Just saw this article on Tetrapods today in the JapanTimes. When I first went to a Japanese beach, I thought to myself, "what the hell are those?!" It looked like some sloppy, spoiled, and super-sized Japanese okachan had left his jacks casually littering the beach with his discarded gomi.
I could go on (and go off) about child-rearing in Japan, nature, control, and weird Japanese aesthetics for quite some time, but Alex Kerr does it so much better. I just want to quote one section from the bottom of the Japan Times article:
"Around the world, there are some spectacular examples of the damage caused by retreating shorelines. And there are equally spectacular examples of the expense to which some governments will go to hold their shorelines in place. More than 80 percent of the world's shorelines are eroding at rates varying from centimeters to meters per year," write Orrin Pilkey and Terry Hume in an article in a 2001 issue of Water & Atmosphere titled "The Shoreline Erosion Problem: Lessons from the Past."
This is wild--80%! I'll just leave it at that. Eighty percent.
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