The Kurobe No. 4 Dam Project amid Contending Developmentalist Visions of Post-1945 Japan’s Economic Reconstruction

Towering 186 meters over a river valley in the Japan Alps, the Kurobe No. 4 (Kuroyon) Dam has symbolized post-World War II Japan’s economic and technological resurgence.  Built between 1956 and 1963, it has remained Japan’s tallest concrete arch dam, one of its largest energy projects, and a tourist draw luring around one million visitors each year.  The dominant narrative regarding Kuroyon’s construction has centered on tunnel diggers, concrete pourers, and hydraulic engineers, who risked their lives battling the elements to energize national economic growth by harnessing the immense kinetic power of the Kurobe River.  Yet this narrative obscures a history of contending development visions at the national, regional, and local levels.  Dam operators in the Kansai Electric Power Company viewed the Kurobe’s hydroelectric development as a means of meeting surging power demand in metropolitan Osaka.  Meanwhile, many government resource planners in Tokyo saw it as Tennessee Valley Authority-style “comprehensive development,” in which hydraulic engineers would channel the hydrosphere toward national modernization and high living standards.  Regional boosters in Toyama Prefecture, as well as local politicians along the river, supported electric power development, but primarily as a means of attracting industrial firms and boosting alpine and hot springs tourism.  Mountaineers and conservationists inside and outside the region fulminated against the ruination of natural scenery as the Kuroyon Dam created an enormous reservoir and constricted the Kurobe River’s flow.  They viewed the Kurobe River Gorge as a distinctly Japanese landscape, and they feared its submergence under hydroelectric development would mean the very dilution of Japanese national identity.  All parties involved in debates about Kuroyon Dam anthropocentrically viewed the Kurobe River as a precious “resource,” but they clashed over whose, or what kind of, resource it was.