The gift of the hinterland - Page 4

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Tony Barrell (dec.)

THERE'S ANOTHER IRONIC twist to Kyoto's complex relationship with the ancient precepts that gave us modernism. Just as Molivos depends on the EU for its sustenance, and Chester feeds off the farms and businesses of Cheshire, there is another more monstrous grid of hinterland sustainability on which Kyoto must now rely for its future survival. One of Japan's most ambitious engineering projects of the past fifty years is the nationwide network of nuclear power stations known as genpatsu. Currently, they supply about one-third of Japan's electricity – a large proportion of which is sucked up by the national and suburban railway networks and their luxurious multi-purpose stations. Official policy is to boost Japan's share of nuclear-provided electricity to 60 per cent by 2050.

Around the country, always on the coast, there are more than fifty genpatsu, but the densest cluster is north of Kyoto, beyond the great freshwater Lake Biwa, on the bays and beaches of the prefecture of Fukui. They call this coast the ‘nuclear Ginza' because there are more genpatsu there – a staggering fifteen all told – than there are department stores in Tokyo's premium retail precinct, the Ginza. And it is the nuclear stations which supply the Japan's Kansai region, the industrial heart around Osaka and Kobe, as well as Kyoto.

In the mid-1950s the government decided nuclear energy would make Japan's energy resources self-sufficient and sustainable – a network of commercial fast breeder reactors (FBRs) which could create more fissile fuel than they consumed. The first commercial reactor is due north of Kyoto, on the beach of a tiny village on the otherwise beautiful Wakasa Bay. It is named Monju after the bodhisattva who sits at the right hand of Buddha. An earlier prototype was named Fugen, the bodhisattva at Buddha's left. These two figures can be seen outside many a temple entrance around the fringes of Kyoto.

As well as Buddhist spirituality, Monju's designers had a lot in common with the fantasy inventor William Heath Robinson. They were, in effect, trying to create a perpetual motion machine, and the layout of its pipes and wiring is on a colossal scale – every bit as complicated as one of Robinson's contraptions. Just around the time Kyoto station was nearing completion, Monju's liquid sodium cooling system sprang a leak and the entire complex had to be shut down for a decade.

Monju is due for a reboot sometime this year; the outcome will make or break the argument that FBRs are a source of endless ‘free' energy. A lot of people who don't like nuclear power think it is a bit risky starting up any reactor that has been in mothballs since 1995. Meanwhile, people in Kyoto probably don't think too much about their new seemingly magic energy hinterland any more than they realise their beautifully straight streets were designed for the benefit of an imperial army.

Kyoto's revered reputation as the living embodiment of traditional, sacred Japan is rarely challenged at home or abroad. Its spiritual appeal is self-defining. But, like Osaka or Yokohama, a lot of Kyoto's environment can be messy and confusing. Even without the new generation of tall buildings ushered in by the development of the station, there's plenty of poorly built low-rise concrete drek and, as with any Japanese city, infrastructural ‘upgrades' have been clumsy and unsightly. The streets follow the ancient plan, but few of them are quaint. The temple and palaces survive because they are secured behind high walls or way out on the fringes of the grid, protected by woods, surrounded by pine trees, gravel gardens or stones that have ‘souls' and monks who preserve the aesthetic of ceremonial ritual. On the east side, the Gion district has the only collection of wholly wooden streets, and in the middle of the day authentic (if garish-looking) geisha hobble between the tea houses on clacking wooden sandals. But even here the streets are draped with thick and ugly electric wiring (as they are in Molivos), the antique sewerage system often fails, and the roar of fuming traffic is never far away.

Kyoto is no longer what we might want it to be, if it ever was. Like every other city, it depends for its survival on civilisation's dangerous energy solution. So does Chester; a quarter of Britain's electricity also comes from nuclear power. Greece is still burning imported coal.

Nuclear power, devised in the 1950s when modernism was at its most unself-critical, is the ultimate risk strategy, the evolutionary end-point for military settlements founded to protect empires great and small. All three of these towns embody the romantic attachments we have for antiquity, but no matter how well that heritage has weathered and softened, the future sustainability of cities seems to be approaching a murky destiny. Already, Kyoto and Chester have their own nuclear hinterlands, and if the pragmatic acceptance of nuclear power continues to expand, it seems likely that one day so will dear little Molivos. ♦