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By Anton Spice
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Anton Spice is a writer and artist-researcher interested in how sound mediates the relationship between humans and the environment. His work as a journalist has been published in The Guardian, Frieze, Wax Poetics, Electronic Sound and Composer Magazine. He currently runs his own newsletter, Through Sounds, featuring multi-disciplinary interviews about sonic practice and climate change.
By Anton Spice
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Anton Spice is a writer and artist-researcher interested in how sound mediates the relationship between humans and the environment. His work as a journalist has been published in The Guardian, Frieze, Wax Poetics, Electronic Sound and Composer Magazine. He currently runs his own newsletter, Through Sounds, featuring multi-disciplinary interviews about sonic practice and climate change.
By Anton Spice
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Anton Spice is a writer and artist-researcher interested in how sound mediates the relationship between humans and the environment. His work as a journalist has been published in The Guardian, Frieze, Wax Poetics, Electronic Sound and Composer Magazine. He currently runs his own newsletter, Through Sounds, featuring multi-disciplinary interviews about sonic practice and climate change.
By Anton Spice
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.
In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.
From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.
—
Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.
When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.
One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.
One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.
The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.
LISTEN TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDS AT EROSION CONTROL WEIR
Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.
Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.
Anton Spice is a writer and artist-researcher interested in how sound mediates the relationship between humans and the environment. His work as a journalist has been published in The Guardian, Frieze, Wax Poetics, Electronic Sound and Composer Magazine. He currently runs his own newsletter, Through Sounds, featuring multi-disciplinary interviews about sonic practice and climate change.