Vince always wondered  about  the little rivulets that often
          ran along the  sides  of  the  streets.  Water babbled along
          between stones and  around  curves  and  more often than not
          they got clogged  with autumn leaves. You could find them in
          the most unusual  places  and  they  were a testimony to the
          Japanese love of water sculpture. Who made these and why?

          One such rivulet  stretched for 850 metres outside the Isogo
          Ward offices quite  near  to  Isogo station. This was one of
          the most elaborate  water  ways  Vince had ever seen. It had
          twirls and swirls  of patterned rock, wooden bridges, seats,
          stepping stones, plaques,  little  gardens and sets of steps
          that seemed to  go  nowhere.  Little pieces of glass, shells
          and even some  throwing  dice  were  set  amid the concreted
          pebbles.

          Vince might not have thought any more of it, had he not been
          with Osamu at  the  time.  He  had  casually remarked on the
          Japanese love of  miniaturisation and Osamu had informed him
          that there was more to it than that.

          "100 years ago,"  Osamu  noted, "we would have been standing
          in the water  here.  This  is  all  reclaimed  land and this
          monument represents the  coastline of the area before it was
          filled."

          "Oh, really," Vince replied, only half interested.

          Osamu dragged him  back  to  the first part of the sculpture
          and pointed to three cone-shaped fountains, "These represent
          the mountains that used to be on this coastline."

          "You mean they're not there any more?"

          "Oh, they're still there. They just look very different now,
          a lot flatter. The pond is where the sea used to be and this
          is where the beach would have been. See all the sand and the
          shells."

          "And what about the dice?"

          "Oh, that's a  Japanese  symbol for good luck. You find dice
          on the New Year rakes that you can buy at temples or shrines
          at New Year."

          Vince knew well  enough that a large section of Yokohama was
          in fact landfill.  On  his first visit to the Yamate Museum,
          an elderly woman  attendant  had  showed him an early map of
          Yokohama and explained to him where some current spots were.
          Sakuragicho, the terminus of the first railway line in Japan
          was right on  an outcrop of rock and Yokohama station was in
          the middle of Tokyo Bay.


          This was a  comparatively new phenomenon for Yokohama, which
          had  only  really   attracted  settlers  after  the  foreign
          invasion set in motion by Commodore Perry's gun boats. Vince
          was well aware  that  people  had  been filling in Tokyo Bay
          around  Edo  since   the  1600's  when  the  Shogun,  Ieyasu
          Tokugawa, made it his capital.

          If Vince wondered  where the landfill had come from, he need
          have gone no  further  than  his own back door. Even through
          the peep hole,  from  which you could spot unwanted visitors
          like Daily Yomiuri  salesman  and  Jehovah's  Witnesses, you
          could see the  candy red and white shades of the Midori Ward
          Refuse Centre smoke  stack.  Garbage  collection in Yokohama
          was not at  all  like  that  in Tokyo. You didn't spend time
          sorting through your  rubbish into burnable and non-burnable
          bins, trying to  remember  if  this was the burnable rubbish
          collection day or  a  non-burnable rubbish collection day or
          no rubbish day at all for that matter.

          Vince, indeed, worked with a American man called Peter whose
          landlady had a  habit  of  bringing  his rubbish back to his
          door step and  resorting  it  into  what  she  thought  were
          burnable and non-burnable  piles.  Pete had called the local
          ward office to  check exactly what was burnable and what was
          not, only to  discover  that  he had been right in the first
          place. Still, no  one could convince his landlady that she'd
          got it wrong.

          Yokohama provided Vince  with  none  of these hassles. There
          were rubbish collections  three  times a week and everything
          went into the  same  truck.  The rubbish men even hosed down
          the rubbish area  and  the disposal truck played a variation
          of "Coming through the Rye". The tune seemed to be the theme
          song for the  district. The traffic light cross signals also
          played it and  Vince  had  little doubt that it had Japanese
          lyrics and no  doubt  most Japanese people thought it was an
          enka like "Auld Lang Syne".


          Vince didn't believe  in  burying  his  head in the sand. He
          felt that it  was  every man, woman and child's duty to know
          exactly where their  rubbish  went.  Out of a sense of moral
          responsibility, he visited  one  of  these refuse plants. It
          wasn't, as it turned out, the one he could see from his back
          door, but the  Hodogaya Ward Refuse Plant He was led through
          a series of control rooms and given screeds of statistics on
          the amount of  rubbish that went through the plant in a week
          and how much  power  it  produced  to  heat  a nearby Senior
          Citizens' Centre and  the  Hodogaya  swimming  pool.  He was
          shown the pollution control systems and noted that the smoke
          that came out  of  the  Midori  Ward plant was also a fleecy
          white and made it look as if the election of a new pope were
          being announced.

          He was finally  led  to  sealed  off rooms that kept out the
          smell and looked  down  into  a  massive pit, which was just
          like a Jackson  Pollack drip painting with polythene bags in
          red, orange, white,  green and blue. While Vince peered into
          this latter day  Gehenna, a Mr. Sugimoto explained about how
          a garbage truck  had  once tumbled into this pit and another
          occasion when one  of  the  plant  workers had fallen in. He
          explained about the  one  week  in the year in which the pit
          was completely emptied  and  cleaned out and just how bad it
          smelled.

          "Five minutes in there and you smell just like it does."

          While Mr. Sugimoto  spoke,  Vince  watched  a crane with six
          humongous claws pick up tons of garbage at a time and feed a
          giant furnace. The  contents  were  burnt  to  ash and Vince
          asked:

          "Where do you take the ash after it's been burnt?"

          "It's used as land fill."

          Just as he  had  suspected, it would be used in the same way
          as the rubbish  in the days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Vince
          was not at  all  convinced  that this process would cease as
          soon as they  had  filled in the entirety of Tokyo Bay, thus
          linking Chiba and  Kanagawa  prefectures. There was no doubt
          in his mind that the Japanese obsession with land fill would
          continue until the  whole  country  was  just one big island
          that was completely square.