Ben Huang

Coastal Mammoth

Coastal Mammoth is a photographic investigation examining the newly erected seawall in the northeastern part of Japan, known as the Tohoku region, more than a decade after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. It was part of a reconstruction plan to rebuild towns devastated by the disaster. The plan includes reconstructing seawalls along the affected coast, with a budget of $12 billion. Upon completion, an average of 12 meters of concrete barriers would be built along the nearly 400km coastline, effectively altering the landscape and daily lives of locals. The body of work surveys the artificially formed shorelines and their impact on the surrounding environment. It illustrates the evolving relationship of the region’s coastal ecosystem under the new static line of barriers while interrogating the effectiveness of such structure as a method of disaster prevention in the era of climate change.