First it was the crawl home from the airport through concrete blocks sprawling to every horizon, then came the convoy of nationalists blitzing the neighbourhood from loudspeaker vans. Finally came the evening's news headlines about another minister resigning over some obscure corruption scandal.
But it was when I saw the late night roadworks outside my flat-the hole in the road, the floodlights towering above it, the construction workers with luminous wands waving through the cars-that it truly registered: I was back in Japan.
And I was back just in time to witness the televised sobs of Shohei Nozawa, the president of Yamaichi Securities, as he announced his firm's collapse. Those sobs and the accompanying anxiety about the health of the economy are bad news for my road-or at least for those of us who have to use it and live alongside it. Every time the economy wobbles, the call goes out for more "public works"-which means my road gets dug up again. It is already a patchwork mosaic of tarmac, with scarcely a 20-yard stretch undisturbed-but in Japan, construction is a never-ending story. And for Alex Kerr it has gone on long enough.
The departure of foreigners from Japan does not usually occasion publicity (with the exception of asylum seekers). So why should Kerr's recent departure to Thailand warrant a feature in The Daily Yomiuri? Kerr is not your average gaijin. The Yale- and Oxford-educated American has lived in Japan for 20 years, immersing himself in the traditional culture and acquiring a depth of knowledge-linguistic and sociological-few foreigners ever approach.
Some of this learning is revealed with self-effacement in his The Lost Japan, a series of essays he originally wrote in Japanese for the Japanese. (Most foreigners sound off on the letters pages of the nation's English dailies.) The book has achieved a quiet acclaim: there is little else available which is as authoritative, as eloquent, or as damning of what Kerr calls the country's "cultural meltdown."
"Everywhere you go in Japan," he lamented before his departure, "you come across the same ugly scene. In the city you see big pachinko parlours and tall grey buildings with gaudy signboards. In the countryside, everything is covered with concrete."
It is not hard to see why. This is a country with 510,000 registered construction companies, vying for business in a habitable land mass half that of Britain, while employing nearly 10 per cent of all industrial workers.
The construction ministry secures huge chunks of the national budget to finance its endless supply of public works. The budget for these projects is nearly 10 trillion yen (?50 billion) in the current fiscal year-a quarter of all general government expenditures. According to the New York Times, this is more than the Pentagon's defence budget.
Hence the passion for hosting international expos and sports events. Hiroshima had the Asian Games in 1994; the World Cup has been secured (together with South Korea) for 2002. Osaka was the first city to declare its candidacy for the 2008 Olympics and is planning to construct a "Sports Paradise"-two man-made islands in Osaka Bay to hold a 100,000-seat stadium, a swimming pool and an athletes' village. (Little has been said about what would be done with them afterwards.) And in February Nagano hosts the Winter Olympics: given the acres of alpine forest that have been sacrificed in preparation, the long dispute over the placing of the starting gate for the men's downhill to preserve local plant life is quite bizarre.
Perhaps it was the mania for theme parks which proved the final straw for Kerr-the American movie theme park which opens in Osaka in 1999, or the new Tivoli park in nearby Okayama (a replica of the Danish gardens), or the Gulliver park in the foothills of Mt Fuji with its huge sculpture of Jonathan Swift's hero supine (as if laid low in a gas attack by the Aum Supreme Truth sect on whose former land it is actually built).
The list goes on. And perhaps Kerr finally conceded that although the pen may be mightier than the sword, the words of a cultured foreigner are powerless against the juggernaut of Japanese pork-barrel politics.
Kerr says that he has not lost hope for Japan (a sequel to his book will be out soon); but he is clearly placing his hopes elsewhere. He believes southeast Asia can learn from Japan's mistakes and plans to open a school in Bangkok for traditional Thai arts, before the headlong modernisation of that country leads it onto the Japanese path.
Meanwhile, with constant talk of the "big one" hitting Tokyo, there might actually be some real work for all those construction companies quite soon. My own block of flats undulates at the slightest tremor, rather too often for comfort.
But it seems that the construction ministry cannot wait. We are now promised a new "quake-proof" runway for Tokyo's Haneda airport. There are also plans to build a new capital, although the government has not yet figured out where to put it. In the meantime, there are plenty of roads to be dug, and dug again.
