Tokyo's Underground Temple - Tunnels That Protect Tokyo From Floods | Japan Go! | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Tokyo's Underground Temple - Tunnels That Protect Tokyo From Floods
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Hey guys welcome back to another video. Today we have come to Kasukabe in Saitama
prefecture to see one of the largest underground water facilities in the
world. Basically, it's an enormous underground
tunnel that's built around 20 kilometers north of tokyo to prevent flooding from
one of the many rivers that runs through the city.
So Yasu, I heard this place was kind of famous being featured in lots of like
manga and anime right? Yeah, at least I remember it appeared on
Tokyo Ghoul at one of the decisive battles. Oh wow.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing it. That sounds kind of epic.
Maybe we can have a decisive battle ourselves. We can try!
Well, our tour starts in about 10 minutes so we need to get going! Let's go.
The greater Tokyo area which consists of
central Tokyo as well as the prefectures of Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama,
is built on the Kanto plain, Japans largest area of flat land
at 17,000 kilometres and is intersected by many small rivers
making it especially prone to flooding.
With Tokyo's rapid urbanisation the area is now home to over 38 million people
and uncountable trillions of yen in property and business value,
so it goes without saying that flood prevention is a big priority for the
Japanese government. In 1993 construction began on a
230 billion yen project that would take around 13 years to complete.
We're up in Saitama at the moment,
so anyone that knows Saitama, it's is pretty just like
plain it's a very residential area. But a lot of the big rivers that come
through Tokyo they kind of start up in the north and this one is actually
next to Edo river which by the time it gets to Tokyo gets quite big so
you know the uh the plant needs to be upstream
to prevent the flooding you know in the more populated area
After beginning our descent down into the main chamber, the first thing we
notice is the immediate drop in temperature
from the toasty 34 degrees outside to what felt like around 17 degrees by the
time we'd reached the bottom the tour takes you into the heart of the
Shi-to-ken Gai-kaku Hou-sui-ro
or Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel in English.
It's a mouthful in both languages, which is why it's often abbreviated to G-CANS for short.
So what do you think about these gigantic pillars?
Uh.. they're certainly gigantic. It's almost like overwhelming they're
just too big but apparently they're 18 meters tall
right in this one chamber there's a 59 of them
supporting the weight of the ceiling above us
so they can hold a colossal amount of water around 13 billion gallons
so it's pretty crazy but i think until we actually come in here
just you can't quite understand the size of it it's just it's overwhelming
the main discharge tank certainly is colossal measuring 177 meters long
and 78 meters wide the 59 pillars that support the roof weigh 500 tons
each it's also not hard to see why this structure is referred to by many
as chika shinden which means the underground temple as it has a striking
resemblance to the greek parthenon
this area is just the final stage though as there are also five
other silos along the chain that collect water from the otoshi furutone
komatsu kurumatsu and naka rivers each of these silos is approximately 70
meters deep with a diameter of around 30 meters
that's enough space to hide the statue of liberty in or even a space shuttle
at maximum capacity the system can handle up to 670
000 cubic meters of water and in order to offload this into the edogal river
quickly and efficiently this facility is equipped with four
incredibly powerful 14 000 horsepower pumps which could
discharge water at up to 200 cubic meters per second
that's fast enough to drain an olympic-sized swimming pool in only 12
seconds so i hear this tunnel overflows only
seven times a year but it appears quite often on the media such as filming for
the tv shows movies or music videos
fans of the video game mirror's edge might recognize this location from one
of the levels featured in the game it was also used as part of the underground
setting as the main characters approached the capital city
in the hunger games mockingjay part 2. so guys we just returned from the
underground tour of the g-cans drainage tunnel
very surreal experience i thought yeah it was really magnificent
now i understand why it's called the underground temple definitely you know
it reminded me of that scene in lord of the rings when they're running through
the mines of morgan and all the orcs are coming down the
pillars yeah especially with the mist you know that adds on to the mystical
atmosphere oh definitely yeah you know the mises is created by the difference
in temperature so outdoors today it's 32 degrees scorching hot
but down in the tunnel it's actually 18 degrees right and it creates all this
condensation very spooky mood here
since its construction tokyo's underground temple has reduced flooding
in the capital by around 80 percent and is certainly a
modern marvel of engineering if you're interested in taking the tour
for yourself then you can find some helpful links down in the video
description like this video if you found it
interesting and be sure to subscribe to view tokyo for new videos every single
week you can also stay up to date with all
the biggest news by checking out our podcast
this week in japan thanks for watching and we'll see you again
next time
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