Rewatched The Story of Yangawa's Canals

If you haven't seen the second movie from Studio Ghibli: it's a documentary they funded with the profits from Nausicaa, and it's very good and weird, and you should watch it! I've now watched it twice! It is about a city called Yanagawa which has a large number of canals running behind residential homes and around tourist attractions. By the 70s, the canals were clogged with trash and overgrown weeds and were unusable. The documentary very conspicuously does not really dig into the political, social, or war-related reasons for why they got this way, so I genuinely don't know myself. Instead, it focuses on the canal restoration project, which kicked off in the late 1970s and reestablished traditional methods of waterway maintenance - most notably, mass participation in canal cleaning projects by regular citizens. The documentary was pretty impactful on me the first time I watched it, mainly because it offered me an illuminating perspective on Ghibli's characteristic pastoralism. This…