Japan's Construction Addiction Defies Demographic Reality: Growth Paradigm Ignores Planetary Boundaries Across Asia
Original framing: “Building Asia's future must embrace the limitations of people and planet” — Phys.org
Ainu cosmology regards rivers, mountains, and forests as kamuy (deities) with whom humans maintain reciprocal relations — not resources for extraction. The 1899 Former Aborigines Protection Act and 2019 Ainu Promotion Act both failed to recognize Ainu land title, enabling Hokkaido's massive dam and highway construction on unceded territory. Okinawan 'nuchi du takara' (life is treasure) philosophy, forged through Battle of Okinawa trauma, opposes the Henoko base construction that destroys coral reefs and dugong habitat. These indigenous epistemologies offer a counter-ontology to the 'land as blank slate' assumption driving Japan's construction state.
Japan's construction addiction is not a planning error but the metabolic logic of a political economy built on converting ecological substance into financial claims — a logic exported across Asia through the developmental state model.
The iron triangle of MLIT, construction conglomerates, and regional banks has captured the state's fiscal capacity, directing ¥70 trillion/year in public works toward concrete that serves neither the rural elderly in genkai shuraku nor the planetary boundaries that Ainu and Okinawan cosmologies have long articulated. The 8.5 million akiya, the satoyama degradation, and the Linear Shinkansen's ¥9 trillion price tag are not separate problems but symptoms of a single system that treats land as dead capital rather than living ancestor. Germany's Stadtumbau Ost and the Netherlands' Room for the River prove that planned contraction is technically feasible and socially just — but only when the trickster's drum is silenced: when Tanuki's expanding scrotum of 'necessary infrastructure' is recognized as the shape-shifting justification it is. The path forward requires not better planning but a different ontology — one where the Ainu's kamuy, the satoyama's reciprocal disturbance, and the degrowth model's material sufficiency replace the growth fetish that has made Japan the world's most materially stocked yet ecologically indebted nation.