Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [67]
There are four veggie airports already built, and five more under construction. However, as it turns out, flying vegetables costs six to seven times as much as trucking them, and far more labor to load and reload them from trucks to aircraft to larger aircraft and back to trucks. Kasaoka Airfield flies vegetables to Okayama City, only a few dozen kilometers away, even though flying them takes just as long as sending them by road.
Boondoggle fever is infectious. It has expanded beyond government into endowed foundations and cultural groups. Even the Red Cross, it seems, is not immune. In March 1997, newspapers revealed that the Japan Red Cross had secretly diverted much of the $10.3 million in earthquake-relief donations that came from Red Cross organizations in twenty-six countries to build a facility called the Hyogo Prefecture Disaster Treatment Center.
«This money was collected for victims of the Kobe earthquake,» said Vedron Drakulic, the public-affairs manager of the Australian Red Cross. «We didn't know about other uses.» One could hardly blame the Australians for not understanding the way things work in modern Japan. The socially prominent Japanese who sit on the Japan Red Cross board and the millions of contributors across the nation who support it are sincere in their desire to be philanthropic. They, too, are victims for they are no match for the bureaucrats who manage the organization like every other, programmed to make construction a priority.
Mitsuie Yasuo, a Construction Ministry official who has argued in support of higher public-works budgets, makes the claim that «Japan is still a developing country compared with Western Europe and the United States.» This open admission of the Construction Ministry's ineptitude is, incredibly enough, a truthful one. Perhaps the single exception is Japan's rail network, one of the most extensive and efficient in the world. Railroad building is an example of a policy that grew far beyond its original aims and became one of officialdom's unstoppable tanks. A high priority in the postwar years, railways took on a life of their own as the ultimate pork barrel beloved of politicians, with the result that gigantic new lines continue to expand across the nation regardless of economic need or environmental impact. As Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute, puts it, «Good projects are a luxury. Recovery is a necessity. How money is spent is not important. That money is spent is important.»
That so much money has brought so little real improvement to life is an aspect of Japan's modern development that most defies comprehension. As boondoggles burgeon madly over the landscape, the sorely needed improvements that would really enhance life remain in the future: burial of power and phone lines, construction of sewage lines (still lacking for a third of Japan's homes), provision of good public hospitals and educational institutions, cheap and efficient air travel (Japanese domestic air travel is the most expensive in the world, and Narita Airport in Tokyo features such poor design and management that travelers recently voted it the forty-second worst airport in the world out of forty-three), and waterproof waste-disposal sites. This is not to mention a massive de-construction program to remove the Construction Ministry's worst mistakes – such as the asbestos found in almost every large building in the country. Yet money does