Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for a nuanced understanding of the sea-land and human-nonhuman interface on Japan's developed coastlines through a historical and discursive analysis of coastal infrastructure, focusing on the extensive use and evolving form of the concrete coastal armor unit known as the tetrapod.

Paper long abstract:

Tetrapods—four-footed wave-dissipating concrete blocks used worldwide to "armor" coastal structures and beaches—exist prominently on Japan's coast and in public imagination. The product of a particular conjecture of geology, climate, and imperatives of postwar economic development, the massive walls of tetrapods buttressing Japan's coasts have a complicated historical and ontological relationship with the natural environment in which they are embedded and with the humans who interact physically and discursively with them. Theroetically informed by ontology-inflected infrastructure studies and drawing on published sources in global and Japanese coastal engineering, government environmental surveys and planning documents, interviews with industry representatives and civil engineers, and fieldwork at tetrapod installations on Japan's coasts, this paper argues for an approach to Japan's coastal infrastructure that recognizes it as not simply a one-way imposition of the human-made upon the natural environment. Rather, it conceptualizes it as a more complex heterogeneous assemblage of the built and the natural, activated in the space between tetrapods and constantly evolving with a material, social, and cultural life as a distinctly Japanese icon.