A tunnel to nowhere
“Yon, san, ni, ichi’,”went the countdown last week, “four, three, two, one.” At “zero,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone aimed a glove-covered finger at a button in his Tokyo residence. The prime-ministerial pressure detonated a dynamite charge 440 miles north of Tokyo and 780 ft. beneath the Tsugaru Strait, which separates Honshu and Hokkaido islands. The blast blew away the final rock separating two pilot tunnels under the strait that have been boring toward each other for the past 18 years.
When the project is completed in three years, the 33.3-mile Seikan tube will be the world’s longest underwater tunnel. But while construction workers last week shouted “Banzai!” and broke out sake, other Japanese wondered why. In fact, Yomiuri, Tokyo’s biggest newspaper, dismissed the tunnel as “a white elephant.”
Twenty years ago, the view was different. Seikan was hailed as a technological “dawn for Asia.” With 25 million people expected to travel between the islands each year, it would allow bullet trains to supplant aging ferries and slash travel times.
Since then, however, projections have become less rosy, as economic setbacks hit Japan. Last year only 2.4 million people used the ferries. The Japanese National Railways, already $78 billion in the red, balked at adding a bullet line that stood to lose still more. Meanwhile, 33 tunnel workers have died in accidents, and the original $1 billion price tag will have tripled by the end of the project. What to do with the tunnel when it is finally completed? One suggestion is to use it for oil storage. Another is to grow mushrooms in it. After all, the moisture and darkness would be ideal.
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