Tokyo Stories

For one politician, exposing his own serial adultery has proved a popularity boost, reports Richard Lloyd Parry. Meanwhile Japan counts the horrendous cost of having hosted the World Cup

Yasuo Tanaka doesn't look much like the man who will save Japan from itself, but then he doesn't look much like a throbbing, pulsating, 24-hour love machine either. At the age of 46, however, and despite his pudgy face, short frame and frog-like eyes, Mr Tanaka is the country's most famous Casanova, who chronicles his amours in a well-known weekly magazine.

"We took a rest at the Park Hyatt hotel," runs a typical column. "The noise must have echoed through the entire floor. Late that night she returned to her husband."

But apart from his priapic achievements, Mr Tanaka is also the country's most interesting politician. After a career as a prize-winning novelist, he was elected two years ago as the governor of Nagano prefecture.

Unlike the remote bureaucrats who came before him, Mr Tanaka has brought to the job the same frank openness that he exhibits in his magazine column. He has moved his desk from the upper reaches of the office to its lobby, where he can be seen by members of the general public, eating his lunchtime sandwiches.

He has travelled around the prefecture to talk to local people, and abolished the closed system of briefings to selected journalists, throwing them open to all. But nothing has caused more upset and admiration than his attitude to the dams.

As a land of mountain rivers, Nagano has profited more than most from the Japanese propensity for building dams. The system works like this: local politicians and bureaucrats identify a site for a dam, along with more or less spurious reasons for building it ("flood control" is the commonest one). The central government grants an enormous cash subsidy for the project, which is distributed among powerful construction companies.

Come election time, the construction companies campaign vigorously on behalf of the politicians, and look forward to the next round of dam-building a few years down the road.

Meanwhile the rivers are reduced to trickles, and the hillsides are scarred by tractor roads and concrete embankments. The cycle of wasteful public spending – on roads, public buildings and bridges, as well as dams – occurs throughout Japan, although Nagano people know more about it than most: their prefecture has a debt of more than £8bn.

So when Mr Tanaka announced a ban on all dam-construction, the whole country cheered – except for the vested interests in Nagano. Last week his prefectural assembly passed a vote of no confidence in him and tomorrow he must decide whether to resign or call new elections – which he would stand a good chance of winning. The signs last week were that he would fight on. He may be damned if he does, but he will certainly be dammed if he doesn't.

It is impossible to live in Tokyo without being conscious of waste – wasted money, wasted resources, wasted energy. This was never more visible than during the World Cup.

Armies of Japanese volunteers were on hand to provide confusing and contradictory advice in a dozen foreign languages. Tens of thousands of police were mobilised to combat the hooligans who never arrived. And epic stadia were built in the middle of rice fields. The whole of France 1998 cost less than £1bn. Japan's half of this year's tournament cost more than £3bn.

The justification for this kind of thing is always the "economic knock-on effects". In other words, the money invested will be offset by the money attracted in spending on hotels, trains, and beer. One always suspected this was nonsense, and so it has proved. Before the tournament, government departments predicted an extra 337,000 visitors; the actual increase was less than one tenth of that. A consumer spending frenzy was meant to generate £17.5bn. All wrong.

The good news, says the government, is that the tournament does not seem to have harmed the economy. But its positive effects were "negligible". The World Cup was thrilling and inspiring, but it was sold on the basis of lies. As a spending exercise it was another colossal waste.