Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [66]
Teleport Town was built on land reclaimed from Tokyo Bay by the Tokyo metropolitan government and developed with state-of-the-art infrastructure. Time 24, one of its «intelligent buildings,» boasts fiber-optic wiring and other equipment, and is serviced by a shiny new train system. The trouble is that there was no need for Teleport Town. Time 24 has been almost empty since it opened, and so has the train. So few tenants moved in that in February 1996 Time 24 tried to lease floors to the Fisheries Department, to be filled with fish tanks – unsuccessfully. Projections indicate that Teleport Town will run up a ¥5 trillion shortfall over the next three decades.
From here we move on to Tega Marsh Fountain, built by the Chiba prefectural government, northeast of Tokyo. This fountain, spouting water from the most polluted inland body of water in Japan, was built to «symbolize the community's hopes for the future.» So poisonous is the spume that operators halt the fountain when the wind is blowing hard or when there is an outbreak of toxic algae. In a newspaper interview, one man summed up the view of local residents: «I don't have a good feeling when I see the fountain.»
While Teleport Town is a monument in progress and Tega Marsh Fountain is in its terminal stages, in Gifu, between Kyoto and Nagoya, we can see a monument at its inception. The town of Gifu is a dreary conglomeration of little shops, home to thousands of low-end manufacturers of T-shirts and cheap clothing. This local industry, at a sharp disadvantage to China and other cheap foreign producers, is mired in chronic depression, hardly an encouraging sight, but in December 1995 Gifu Prefecture announced that it intended to become the «Milan of Japan.» At great expense, it redeveloped the wholesale market near the train station, raising a gleaming new complex that Gifu hoped would solve the problem of structural decline in Japan s apparel industry.
Northwest of Gifu, the Hokuriku Express, a spur train line, was built for ¥130 billion during the course of almost thirty years simply to shave fifteen minutes off the rail time between Tokyo and Kanazawa, and it is now to be overshadowed by a newer monument. In addition to the fact that there was no real need for it in the first place, it appears no one will ever use the line because Japan Railways is extending the bullet train to Kanazawa. A Hokuriku Express executive says, «Although no one openly says so, everybody's worried. We hope to attract passengers by developing tourist attractions.» In other words more monuments.
Last, there is the Hakata Bay project, a container port being built on mud flats in the harbor off Fukuoka City. When completed, the 448-hectare island, second in size only to Teleport Town, will destroy bird habitat, the last remaining place in Hakata Bay for migratory birds. There was some opposition to this project in the early 1990s, but Fukuoka Prefecture claimed the port would be needed for new commerce with Southeast Asia, though this is unlikely, given the high yen and increased competition from other ports in Asia and Japan. Kaneko Jun, a manager at Evergreen, a company that handles the largest volume of containers at Fukuoka, said, «As far as our company is concerned, the island is not necessary.» Would Fukuoka protect the birds, cancel the plan, and save itself ruinous expense? The answer is predictable. Although the World Wildlife Fund Japan petitioned the national government to review the project, the Environment Agency approved it and construction began in April 1996.
Japan's monument mentality is in evidence everywhere. Not only the Construction and Transport ministries raise monuments – every department does. One of the biggest builders is the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries (MAFF), which receives 20 percent of the public-works construction budget, far more than it needs. Nevertheless funds, once budgeted, must be spent. MAFF devotes as much money as it can to creating untraveled forestry roads and