鳥取砂丘と植田正治Tottori Sand Dunes: A Landscape Shaped by Nature and Human Ingenuity

The Tottori Sand Dunes in Tottori Prefecture are known as a famous scenic spot that draws as many as one million tourists a year. It is thought that from about 100,000 years ago the sediment carried by the nearby Sendai River as it flowed into the Sea of Japan gradually accumulated along the coast over the years through ocean currents and seasonal winds, and eventually formed the dunes of today.

But since long ago, flying sand and erosion have often struck the surrounding farmland, a problem peculiar to the land in which crops would no longer grow, so sand has been a threat to daily life for the people living here. Coexistence with such a special natural environment is found only in Tottori in Japan.

For that reason, from the late Edo period into the Meiji era, the Tottori domain and the Meiji government took various measures to prevent sand damage, and from that time it was known that planting pines was effective against sand.

Planting of black pine proceeded, led by Taichi Nakai (1830–1913), an agronomist born in Tottori. This is why pine forests spread around the dunes when you visit today. They did not grow wild: they were an effective measure against sand damage, and the wisdom of people living with the dunes.

In fact, the hardship of that time bore fruit, and about three million trees have now been planted, skillfully avoiding the damage the dunes would do. From the start of the twentieth century, agriculture that made use of the Tottori dunes, among the most distinctive conditions in Japan, was tried one experiment after another. Unlike a desert, the dunes are moist if you dig a little, and an agriculture of Tottori's own developed that uses the drainage of the sand; rakkyo, watermelons and melons are still grown there.

During the Second World War part of the dunes was used as a military training ground. The pine forest that had been planted with such effort was destroyed, and the problem surfaced again of dune erosion advancing sharply. Replanting after the war led to the present appearance. The Tottori Sand Dunes are thus an interesting place formed by a landscape that nature took 100,000 years to make together with human effort.

The dunes became popular as a tourist spot as postwar Japan moved toward economic recovery, but then overtourism of the time roughened the dunes. Since then, local people have pushed efforts that protect the dunes' unique environment while at the same time promoting tourism, and from the 1980s in particular they have concentrated on conservation.

The dunes are still exposed to erosion by wind and waves, and continuing sand conservation and management of the planted forests are needed, but the new problem is that Tottori Prefecture is one of the most declining regions in the country, and depopulation and financial difficulty are making sustained protection hard.

The dunes' unique natural environment has been the setting and inspiration of interesting works through the twentieth century. I wrote earlier about the photographer Taikichi Irie, born in Nara, who kept photographing Nara until he died; Tottori too had an outstanding photographer like him: Shoji Ueda (1913–2000).

Born in Tottori, Ueda kept photographing his hometown for seventy years with single-minded devotion, apart from the artistic movements in photography active in the cities. But there was always an intense struggle to produce originality.

In postwar Japanese photography especially, photographers had had to follow the censorship and policy of the military during the war, so pursuing the pictures and artistic expression they wanted had been forbidden. After the war, as if that dissatisfaction burst out, the well-known photographer Ken Domon advocated realism photography, and the new photographic movement greatly influenced the whole country.

Ueda, however, did not go along with the urban realism movement. He kept searching desperately for his own expression and arrived at a new one, “staged photography.” His originality was not only in staging; the excellence lay in regarding his hometown's scenery as a “huge cyclorama” and replacing the studio with the natural landscape. No one in photography at the time had thought of such an approach.

What drew great attention to Ueda was his publishing staged photographs set on the Tottori dunes. In the 1950s in particular he presented works that focused on the expressions and forms of the dunes, offering one different view of his hometown after another, and inspired amateur photographers living outside the big cities.

Another famous work set in the dunes is Kobo Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962), translated into twenty languages so far. Its motif, in which the protagonist, like an ant fallen into an antlion's pit, cannot escape the world of the dunes, struck the hearts of the many young people of the time who carried pent-up frustration in society and could not get away. It was made into a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964; the shooting itself took place at dunes in Shizuoka Prefecture, but it became an occasion for great attention to the Tottori dunes too.

Thus the Tottori Sand Dunes, though a special environment even in Japan, have given rise to much practical wisdom and have even influenced works of art. Sadly, this landscape is gradually becoming impossible to maintain because of the situation in Tottori Prefecture, and it may be that in the future we will no longer be able to enjoy the dunes as they are now.