[Marxism] Some features of economic growth and capital accumulation in Japan

[Lajany Otum <lajany_otum@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

GAVAN McCORMACK
BREAKING JAPAN'S IRON TRIANGLE
New Left Review 13, January-February 2002

<snip>

Concreting the archipelago

The zaito became a machine for supporting the large-scale
construction companies allied to the LDP and the semi-public 
corporations headed by retired bureaucrats?a domain scarcely 
penetrable by the cold winds of the market. With the onset 
of chronic recession after the bubble burst at the beginning 
of the 1990s, the government turned to ever larger?and 
decreasingly effective?Keynesian deficits. It was at this 
stage that the snowballing effect began to assume an 
uncontrollable momentum, and the decades-long expansion of 
this public-works core could be seen for what it was: 
unsustainable and ?future eating?, characterized not only 
by immense environmental and social costs but by inbuilt 
collusion, corruption and fiscal irresponsibility. By the 
late 1990s, the deficits had become chronic, structural 
and unsupportable, exerting a steadily growing, negative 
pressure that has helped to drag the Japanese economy to 
its present nadir.

<snip>

Throughout the nineties, however, the doken kokka has 
continued intact. The present Zenso, announced in March 
1998 as a blue-print for national development up to 2010, 
is a grandiose design calling for the construction of 
new railwaylines, express highways, airports, information 
systems, no less than six new bridges between the islands, 
large dams and nuclear installations and, last but far 
from least, a new capital city?at a cost of somewhere in 
the vicinity of 14 trillion yen (over $100 billion), with 
an additional 3 to 6 trillion yen ($20 to $40 billion) 
for ancillary transport infrastructure?to take over many 
functions from Tokyo. The ?Basic Plan for Public 
Investment?, under which central and local governments, 
together with public corporations, are to invest 630 
trillion yen ($4.75 trillion) of taxpayers? money over 
the period 1995?2007, remains intact. [19]

Plans proceed to increase the country?s expressways from 
6,861 to 9,342 kilometres and the forest roads from 127,000 
to 270,000 kilometres; to construct substantial stretches 
of new shinkansen express-rail line in Hokuriku and Kyushu, 
at a projected cost of 7 trillion yen (over $50 billion). 
The Kobe, Chubu and Shizuoka airports will go ahead, as 
will the massive expansion of Kansai airport, the Yamba, 
Nagashima and Tokuyama dams, a ?central link road??Ken?o do, 
a Japanese version of London?s M25, designed to cut a 
270-kilometre-long swathe through Chiba, Ibaraki, Saitama 
and Kanagawa prefectures, as well as Tokyo itself?and the 
drainage and reclamation of the Washiro wetlands in Fukuoka 
City, to construct a new ?Island City?. The pathological 
?super-dyking? process, designed to protect the country?s 
major rivers against a once-in-two-hundred-years flood is 
also proceeding as planned, though scheduled to take 1,000 
years to complete. The government is also committed to 
building at least ten new nuclear power stations in the 
coming decade, which will necessitate not only huge 
construction costs but also vast sweetener payments to win 
over hostile local opinion, while the new base it is 
determined to construct for the US Marines in Okinawa 
is estimated to have a price tag of around 1 trillion 
yen ($7.5 billion). Like the Battleship Yamato, the 
Ministry of Finance-run public-works system was conceived 
of as the most splendid construction but has proved so 
vast and unmanoeuvrable as to be almost impossible to 
turn around. 

<snip> 

When Koizumi did briefly threaten that other sacred cow, 
the annual 6 trillion yen ($45 billion) fund designated 
as the core allocation for highway construction?regularly 
supplemented by large subsidies of FILP public 
funds?virtually all local governments across the country
united in protest, and the uproar that followed gave a 
foretaste of what would happen if he proceeded seriously 
to tackle the doken kokka as a whole. Road-building has 
been central to Japan?s construction state, the amounts 
appropriated to it under successive five-year plans 
steadily increasing from 6.6 trillion yen ($50 billion) 
in 1967 to 78 trillion yen ($588 billion) for the current 
one. Its beneficiaries range from local farmers who rely 
on supplementary income from construction work to amakudari 
(?descending from heaven?) bureaucrats, fattening on 
lucrative post-retirement posts in the various semi-public 
bodies that run the nation?s roads. Less than a month
after the cuts in highway construction were announced 
the LDP back-pedalled, saying it was committed only to 
?studying? the problem.

http://newleftreview.org/?view=2365




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