Japan Press Weekly

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2012 December 19 - 25 [POLITICS]

Repair of aging infrastructure neglected

Japan, around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, promoted many large development projects such as the construction of expressways, a bullet train line, and cross-channel bridges and roads.

They are 40-50 years old now. The government, however, prioritizes plans to construct another bullet train line and expressways over works to maintain and upgrade the existing infrastructure, leaving the old public structures as they are.

For example, when concrete pieces inside a tunnel of the Osaka-Fukuoka bullet train fell off one after another in 1999, a subsequent overhaul found that 41,000 spots had become degraded in tunnels of that train line.

Japan has157,000 bridges of more than 15 meters in length. As of April, 217 of them were closed to traffic due to deterioration associated with age. The number of bridges in need of repair totals 60,704. Nevertheless, the government has had only 6,476 renovations done so far, accounting for 11% of the bridges in need of repair.

Government spending for road repair and maintenance works remains unchanged. The Liberal Democratic and Komei parties, winners in the latest general election, are calling for more large public works projects at a projected cost of hundreds of trillions of yen.

Policies pertaining to public works projects should center on the maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure, not on promotion of more large development projects, and should also strengthen the system to inspect and properly maintain the public infrastructure.