ABSTRACT
Somewhere out in the eastern reaches of Tokyo, a stream of pure water flows gently past bamboo groves, pebble beaches, mountain ravines and waterfalls, artfully placed to suggest the four seasons and to symbolise some of the most celebrated features of the Japanese landscape, a modern urban equivalent of a seventeenth-century lord’s garden. Children splash in the pond at the foot of a waterfall and clamber over the rocks placed on either side of the stream. In summer, festivals are held with the stream as a focus, and groups volunteer to clean the bed and banks. This is the Komatsugawa Shinsui K en literally, Komatsugawa affection-for-water park), a narrow stream of water together with the paths and greenery along its banks, about five kilometres in length but on average only about thirty metres wide. Like so many other waterways in the suburbs of Japanese cities, the Komatsugawa was once part of an extensive and intricate network of irrigation channels.
