Information is unreliable, knowledge of new techniques used abroad scarce, and public funds distributed not to the sectors that need them but to those who pay bureaucrats the most – in this dim twilight world, Japanese officials are losing touch with reality. Government agencies feel they should be doing something and, unable to see what the basic problems are or how to address them, they turn to building monuments. Monument construction is profitable, too. Anyone who travels in Japan will be familiar with the multipurpose cultural halls, museums, and communications centers that are becoming the predominant features of urban life. Even tiny villages have them. Halls and centers that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each go up across the nation, it is said, at the rate of three a day.

In the ancient Chinese philosophical treatise Han Feizi , the emperor asked a painter, «What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?» The artist replied, «Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy.» By that he meant that simple, unobtrusive things in our immediate environment – like dogs and horses – are hard to get right, while anyone can draw an eye-catching monster. Japan suffers from a severe case of «dogs and demons.» In field after field, the bureaucracy dreams up lavish monuments rather than attend to long-term underlying problems. Communications centers sprout antennas from lofty towers, yet television channels and Internet usage lag. Lavish crafts halls dot the landscape while Japan's traditional crafts are in terminal decline. And local history museums stand proud in every small town and municipal district while a sea of blighted industrial development has all but eradicated real local history.

In libraries devoted to Japan, shelves sag under the weight of hundreds of volumes written about the gardens of Kyoto, Zen, Japan's youth culture, and so forth. Yet we must concede, after looking at the Construction State, that these are not the areas into which the energies of Japanese society are really flowing. The real Japan, sadly ignored by travel writers so far, lies in its many modern monuments; visiting a few of them will give us a taste of the true Japan.

Our first stop is Tokyo's Teleport Town, a waterfront construction project like the ones that almost every Japanese city with access to the sea now boasts. These Utopian visions of high-tech «cities of the future» are Japan's pride, with their expensive landfill in harbors, followed by museums, convention halls, and superexpensive «intelligent buildings.» The costs are astronomical, high enough to drag Osaka Prefecture and Tokyo, Japan's two major metropolitan regions, into bankruptcy. But the local governments are pressing on regardless.

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 fishing ports where no boats call, but even this isn't enough to soak up the surplus. To spend it all, MAFF officials have cooked up some truly bizarre schemes, the most fanciful among them being rural airports devoted to airlifting vegetables. The idea was to improve Japan's agricultural productivity by speeding vegetable delivery from rural areas to big cities. The veggie airports are a classic Dogs and Demons project, because the problems in Japanese agriculture have little to do with delivery and everything to do with other factors-such as artificially high prices and a declining workforce – which MAFF would rather not address.

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 not flow to such projects. It flows to museums with no artworks, rail lines with no passengers, container ports with no ships, new cities with no tenants, and airports for radishes. The trillions of dollars poured into construction during the past decades have been going, quite simply, to the wrong places.