¥30B for Independence

Japan Reconstruction Agency announced that the government of Japan was going to ask local government in devastated Tohoku area with Great East Japan Earthquake to pay for a part of reconstruction efforts starting from FY2016. Although the quota of suffered area will be 1.0% to 3.3% of whole national reconstruction budget, the burden for three prefectures in Tohoku for next five years is amounting to ¥30 billion. It is something like a child abuse ousting from the house. Local governments are helplessly at a loss.

The government brought a concept of balancing. In Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, the local governments in suffered area owed a part of reconstruction budget from the beginning. The policy posed a large amount of debt on the local governments, while their savings for projects kept on shrinking. They are still struggling for improving their budget.

In Tohoku, the national government decided to take all the reconstruction projects in charge. For the reconstruction, it introduced new national income tax for twenty-five years. But, after five years of reconstruction efforts, which has been delayed by inappropriate application of trivial regulation or misuse of budget to the developing projects unrelated to the reconstruction, the national government turned the eye on frustration in other areas of Japan.

One of the three suffered prefecture, Iwate, will have to pay ¥7.3 billion for their reconstruction projects, such as building seawalls against tsunami. “It is not the money we can dig up immediately,” told Governor of Iwate, Tatsuya Tasso. Local Assembly of Miyako, one of the cities in Iwate that seriously devastated by tsunami and lost the people passed a resolution to abolish the decision. The later infrastructure is overhauled, the less people will get back to their hometown. It significantly harms reconstruction of local community.

Prefecture of Fukushima has one hundred and forty-one road reconstruction projects that have been supported by subsidy from national government. Reconstruction Agency is going to demand Fukushima government thirty percent of payment in thirty-one projects. Total amount of Fukushima will be swallen to ¥26 billion. “Mind of national government is apparently different from ours so far,” told Governor of Fukushima, Masao Uchibori.

It is true that the devastated local cities have to be independent on certain point of time. However, it is not the time for it. National government is responsible for the delay of reconstruction. That responsibility is what they are intensively ignoring.