Our cities are visually dull enough as it is
Japan's forests of utility poles—strung with cable and history alike—have become the unlikely subject of a national debate about what modernization truly means. Political ambitions to bury the lines underground collide with staggering costs, seismic complexity, and the quiet realization that infrastructure is never merely technical. As filmmaker Hideaki Anno observed in 2014, the poles that crowd Japan's skylines may be less an embarrassment than a kind of visual honesty—evidence of the layered, living systems that hold urban life together.
- The push to underground Japan's power lines has real political momentum, but the engineering and financial barriers are so severe that large-scale removal remains effectively out of reach.
- Earthquakes, typhoons, and a labyrinth of existing underground infrastructure turn what sounds like a clean modernization project into a coordination nightmare across competing utility companies.
- A quieter disruption runs beneath the technical debate: removing the poles would erase a visual texture that has shaped how generations of Japanese people experience their own cities.
- Filmmaker Hideaki Anno, speaking at the 2014 Tokyo International Film Festival, gave voice to this unease—arguing that cities already risk becoming visually hollow, and that the poles carry a rough, industrial character worth preserving.
- Japan is settling, for now, into an uncomfortable but realistic posture: the poles will stay, and the conversation must shift from removal to maintenance, integration, and a more honest reckoning with what modernization actually demands.
Japan's urban skylines are threaded with utility poles—tens of thousands of them, draped in power lines and telephone cables so familiar they have become nearly invisible. Yet a persistent political movement seeks to bury them underground, promising cleaner streets and a more modern face for Japanese cities. The reality, engineers and planners have found, is far more stubborn.
The costs are enormous and the technical obstacles formidable. Burying power lines means coordinating across multiple utility companies, navigating dense existing underground infrastructure, and building systems resilient enough to survive the earthquakes and typhoons that regularly test Japan's cities. What politicians describe as a straightforward upgrade reveals itself, at scale, as something close to impossible.
The debate took an unexpected turn at the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2014, when Hideaki Anno—creator of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and director of the live-action film "Shiki-Jitsu," shot in his industrial hometown of Ube—pushed back against the modernization consensus. "There's a movement in political circles to get rid of utility poles," he said, "but our cities are visually dull enough as it is." For Anno, shaped by a childhood among factories and steel, the poles were not eyesores but evidence—of density, of growth, of the visible machinery of modern life.
His remark points to something the infrastructure debate tends to overlook: the poles are not only technical objects but part of the landscape that formed how people see and feel their cities. Erasing them would alter not just the skyline but a relationship between citizens and urban space that has accumulated over generations.
For now, the poles remain, and Japan's focus must shift from removal to coexistence—maintaining what exists, integrating it thoughtfully, and accepting that modernization does not always mean erasure. The question is no longer only how to get rid of the poles, but whether, as Anno quietly suggested, there is something in them worth keeping.
Japan's skyline is crowded with utility poles—thousands upon thousands of them, strung with power lines and telephone cables, a visual constant so familiar that most people stop seeing them. But there is a movement, particularly among politicians and urban planners, to bury these poles underground, to clean up the view, to modernize the infrastructure. The problem is that it doesn't work the way people imagine it should.
The cost is staggering. The technical complexity is immense. Burying power lines requires not just digging trenches and laying cable—it demands coordination across multiple utility companies, careful navigation around existing underground infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance in a country prone to earthquakes and typhoons. What sounds like a straightforward modernization project becomes, in practice, a nearly impossible undertaking at scale. Japan's cities will likely keep their poles for the foreseeable future, which means the conversation has to shift: not how to remove them, but how to live with them.
This tension between infrastructure and aesthetics surfaced in an unexpected place during the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2014. Hideaki Anno, the creator of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and an acclaimed filmmaker in his own right, was reflecting on his work and his influences. He had recently made a live-action film called "Shiki-Jitsu" shot in his hometown of Ube, in Yamaguchi Prefecture—a place shaped by factories and industrial development. Growing up in that landscape, surrounded by steel and machinery, had left a mark on him. He found beauty in what others might dismiss as visual clutter.
When the conversation turned to the push to remove utility poles, Anno offered a counterpoint that cut against the grain of the modernization impulse. Yes, there was political will to eliminate them. Yes, they were seen as eyesores, relics of an earlier era. But he saw something else. "There's a movement in political circles to get rid of utility poles, but our cities are visually dull enough as it is," he said. It was a small remark, made in passing during a talk show, but it captured something real: the poles, for all their disorder, gave Japanese cities a particular character. They were part of the visual texture of urban life, evidence of growth and density and the layering of systems that made modern life possible.
The infrastructure question and the aesthetic question are not separate. When engineers calculate the cost of burying power lines—the excavation, the coordination, the redundancy required for safety—they are calculating the price of erasing a visual element that has become woven into how Japan looks. The poles are not just technical infrastructure; they are part of the landscape that shaped generations of people who grew up beneath them. Removing them would change not just the skyline but the relationship between people and their cities.
For now, the poles remain. The political movement to bury them persists, but the practical barriers are too high. Japan will maintain its above-ground utility infrastructure, which means the focus must shift to maintenance, to integration, to accepting that modernization does not always mean erasure. The poles will stay, and cities will have to find ways to live with them—or, as Anno suggested, to see in them something worth keeping.
Citações Notáveis
There's a movement in political circles to get rid of utility poles, but our cities are visually dull enough as it is— Hideaki Anno, filmmaker and animator
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why is burying power lines so much more expensive than people assume?
It's not just about digging a trench. You have to coordinate with multiple utility companies, work around existing underground infrastructure, and build systems that can survive earthquakes and typhoons. In a dense urban area, that complexity multiplies. The cost becomes prohibitive at scale.
So it's a technical problem, not a money problem?
It's both. The money is real—the engineering requirements are real. But they're connected. You can't separate the cost from the difficulty.
What does Hideaki Anno have to do with this?
He offers a different lens. He grew up in an industrial landscape, surrounded by factories and steel. When he looks at utility poles, he doesn't see clutter. He sees character. He's saying that the push to remove them assumes they're purely negative, but they're part of how Japanese cities actually look and feel.
Is he arguing against burying the lines?
Not exactly. He's questioning the assumption that removing them is automatically progress. He's pointing out that cities are already visually dull in many ways, and the poles give them a particular texture. It's a reminder that infrastructure is also aesthetic.
So Japan will just keep the poles?
For the foreseeable future, yes. The practical barriers are too high. The conversation has to shift from removal to maintenance, to accepting that some infrastructure stays and finding ways to integrate it rather than erase it.
Does that feel like giving up?
It feels like being honest about what's possible. Sometimes modernization means working with what you have, not replacing it.