Sacrifices

What does it take to keep the world in unison?
This question has always driven my explorations into the fringes of the landscape. While navigating the world’s largest metropolis during my time in Japan, I encountered this structure—an extraordinary feat of environmental engineering, built as the Metropolitan Outer Area Underground Discharge Channel. Constructed between 1992 and 2006, this vast subterranean system diverts overflow from six rivers, mitigating the risks of catastrophic flooding. Though similar infrastructures exist worldwide, few match the sheer ambition and scale of this undertaking.

Yet, what does such a structure truly represent? Through its title, I aim to reinterpret sites like this—not as feats of technological mastery or symbols of human dominance over nature, but rather as their opposites: places of surrender, restitution, and sacrifice.

This underground cathedral of crisis is a desperate attempt to restore the ecological balance eroded by relentless progress—a prime example of geo-engineering designed not as an assertion of control, but as a reactive measure against environmental degradation. Excessive groundwater extraction has led to massive land subsidence, retention areas along the river have been converted for urban development and agriculture, and waterways have been dangerously channelized—placing the entire surface area at an ever-greater risk of flooding.
While efforts to expand the system continue, its capacity remains barely adequate.
Across the world, cities are following suit, constructing similar infrastructures in a paradoxical effort to sustain the fragile environmental conditions they themselves have created. The proliferation of such projects signals a new chapter in the Anthropocene—one defined not by conquest over nature, but by the urgent need for damage control. These structures stand as monuments to the reversed sublime, testaments to both human ingenuity and the consequences of progress.