Wakako Kumakura: To Whom Does the Water Belong?

For about the last 10 years, I have been researching the history of water management in Egypt. Unlike land, water is elusive. While it is something that changes shape and disappears, it is indispensable to human life. My interest in water was sparked by an event during my time in the Doctoral Programs. After finishing two years of study in Cairo, I supported myself until the submission of my doctoral dissertation by working part-time as a production assistant for a television program. Whenever there was a shoot, I would fly to Egypt to handle on-site interpretation and logistics management.

A shoot inside the pyramids held in August of one year was grueling. We were filming inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the largest of the famous three pyramids of Giza, but the path from the entrance to the burial chamber consists of narrow corridors with steep angles. Large equipment had to be carried in there. The people responsible for that work were Egyptians hired locally. I explained to them what to carry where and took on part of the on-site direction. Even in an arid region, the inside of the pyramids in midsummer has high humidity due to the sweat emitted by humans, and the smell is intense. Everyone sweated as they repeated the task of carrying heavy equipment up and down.

Once the general work was finished, the workers gathered around me, asking for water. At my feet, plastic bottles were chilling in a cooler, but those were drinks for the actors and staff who had come from Japan. I wanted to give a bottle to each of them after their grueling work, but I was stopped by one of the staff members next to me. When I apologized to them, I heard a voice from among them say, "Is the water only yours?" As if in response, everyone started saying, "This is the desert; if someone is thirsty, giving them water is what makes you human, isn't it?" I waited for a moment when the staff left the site and handed them the plastic bottles.

After returning to Japan, I couldn't get this incident out of my head. Even though we were looking at the same thing, it stuck in my mind that on one hand, a plastic bottle was nothing more than an expense, while on the other, water was life. It was an ethical issue and, at the same time, an issue concerning ownership. At the time, I was engrossed in the history of land systems, but this incident led to the question of who managed and used the water drawn to the land in the first place, and how. You never know where the seeds of historical research might fall.