Whatever trouble there is in your life at the moment, whatever stresses, trials, tribulations, or nuisances you have, you can always be glad you aren’t the LDP’s Tsutomu Takebe, a Diet member from Hokkaido. You see, in addition to all of his other responsibilities, poor Mr. Takebe seems to have been saddled with the task of keeping young Taizo Sugimura of Chiba in line.

If you’re not familiar with Taizo Sugimura, you should be - visionaries like him come but once in a　generation. Even in a party stocked with talent to rival his in a legislative body with a few potential challengers to his throne, Taizo Sugimura stands out. This young man, who made it into the Diet in the snap election of September 2005, when the LDP’s success was so deep as to propel even the lower reaches of the proportional representation list to Nagatacho, started his political career with a bang. He went on television and expressed his glee at his new position. He would, he crowed, be able to ride any train for free, in the Green Car no less, get a sweet Diet member’s apartment, and, best of all, be paid so handsomely that he’d be able to go out and buy a BMW at the tender age of 26. Even if many politicians are so selfish, you might wonder how one so demonstrably lacking in, well, political ability could make it into the upper reaches of the political world so quickly. Pity the LDP (there aren’t many reasons to), they were the victims of their own success. Pity Tsutomu Takebe even more. It was to him that the task of chastising Sugimura fell.

You might think Sugimura has learned his lesson. Well, he kept relatively quiet, but, on television today, Sugimura put all doubts to rest: he is, quite possibly, the most inept politician to have ever served anywhere in the world.

His plan? To reward Takebe by running from Hokkaido in the next election. His platform consisted of two proposals only a very special visionary like him could devise. To help cash-strapped Hokkaido, he wants to:
1. Bring a major sumo tournament to Hokkaido, which currently only gets the rikishi on tour, thus creating the Hokkaido Bashou,
and
2. Build a rail link between the Trans-Siberian Railroad and Hokkaido.

Neither of these ideas will address Hokkaido’s pressing problems, viz. that over 70% of Hokkaido’s municipalities are losing population, the highest rate in Japan, and that Hokkaido is short of funds. Luckily, Mr. Takebe quickly shot down Sugimura’s plan to run from Hokkaido and, one hopes, had a few choice words for the lad in private. (One would think the LDP would have an order out prohibiting Sugimura from opening his mouth in public by now.)

Now, the first idea is less-than-bright only because it’s not all that likely to really help Hokkaido, which could use some financial help in many of its towns and villages, and is likely to be expensive. It’s the kind of thing someone with no ideas thinks is going to help. The second. . .

Checking my handy Global Mapple atlas, I see that the point of Hokkaido closest to Siberia proper is little Rebunto (礼文島), an island in Rishiri-Rebun-Sarobetsu National Park (利尻礼文サロベツ国立公園), due west of Wakkanai, Japan’s northernmost city. Rebunto has one town, if you’re being generous, Rebun-cho (礼文町), which has a population of about 3,500. The entire Souya subprefecture, which includes almost all of Hokkaido’s Northern peninsula, is home to only 77,500 people.

Rebunto is slightly southeast of the village of Ust’-Sobolevka, which doesn’t even have power at all times. The distance between these two villages is approximately 250km, with no land at all in between.

We could give Sugimura a break and assume he meant Sakhalin, which is technically part of Siberia, and makes more sense as, with 546,695 inhabitants according to the 2002 census, it is vastly more populous than the mainland regions of Primorskij near Japan and is a lot closer than Ust’-Sobolevka. However, he said Trans-Siberian Railroad (シベリア鉄道), which means he has to get to Primorskij, and ultimately on to Vladivostok or Ussurijsk, the Eastern termini of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Vladivostok, the closer of the two, is about 620km from Okushiri-to (奥尻島), an island off the Southwestern coast of Hokkaido, and most of that distance is water.

In short, Sugimura is proposing, at a minimum, a tunnel nearly five times the length of the current longest tunnel, which would run between two sparsely-populated areas and possibly through a national park. Or a bridge nearly 126 times the length of the current longest suspension bridge span.

Or he could be proposing a tunnel to Okushiri-to, which would challenge the current record if not break it, then a tunnel nearly nine times as long as the current record holder, to go more directly between relatively more populated areas of Hokkaido and Primorskij.

Any way you slice it, not a feasible undertaking for a country facing crushing budget obligations or a prefecture hurting for cash.

As a little thought exercise, what about a link between Sakhalin and Hokkaido?

The Tunnel Scenario

There is an idea out there for this - a section of the proposed Trans Global Highway. The distance is achievable. Hokkaido is already on one end of the world’s longest tunnel, the 53.85km Seikan Tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait. While an actual tunnel between between the area around Omisaki (大岬) and the Kril’on area would likely be longer, the shortest distance is about 38.46km.

The trouble is that the Seikan Tunnel was done between Japan and provides a rail link, ultimately between Sapporo, one of Japan’s larger cities, and Honshu. There’s a solid reason for it. There is no such compelling reason for a heavily indebted government to build a very expensive tunnel between two sparsely populated areas that primarily engage in fishing anyway. Frank Didik, the author of the Trans-Global Highway proposal, puts the cost of the construction of such a tunnel at US$4.2 billion and estimates it would take nine years. Seeing what Japan has actually paid for previous large construction porjects, we could expect the actual cost to be much higher, with a fair bit of it flying around as graft. So what’s the point? (Or was that Sugimura’s plan with the above, more ambitious proposal? He’s already made it clear that he’s in the Diet for the easy money and the perks. [And the LDP has made it almost as clear that they don’t see particular problem with this.])

The Bridge Scenario (just to consider it)

The problem is engineering. The longest bridge in the world at the moment is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway near New Orleans, which is 38.42km long and has no span longer than 45.7m. The longest span in the world is the 1,991m central span of the Akashi-Kaikyo Great Bridge between Kobe and Awaji-shima. A bridge between Omisaki (大岬) and Kril’on would need a span or series of spans to cover a total length of about 38.46km, making it the longest bridge in the world, 17 times as long as the current longest suspension bridge, and in an environment where, due to winds and low temperatures, building such a bridge would be an engineering feat to say the least.

A Note on Shasetsu

For the time being and the forseeable future, Shasetsu will no longer be an audio program. We like doing the audio, we just had to make a few decisions about what we could realistically continue to do. We realized that there were a lot of good topics on which we weren’t writing and a lot of developments we weren’t covering because we were too worried about finding the time to record, edit, and produce podcasts on them. Our regular audio series will remain the same, this change affects only Shasetsu. Our apologies to anyone who can’t get enough of our dulcet tones from TPR News, Seijigiri, BizCast Japan, and TPR Spotlight.