Within a block of one another, three public works projects gummed up traffic one day last week. Workmen upgraded a gas line, installed a new water main and replaced sand in a public playground.
It was part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's crash program to triple the number of public works projects in the city, create thousands of jobs and fight back against a global recession that is punishing export-dependent Japan more severely than any other major industrialized country.
Japan's economy, the second-largest in the world, is shrinking at the fastest pace in more than 30 years, roughly twice as fast as the U.S. economy. Exports and imports declined in February at a record rate, with monthly sales to the United States down nearly 60 percent compared with last year.
Tokyo, by far the largest and richest city in Japan, is giving itself public-works medicine for these global trade ills. It is deploying legions of men and women with flags and hard hats to repave streets, repaint crosswalks and fix broken clocks in city parks. Potholes, cracked sidewalks and peeling paint -- never that common in this immaculately maintained city -- have all but disappeared from public spaces.
Now, a heated political argument is erupting across Japan over whether the entire country should follow Tokyo's lead and pour taxpayer money into major public works. The Obama administration, it has been noted here, has embraced this idea as a way to kick-start the U.S. economy, spending hundreds of billions on roads, broadband and other infrastructure projects.
The dilemma for Japan is that it has already been there and done that -- in spades and not so long ago.
In the 1990s, during the "Lost Decade" that followed the bursting of a real estate bubble, Japan's government spent more than $2 trillion on public works. In so doing, it dug itself the deepest public-debt hole in the history of the developed world, totaling more than 175 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
All the spending has made Japan's infrastructure the envy of the world. It has a public transportation system that is unrivaled for convenience and ubiquity. Its fiber-optic broadband infrastructure enables the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else.
Going too far?
But many critics say the government has gone too far, outfitting itself with more dams, bridges, highways, museums and airports than it will ever use. Japan has the oldest population in the world and the lowest proportion of children.
"Our infrastructure is impeccable," said Takayoshi Igarashi, a professor of politics at Hosei University and an expert on public works spending. "More public works would be surplus to real need. It would not stimulate anything but the construction industry."
Still, Prime Minister Taro Aso and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) seem to favor another big round of spending on public works. Aso has said that these projects, including building roads, burying telephone wires and thinning forests, have been neglected and will produce much-needed jobs.
One of Aso's economic advisers, Richard C. Koo, who is also chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute, says that as Japan sinks into what seems certain to be its worst recession since World War II, nothing can produce more economic benefits more quickly than massive government spending on public works.
"You can bash public works all you want, but in this type of recession, where companies and individuals have stopped spending, government expenditures become absolutely essential," he said. "We need speed more than anything in responding to this crisis."
Koo said that while public works spending in the 1990s saddled the government with an onerous debt, it also prevented the economy from slipping into a depression, despite an 80 percent collapse in asset prices after the bubble burst.
"Our unemployment rate never went above 5.5 percent," Koo said. "Public works was an extremely effective fiscal stimulus, even though a few projects were really stupid."
There is, however, much more than mere economics involved in Japan's squabble over more public works.
The LDP, which has governed as a virtual one-party state for nearly half a century, owes much of its power and longevity to decades of generous government spending on infrastructure built outside Tokyo.
Money, jobs, roads and countless numbers of large concrete structures delighted rural voters, while encouraging construction companies to funnel political donations, some of them illegal, to ruling-party politicians, some of whom were convicted of corruption.
The LDP, over the years, designed a government bureaucracy that quietly awarded public works contracts to politically favored construction companies, according to Igarashi, the professor at Hosei University. He also said bureaucrats, when they retired from public service, made a habit of accepting lucrative jobs at construction firms that prospered from government contracts.
In 2001, a charismatic politician with a big-city power base, Junichiro Koizumi, took control of the ruling party. As prime minister until 2006, he cut spending on public works.
In the process, though, the ruling party's popularity in rural areas declined.
The law requires a national election this year, and both the ruling party and the prime minister appear to be in deep trouble with voters. Nine out of 10 voters disapprove of Aso, according to recent opinion polls.
Fight for rural hearts and minds
A massive increase in public works spending, however, could win hearts and minds in rural areas.
The opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which leads the LDP in most polls, has shown little interest in public works spending. It has an official policy of not accepting campaign money from the construction industry.
But public works and the dirty money it tends to draw from construction companies has now sullied the Democratic Party and the prime ministerial prospects of its leader, Ichiro Ozawa.
His chief aide was indicted last week for allegedly accepting money from a construction company and then falsifying where it came from. The money went to Ozawa's political fundraising organization and was donated over several years in an apparent attempt by the company to secure public works contracts in his political stronghold.
Parliament is expected to pass a large stimulus package before the national election is held. It is not yet clear how much money it will choose to spend on public works.
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
