Japan Begins Search for a Place in the Country

The Japanese government has been vowing for a decade to move the nation’s capital out of overcrowded, overpriced, earthquake-prone Tokyo--but will it really do so?

The relocation is dismissed as preposterous by most of the political elite here, including lawmakers who voted for it in 1990 and 1992. Nevertheless, the gazillion-yen scheme inched a step closer to reality last week when a blue-ribbon commission named two sites in the Japanese hinterlands as suitable candidates to host the parliament, the prime minister and the central bureaucracy.

One of the sites is directly north of Tokyo in an area spanning Tochigi and Fukushima prefectures, and was rated highly by the commission because of ease of transportation to Tokyo.

The second candidate is west of Tokyo, a section of Gifu and Aichi prefectures that was deemed least likely to be leveled by the earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, floods and other natural disasters that frequently afflict this volcanic archipelago.

The panel conditionally recommended a third region near Japan’s ancient capitals, an area that would include Nara, Kyoto and Shiga prefectures, provided that a new high-speed transportation system is completed there as planned.

Now Parliament must debate the merits of the sites--or decide whether to abandon the move altogether, as the governor of Tokyo and many powerful bureaucrats and politicians would prefer.

“Nobody takes this seriously,” scoffed Keio University policy professor Hideki Kato. “Quite simply, we don’t have the money.”

Estimates of how much the move would cost are plentiful and contradictory. However, the respected Asahi newspaper recently put the figure at $11.9 billion for the new government buildings alone, not including the cost of the infrastructure needed to support the nerve center of the world’s No. 2 economic power.

Japan’s soaring national debt is a growing concern, and Kato, a former Ministry of Finance official, said the capital relocation would require a borrowing spree that could increase the amount of government bonds outstanding from 20% to 30%.

“The line of thinking that this will create public works projects that will stimulate the economy is very inferior,” Kato said. “Japanese society will not become affluent as a result.”

Advocates, however, say the government must get out of Tokyo, whatever the short-term costs.

First, the city is overpopulated and too concentrated, with land prices that remain stratospheric even after a decade-long economic slump. The population of Tokyo itself, now 11.8 million, has increased only 8.8% since 1965--but that’s because few Japanese can afford to move into a city where apartments the size of a Southern California kitchen rent for $2,000 a month.

But the population of the three prefectures surrounding Tokyo has increased 47% since 1965, to form a megalopolis of 31 million people. Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures have been turned into vast, mostly hideous bedroom towns from which millions of commuters travel 90 minutes each way aboard sardine-can trains. Meanwhile, rural Japan is depopulating.

“If the capital is moved, both the business climate and the living environment in Tokyo will improve, and Tokyo will pay more attention to the regions,” said Kazuo Yawata, a former top official at the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the author of a 1987 book, “The Concentration of Tokyo Will Destroy Japan.”

Moreover, advocates say, moving the capital will encourage the political, economic and geographic decentralization that Japan desperately needs.

For example, they say, companies with headquarters outside Tokyo have long been disadvantaged, but the current corporate restructuring and consolidation has made it more essential than ever for firms that seek to be national players to be located in Tokyo, further worsening the crunch.

Moving the bureaucrats out would weaken the cozy business-government ties that are seen as a barrier to structural reform, help level the playing field for Japanese and foreign businesses and shift power from the bureaucracy to the citizenry, Yawata said.

Supporters say decentralization is vital, given expert forecasts that a major earthquake is a near-certainty in the next 25 years.

“If there is one, the damage will be so great that the Japanese economy will shut down and the economic effects will be worldwide,” said Hitoshi Suzuki, a staffer at an industry group in Gifu. “I don’t care if they don’t move here, but they have to be moved.”