One of the arguments about post-1945 Japanese politics is that except for between 1945 to 1960, it has not been very political. This chapter on the Construction state adheres to this argument. To explain and evaluate how "political" Japanese politics has been, it is important to define what is meant by politics or democratic politics. It can be said that democratic politics has, among others, three crucial components: the people, the governing body, and laws. Politics is the procedure when people's issues and agendas are reflected in the governing body, which, after deliberations and negotiations, answers the people's needs. Laws are ratified to protect people's needs and interests and the conducts of the governing body can be challenged in their degree of conformity to the Constitution. During the deliberation process, a more balanced view of the situation is generated by two contrasting political opinions represented by two political parties in the U.S.

Against this definition of politics, the Japanese state since 1945 has had a significant absence, or near absence, of people's input into it. There has been hardly any grassroots politics, and the Diet members worked with large interest groups in their electoral districts. This situation was caused by the long time dominance of one party of Japanese politics, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), formed with the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party to counter the rising clout of the Socialist Party, in 1955. The Diet, as the forum to debate about and negotiate different agendas, has been under-utilized, and many of the negotiations have taken place outside of the Diet (congress), between Diet members, interest group leaders, and government bureaucrats who drafted the laws for the Diet members. What is brought back to the Diet is the semi-finished or the finished versions of the negotiations, or deals. And passing these deals into law in the Diet becomes a rubber-stamping process, although sometimes the LDP would want to win the support of the small opposition parties in the Diet by modifying their proposals when presented in the Diet. This is made possible because the LDP has mostly been the majority party in the lower and upper houses in the Diet since 1955, and no other party in the Diet is large enough to challenge the negotiated deals of the LDP and prevent them from passing into law through majority vote. There is no supervision of the Diet's behavior by the law. Members of the government may be indicted from time to time, but only on charges of corruption, and not on transgressions of the 1947 Constitution that stipulated democracy as the form of government. That is why many have charged that the Japanese state has been "a-political."

This lack of oppostion has enabled the LDP to construct its own development agenda through negotiations with the interest groups and for Japan as a whole. From 1950s on, relying on MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and the Bank of Japan, the Japanese state focused on developing the heavy industries, in coal, iron and steel, and chemical industries.

The LDP led government also launched a series of very ambitious construction projects, including dams, highways, and most dramatic of all, land-fill projects such as described in Mccormack (pp.25-32) to fill the Inland Sea, the crescent bay between Shikoku Island and Honshu, the largest island of Japan. With half the U.S. population but located in an area smaller than California, with 3/4 of the land mass covered with mountains, it is understandable that Japan is land hungry. But, as McCormack points out, once construction, including dams and land-fills, becomes a state agenda, it takes on a life of its own, and becomes a project of collusion between the LDP Diet members, the construction companies, and the bureaucrats. First, the construction companies work with/bribe the LDP Diet members, the so-called Construction Tribe because they have been in the Diet for a long time and accumulated the expertise of working with construction companies. The Construction Tribe in the Diet then refer these companies' names to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Construction who are responsible for determining how many construction projects the government will undertake each year, and then allocate these projects to a prearranged order of construction companies. For their reference, the Construction Tribe gets the votes from the construction companies, and the bureaucrats, after their retirement from government service, will get the construction companies' votes if they run for an electoral position, or get appointed as heads of the construction companies as a reward. (McCormack, p.37) In this case, construction becomes incidental to the reproduction of power and the distribution of profit.(McCormack, p.33) This structure to some extent is reflected in the U.S. in the close relationship between the U.S. government and some defense industries and the huge contracts the latter receive from the state. But in the U.S. this close cooperation is for the development of American military defense, and the state does not receive "kickbacks" of money from the defense industries. In Japan, the construction companies' price tags are extremely high, allowing lucrative profits and a certain amount of it, between 1-3 per cent, as "kickbacks" or levies to help with the local and elections of the LDP candidates, as many offices, including that of the Prime Minister, often had to be "bought." To be prime minister, which is to be recognized as the leader of the LDP, the candidate had often to bribe the various LDP factions in the Diet.

The large construction projects had initially proceeded from a vision to divide Japan into several industrial centers, each with its hydropower supply through the construction of dams, and the centers would be connected through highways. More space would be created through landfill. Therefore, dams, highways, and landfill became top construction projects. But once dams were put on the priority list, producing electricity became secondary to building them for profit. Indiscriminate building of dams followed, and many dams ceased to produce electricity because they were quickly filled with too much silt. And the damming up of most Japanese rivers has also negatively impacted ecology. Many of the industrial centers as visualized did not materialize. In contrast, the few industrial centers that did happen, such as around Tokyo-Yokohama, and Osaka-Kobe, drew many people from smaller areas to these big cities, further draining the human resources of the small towns, leading to a greater polarization of the big cities and the smaller, regional ones.

This type of indiscriminate construction, although obnoxious and harmful, may not be very obvious if Japan is undergoing rapid development, when the construction of some dams, highways and airports may be of some use. However, Japanese economy slid into a recession in 1993, and the national debt has spiraled. The Japanese banking sector may need 40 to 80 trillion yen to revive (McCormack, 43) but unnecessarily construction continues to consume a large chunk of the government's money. By 1994, the government estimated that it would spend around 600 trillion yen on public works between 1990-2004. In a recent speech (fall, 2003) Prime Minister Koisumi promised to cut down on construction spending. We will see if he is going to put his promise in practice.