Will “Zombie” Airport End Japans Public Spending Obsession?
Posted by Neil Payne on November 12th, 2009Deep in the Ibaraki backwaters, far from anything useful and tucked at the end of an orchard-lined B-road, workmen are putting the finishing touches to a beautiful Japanese disaster: an international airport with (almost) no planes.
Pitched ambitiously as “a third hub for Tokyo”, the nearly completed airport may represent one of the twilight lunacies in Japan’s 30-year obsession with public spending.
The country’s addiction has created a public debt mountain worth nearly 190 per cent of GDP and a wasteful network of roads to nowhere, suspension bridges over mountain streams and dozens of “zombie airports”.
Tokyo's New Third Hub Is 80km away!
As the country’s 99th airport, Ibaraki is nowhere near Tokyo, doomed to make losses from the outset and the passenger projections that were used to justify its construction were almost certainly plucked from thin air. Its opening comes as most regional airports are in the red and more than 70 per cent of domestic routes are being run below their break-even levels of passenger numbers.
But it is unfair, according to Ibaraki airport’s future managers, to describe the £180 million hub (the military provided the runway) as a total failure. Yes, it has no public transport system ready to connect the place with the outside world; yes, Tokyo already has two huge airports with expanding capacity; and, yes, Japan Airlines and All Nippon, the domestic carriers, refuse to touch it with a bargepole.
However, the “open gateway to Asia” will be handling one small aircraft per day. The precious flight — owned by Asiana, the South Korean carrier — will fly in from Seoul and then make the return journey. People might use the daily flight, Land Ministry officials suggest, to fly over and play golf.
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