Lifting a framed, yellowing photograph off the wall of his tatami-floored living room, Hideo Shimoju points toward the right edge of the monochromatic image to where his family’s sawmill and workers’ tenement houses were standing nearly a century ago, by the banks of the Naka River.
This was before the great floods of 1938 swept away his grandfather’s factory, driving the business into near bankruptcy.
“The region has since suffered multiple floods of the Naka, most recently in 2019,” explains Shimoju as he recalls his family history with a mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and pride.
“That’s why many of us have finally agreed to move our homes to higher ground.”
Shimoju’s neighborhood of Miyabara in the city of Nasukarasuyama, Tochigi Prefecture, is among a handful of those in Japan currently in talks with local and central governments to move to safer areas in light of growing risks from natural calamities. If successful, it will mark the first time collective relocation for disaster prevention, as the program is known, has been undertaken preemptively in the country.
While infrastructure projects and high-tech warning systems have beefed up disaster resilience in municipalities lying near large rivers and coastlines, climate change may be putting things to the test: Intensifying downpours, flooding, storm surges and typhoons are all in the cards, threatening the livelihoods of many communities, especially those in graying, rural outposts such as Miyabara.
And with the quake-prone nation forever at the mercy of nature’s devastating seismic whims, efforts are underway to move or consolidate towns and villages in high-risk zones to safer locales with better access to emergency services. When a 7.6 temblor struck the Noto Peninsula and triggered tsunamis on Jan. 1, for example, dozens of communities were temporarily isolated as roads were torn or blocked by landslides.
It’s not an easy endeavor, however. Many rural residents have been living on their land for generations, often over the span of hundreds of years. Convincing them to move away from their properties is a complicated and sensitive process. There have been several cases where relocation plans were proposed then scrapped due to local opposition.
“A general consensus has been reached among most of the residents in my district who fall under the planned relocation program,” Shimoju says. “But many are old, and there are those who worry about whether they would be able to tend to their farms.”
Raging river
Sitting by an electric heater on a windy February morning, Shimoju serves some green tea along with a package of locally produced fish-shaped cookies modeled after the ayu sweetfish abundant in the Naka River.
A modestly built man with a graying, receding hairline, the 68-year-old doesn’t come off as a seasoned woodworker. In fact, his father shut down the sawmill 35 years ago, shortly before he died of cancer.
Shimoju has instead been working at a local bank until retirement, and he now heads a neighborhood association in his native Miyabara, a small community of around 100 households resting on a pocket of land wedged by the meander of the Naka, a 150 kilometer-long river that runs through Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures before depositing into the Pacific Ocean.
The river has long been a source of irrigation for farmers while offering the Shimoju family’s now-defunct lumber mill a means to transport wood. It has also seen its banks overwhelmed during bouts of heavy rain every decade or so.
The final straw, however, was the powerful Typhoon Hagibis that slammed mainland Japan in October 2019, killing over 100 and collapsing levees on more than 70 rivers. The Naka also surged, flooding 41 households in Miyabara and forcing many residents to temporarily evacuate. A further 72 households were inundated in the neighboring district of Shimozakai.
The Naka River looks peaceful at present, but experts fear it could cause damaging floods in the future.
| ALEX K.T. MARTIN
“My wife panicked as the water had reached the road right below our house,” Shimoju says. “We were safe, but many of our neighbors’ homes were swamped.”
Spreading out a map, Shimoju explains how the area’s firm bedrock has carved out an S-shaped bend in the Naka River, a sharp twist that accumulates pressure during heavy rainfall and increases flood risks. “And as you can see, mountains occupy the opposite bank, so rainwater pours directly into the river.”
Soon after the disaster, officials from Nasukarasuyama made a proposal to both Miyabara and Shimozakai, the hardest hit districts in the city, to consider taking part in so-called bōsai shudan iten, or collective relocation for disaster prevention, a publicly funded program in which local governments use national budget subsidies to purchase private land and homes in areas at risk of disasters while developing new land for relocation.
So far, the strategy has been employed reactively, such as in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake that wiped out coastal communities in northeastern Japan. The idea the government is pushing now, however, is to proactively take advantage of the initiative as a preventive measure to move at-risk residents before disaster strikes.
“The Naka River floods often, and there are sections where levees won’t be enough to contain the water,” says Yasuhiro Suzuki, an official at Nasukarasuyama’s urban planning division who is handling the relocation project.
The Naka River has flooded before, in 2019, but with climate change things could get even more dangerous.
| Courtesy of Nasukarasuyama City
“We’ve been hosting town hall meetings to explain the plan to affected residents, asking them where they might want to move.” Around 90% of the 39 households that are enlisted in the program have agreed, he says, and patches of land within the district have been considered as relocation sites.
“Our priority is to preserve community ties, so we wanted to keep the site within Miyabara,” Suzuki says, adding that 42% of the district’s residents are 65 or older, another reason the city has been taking care not to propose destinations too far from their current homes.
So far, there have been zero cases where planned relocations were successfully implemented before potential disasters. The ongoing projects at Miyabara and Shimozakai, as well as several more in Japan, will be the first of their kind and could pave the way for more to come as a form of risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
Planned relocations
A report prepared for a UNHCR-Brookings-Georgetown consultation titled “Planned Relocations, Disasters and Climate Change: Consolidating Good Practices and Preparing for the Future” advises that if climate change does make certain areas uninhabitable and people need to be moved, “then governments have a responsibility to start thinking about that possibility and to begin planning.”
One of the categories the report identifies are “people who need to be relocated from areas prone to sudden-onset natural hazards which are increasing in severity and intensity as a result of climate change (e.g. flood-prone areas, coastal areas).”
That applies to those living alongside the Gono River, which flows through Hiroshima and Shimane prefectures in western Japan. Much like the Naka, the river has historically been known for its fiery temperament.
The residents of Minato, a small district in the town of Misato in Shimane, have been particularly impacted by the river’s frequent flooding, most recently in July 2020. Torrential downpours saw five homes swamped due to the so-called backwater phenomenon that forced the flow of the Kimitani River tributary to breach its banks after getting blocked by a swelling Gono.
“In the past, this level of flooding occurred only once every 50 or 100 years,” says Tomoh Mikami, an official at Misato’s construction division. “But now it seems to happen much more frequently. After the flooding of 2020, residents decided enough was enough.”
Yasuhiro Suzuki is an official for Nasukarasuyama’s urban planning division. He says it is important for those taking part in collective relocation to move to a site that’s not too far from their homes.
| ALEX K.T. MARTIN
That same year, the government lowered relocation requirements from 10 or more housing units to five or more, allowing the five households in Minato that suffered water damage to utilize the collective relocation initiative. A plot of land on the foothills of a mountain in the district was leveled out for residential use, and Mikami says construction of new houses will start in April. The national government will fund over 90% of the expenses, with the rest falling on Misato.
“By the end of the year, we hope residents can move into their new homes,” he says.
Japan is one of the most disaster-prone countries on Earth. It’s no stranger to extreme weather events, with the frequency of “guerrilla” rainstorms steadily increasing over the past decades while typhoons intensify. Meanwhile, just over 18% of earthquakes in the world take place in Japan, which sits on and near the boundaries of four tectonic plates.
The law for collective relocation is old, enacted back in 1972. Municipalities in Akita and Miyazaki prefectures were among the first to take part in the program following extreme downpours that caused residents to have to move.
Out of the roughly 39,000 households that enrolled in collective relocation so far, however, around 95% were those who fell victim to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, when a magnitude 9.0 temblor triggered massive tsunamis that ravaged seaside towns and cities and claimed the lives of around 18,000 people.
Damages mounted in Nasukarasuyama, Tochigi Prefecture, after the Naka River flooded in 2019.
| Courtesy of Nasukarasuyama City
“In light of the recent intensification of disasters, we are promoting the idea that it’s safer to relocate before a disaster occurs,” says Yusuke Maekawa, a special officer for research at the land ministry’s urban safety affairs division. “We call it jizen iten (advance relocation),” he says.
To that end, the government’s subsidy limit, which was set at ¥16.55 million per housing unit, has recently been brought up to ¥73 million. But in many cases, it is difficult — or even impossible — to predict when and where catastrophe hits.
“The current system can be used for other purposes besides threats from rivers. It can be used to escape landslides and tsunamis, for example,” Maekawa says. However, only communities wary of flooding have considered advance relocation so far.
“Residents of areas in danger of earthquakes and tsunamis, such as the Noto Peninsula, risk losing all their possessions,” Maekawa adds. “But it’s difficult to pinpoint which areas are at risk and not easy to convince folks who have developed strong affection toward their land to move.”
Local attachments
Over 3,000 people in two dozen districts were temporarily isolated in the wake of the Jan. 1 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. The violent shake destroyed tens of thousands of homes, ripped up roads and triggered landslides that blocked vital access routes, highlighting the inherent vulnerability these aging communities harbor.
Meanwhile, the coastal town of Uchinada, a suburb of the prefectural capital of Kanazawa, suffered large-scale liquefaction causing gaping fissures and buildings to sink. During a news conference earlier this month, Mayor Katsunori Kawaguchi said that considering the extensive damage some areas experienced, moving residents elsewhere in the town could be an option.
“I think in the extreme, the idea of collective relocation would come into play,” he said.
As was the case following the 2011 quake that rocked the Tohoku region, however, such initiatives are being considered only after swaths of land become unsuitable to live in.
A local resident makes his way in a flooded area in Mabi town in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, Japan, July 8, 2018. Picture taken July 8, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato
| REUTERS
Satoru Masuda, a professor at Tohoku University and an expert on regional planning, says collective relocation was conceived with the prospect of moving, at most, a few dozen households in areas at risk of landslides and flooding to safer places.
“It was never meant for something of this scale,” he says.
That changed after the 2011 earthquake, when entire neighborhoods along the coast of northeastern Japan were annihilated by towering tsunamis. In total, 37,000 households opted for the program, often moving inland to higher ground or to areas with elevated land. The hastily organized exodus, however, left many communities disheveled, Masuda says, with some residents feeling isolated in their newfound homes.
One factor for the success of relocation projects is the dedication of local officials responsible for the program in explaining their aims to affected residents. Another involves the smooth flow of input and information from outside experts, including urban planners and community organizers.
“And finally, local leadership is necessary in order to reflect local needs into the project’s blueprint,” Masuda says.
As rural depopulation accelerates across the archipelago, Masuda says small hamlets and villages in hard-to-access areas will eventually need to consider moving or merging their communities in order to alleviate the risks of potential calamities.
“The problem is that in Japan, natural disasters can happen pretty much anywhere,” he says.
In Miyabara, the Nasukarasuyama district considering collective relocation, a plot of land bordering a cliff overlooking the Naka River, around 100 meters northwest from Shimoju’s home, is being marked as a potential site to build a dozen or so new homes.
It was the result of compromise reached after lengthy negotiations: While safer locations outside Miyabara were initially proposed, residents resisted, asking that the land be within the district in order to maintain neighborhood ties. To alleviate flood risks, the plan now is to haul in soil to elevate the land before building the homes.
Looking over the Naka, Shimoju says that ruins over 10,000 years old from the late Paleolithic or early Jomon periods have been excavated in Miyabara, indicating a long history of human civilization in the region.
“Yes, the river has brought much destruction to our community, but it has also been a source of much of our livelihood,” he adds, recalling how he and his friends used to take dips in the clear stream during summertime. “I’m very much attached to this place and its people.”