Coastal Mammoth is an ongoing project examining the newly erected seawall in northeastern Japan, known as the Tohoku region, more than a decade after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. It was part of a reconstruction plan to regenerate towns devastated by the disaster. The plan includes reconstructing seawalls along the affected coast, with a budget of $12 billion. Upon completion, an average of 12 meters of concrete barriers would be built along the nearly 400km coastline, altering the coastal landscape.
The construction has been controversial. While experts and many coastal residents agree that newly erected barriers would minimize the damage of future tsunamis, opponents worried that it would give people a false sense of security and alter the region’s cultural identity. But the structure poses another question: Is it the trend of the future shoreline beyond Japan as we face the threat of rising sea levels? How will our relationship with the sea, physically and psychologically, be affected should these structures become integral parts of our lives?
The body of work thus surveys the artificially formed shorelines and their surrounding environment to illustrate the evolving relationship of the region’s coastal ecosystem under the new static line of barriers while interrogating the effectiveness of such structure as a method of disaster prevention in the era of climate change.