Rewatched The Story of Yangawa's Canals
If you haven't seen the second movie from Studio Ghibli: it's a documentary they funded with the profits from Nausicaa, and it's very good and weird, and you should watch it! I've now watched it twice! It is about a city called Yanagawa which has a large number of canals running behind residential homes and around tourist attractions.
By the 70s, the canals were clogged with trash and overgrown weeds and were unusable. The documentary very conspicuously does not really dig into the political, social, or war-related reasons for why they got this way, so I genuinely don't know myself. Instead, it focuses on the canal restoration project, which kicked off in the late 1970s and reestablished traditional methods of waterway maintenance - most notably, mass participation in canal cleaning projects by regular citizens.
The documentary was pretty impactful on me the first time I watched it, mainly because it offered me an illuminating perspective on Ghibli's characteristic pastoralism. This documentary is all about the hard, dirty, smelly work that Yanagawa's regular citizens had to take on in order to fix the busted canal system - as well as the history and logic behind why the canals exist in the first place. It's clear that Ghibli's top creatives actually knew how much hard work and political maneuvering and social unity is required to retvrn to ancient ways, or whatever. They simply think it's better for people to put up with the hassle - and that modern technology can make the "tough relationship" with natural systems, as they call it, easier.
The first half of the doc is pretty slow, but the back half is real infrastructure nerd shit. A late protagonist emerges - we get to meet Tsutae Hiromatsu, the water board guy who became a political pamphleteer in order to convince Yanagawa's citizens to return to community waterway management. It's very inspiring stuff.
I think that if you're interested in community infrastructure projects, urbanism, etc, then this is definitely something that you should watch. There's a great section header in the second half which directly references the outcome of this process as, I think, "self-governance." I think left political theory nerds would find this interesting as well!
The film's argument is basically that having a difficult, physical, laborious relationship with your public infrastructure and water systems will make you and your neighbors in to a better community. Every shot of old men in waders fishing trash and weeds out of a canal is balanced by some insane midnight canal-cleaning party where everyone is hanging out and getting absolutely smashed on sake (and eating fish they grabbed out of the water with their bare hands). The movie is convinced that the work you put into systems like these is absolutely worth it.
I have now seen this twice. Glad I rewatched it! And I had the chance to show it to my friends, which is also great. Many Ghibli fans are completely unaware that they ever made this documentary, but it is a sleeper hit. I am very lucky that my friends want to see long, slow documentaries about water infrastructure!!