous for heedlessly paving rural areas in concrete to create jobs and to buttress the half-century rule of the Liberal Democratic Party, some environmentalists and local residents are sceptical of the new projects.
'It's human egotism, and it's for the sake of spending money,' Mr Kazukaki Saito, 47, a farmer whose land abuts the stretch to be curved, said of the project.
'Words like 'nature' and 'restoration' resonate emotionally,' said Mr Kohei Sekikawa, 70, a leader of the privately funded Senkon Natural Environment Association.
'But in reality, restoration work could be good in some cases, and it could lead to further environmental destruction in other cases.'
The restoration of rivers and wetlands has become big business in the United States and Europe. In Japan, where the rivers have one of the highest proportions of dams in the world and virtually all have been channelised in one way or another, there is a great need for restoration.
For example, in Shiretoko, a small mountainous peninsula in north-eastern Hokkaido that was named a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2005, there are 123 dams on 44 rivers.
In Kushiro, the river was channelised when the priority was to develop the area economically. Upriver, stretches were straightened to prevent flooding of potential farmland.
Few people gave a second thought to the Kushiro wetland - currently 2,020ha that are home to 2,000 species of wildlife - just outside this city.
The straightening upriver made the Kushiro flow more rapidly and carry more sediment downstream. The wetland, which has shrunk by 30 per cent in six decades, began drying up.
To try to reverse this, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will refashion a 1.6km portion upriver into its original 2.7km meandering course at a cost of almost US$8 million (S$11.5 million).
And in a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is stirring up, the Ministry of Agriculture has a project farther upriver that is sending mud and sand downstream in a bid to rehabilitate farmland, said Mr Takuo Sugisawa of Trust Sarun Kushiro, a private environmental group.
'The sediments flowing from upriver will quickly pile up where the river will be curved,' he said, adding that they will eventually bury the Kushiro wetland. To prevent this, workers will eventually have to remove the sediments that are bound to pile up in the recurved stretch, he said.
'So in the name of river management alone, they will be able once again to create public works in the form of removing soil,' he said. 'Public works will just keep going round and round and round.'
