ABSTRACT
In order to satisfy people's many needs—for food, shelter, work, recreation, and so on—the capacity to produce goods has to be expanded; that is what modernization is about, and Japan has been outstandingly successful at it. The system of doken kokka ensured that competition would be avoided, and so costs were regularly forced up. Cossetted against the operations of the market, the construction industry grew from around 80,000 companies in 1960 to 500,000 by 1985. Though the dams were the central achievement of the postwar doken kokka, and the major contributing factor to the huge national debt, most were useless, possessing a steadily shrinking capacity to serve the purposes of water conservation and regulation for which they were built. The construction of a twenty-four-hour airport was a central element in the plan to usurp Tokyo (and its notoriously inconvenient airport at Narita) as hub of the national and regional economy.
