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How do people relate to the past when the future seems increasingly uncertain? Focusing on a river basin in northcentral Japan, I show how hydrological experts tasked with climate adaptation projects have generated new understandings of local environmental histories.

Paper long abstract

How do people relate to the past in an era when the future seems increasingly uncertain? This paper explores this question by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hydrological experts who are working on a project of climate adaptation across a river basin in northcentral Japan. In recent years, the growing intensity and frequency of rainstorms have led the Japanese state to declare a shift in its strategy for flood control away from the conventional approach centered on building large-scale infrastructures. Often called ryūiki chisui, or “watershed-scale flood control,” a key feature of this new policy framework is an expanded view of who ought to bear the work of flood control. Rather than relying solely on hydrological experts, the initiative calls on a wider range of actors to “collaborate” in the effort of disaster risk reduction, whether farmers, real estate agents, or beyond.

I argue that this response to future risks generates new understandings of local environmental histories in at least two ways. On one level, local historical memory has become mobilized as a major resource for the project’s collaborative ethos. Hydrological experts often invoke local actors’ knowledge about past waters as a means to highlight their intimacy with place and urge their participation in the initiative. On another level, this deployment of local histories is making visible a premise about the past embedded within the project. While its claim to the novelty of collaboration assumes that previous practices of flood management drew largely on expertise of the state, the historical fragments summoned through the initiative expose how the state never had full control over this work. By tracing the experts’ encounters with these histories, I show how contemporary anxieties about the future do not simply fuel aspirations to develop new solutions. Such anxieties also prompt reflections on what technocratic expertise has been about in the first place.

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This paper argues that new ways of infrastructuring aquatic environments are transforming who is responsible for environmental management. It argues for a comparative research agenda regarding how this might produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship’ in Japan and elsewhere.

Paper long abstract

States and citizens worldwide are experimenting with how to adapt their aquatic and periaquatic environments to climate change. Many are expanding existing systems, like seawalls and dikes. But some are also deploying new nature-based or ‘green’ infrastructures incorporating natural entities and dynamics into water management. As such infrastructural sediments, soils, and plants proliferate, however, they not only transform where and how water flows. Those infrastructures also constitute socio-political experiments where new ideas and ideals, practices, publics, institutions, and even citizens may be posited and prototyped in dialogue with changing material conditions. Green infrastructures thus form fertile sites for examining a crucial issue facing many nations: how adapting to climate change alters democratic systems.

Drawing on comparative preliminary fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Louisiana Delta, and the Netherlands, this paper hypothesizes that new ways of infrastructuring environments are transforming who and what is responsible for environmental management. In Japan, for example, those advocating green infrastructure often argue it exceeds official categories in terms of both knowledge and practice. Cultivating it requires knowledge not tabulated by official statistics—for example, experiential knowledge regarding where water flows—and enrolling those holding that knowledge, from residents to entrepreneurs, into initiatives creating and managing infrastructural greenery. Green infrastructure thus requires cultivating a multitude of new entanglements and subjects, or “making the people who can make greenery” (midori wo tsukuru hito wo tsukuru koto).

Building on this hypothesis, the paper argues for a comparative research agenda regarding how adaptive infrastructural transformations gather new publics and produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship.’ By ‘climate citizenship,’ it refers to a form of situated globalism emerging from the articulation of existing, local social contracts (with their varying distributions of rights and responsibilities) and climate change as a global phenomenon. It introduces a comparative research project examining this across three areas which interact with each other closely: Tokyo Bay, the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta, and the Louisiana Delta. By examining how infrastructure modes travel across these, and with what effects, the project asks how addressing climate change goes hand in hand with reshaping citizenry, political coalitions, and more.

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Paper short abstract

While global Green Infrastructure (GI) discourse emphasizes new nature-based approaches, traditional landscape is often reframed as GI in Japan. Do climate threats reinforce cultural values or reshape landscape visions? This paper explores GI as technical and cultural projects within global trends.

Paper long abstract

As concern over climate change intensifies, Green Infrastructure (GI) is gaining increased recognition as a key adaptation strategy. GI refers to systems such as urban forests, wetlands, and green seawalls that use ecological functions to deliver environmental, social, and climatic benefits in urban and regional planning. Globally, GI discourse often emphasizes new modes of working with nature, including urban greening initiatives and rain gardens that replace conventional gray infrastructures like concrete drainage systems. At the same time, however, existing ecological landscapes are being reinterpreted and integrated into GI initiatives.

In Japan, the resignification of historical and traditional landscapes forms an important part of the movement. Rice paddies, which form the mindscape of the Japanese countryside, are now recognized as functional water reservoirs, while traditional Japanese gardens in Kyoto are reframed as modes of rainwater management. National legislation that once positioned urban farmland as a space awaiting development now promotes it as an important part of urban space for biodiversity and water retention. Thus, alongside the projects to introduce new types of GI, there are deliberate efforts to resignify, conserve, and even integrate existing landscapes into contemporary infrastructure projects.

This phenomenon raises questions about how climate threats intertwine with cultural values to shape ideas about what the landscape should look like. Are climate threats being used to reinforce existing cultural values, or are they changing how people see and inhabit the landscape? What ecological value emerges when rice paddies are reframed as reservoirs for flood control? How does it inform policy, and how does policy shift from concrete works to GI and NbS (Nature-based Solutions) spreads responsibility across different actors? This paper explores GI as both a technical and a cultural project, situating Japan’s practices within global trends while highlighting their sociocultural distinctiveness.

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This paper examines rain gardens in Tokyo as devices that make legible the ecological accountability for flooding, heat, and water pollution visible in dry, impervious, and sanitized urban environments, while exposing the otherwise hidden and totalizing urban hydrological system.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines rain gardens (ameniwa) in contemporary Tokyo as a landscape intervention through which ecological accountability for flooding, heat, and water pollution has become legible in dry, impervious, and ecologically sterilized urban settings. Over the past decade, rain gardens have entered Japanese policy and design discourse through the translation of “Green Infrastructure” concepts and techniques developed by planners, engineers, and ecologists in Europe, North America, and Asia. Their appearance in Tokyo is linked to a broader national revaluation of flood management following the 2020 flooding of the Kuma River in Kumamoto, which fed into a prefecture-wide implementation of watershed-based flood control (ryūiki chisui). Within this shifting policy context, rain gardens have taken hold unevenly, appearing as DIY household installations, roadside bioswales, park-based projects, and corporate or municipal showcases.

Rain gardens function here as sentinels of ecological accountability: living, diagnostic devices that enable residents and practitioners to apprehend their position within an otherwise hidden and totalized urban network of water infrastructures and bureaucratic domains. Designing and maintaining a rain garden requires attention to how rainwater moves across impervious urban surfaces, through fragmented and buried sewage and flood-control systems, and into waters and wetlands that provide habitat for local fauna and flora. Built to perforate the urban surface, rain gardens translate rainfall and runoff, soil infiltration, heat, and ecological change into perceptible, everyday signs, cultivating awareness of how ordinary water use connects to urban flooding, combined sewer overflows, climatic stress, and downstream ecological effects.

The analysis draws on fieldwork with municipal officials, engineers, planners, and civil society actors in Tokyo—primarily in Suginami Ward—alongside research tracing the global circulation of rain garden concepts through policy and professional networks. Read against longer histories of Japanese water governance, and in dialogue with practitioners who compare rain gardens to earlier hydrological devices such as rice paddies and rock gardens, the paper treats these interventions as diagnostic rather than corrective. Rain gardens render visible the historical production and institutional fragmentation of accountability for urban water.