Tsunami evacuees caught in $30 billion money trap

NO BIDDERS FOR PROJECTS

Other areas have been beset by similar delays. Miyagi, the prefecture that includes Ishinomaki and Sendai, planned to build some 15,000 public housing units by March 2016. In early October it extended that deadline by two years.

After the tsunami, about a third of public works projects in Miyagi failed to attract bidders in the first round as construction companies say they held back for fear the projects would be unprofitable, Miyagi prefecture officials said. That failure rate compares with just 3 percent before the disaster.

To be sure, rebuilding a city like Ishinomaki is a vast logistical undertaking. Parts of the city need to be built from scratch.

A strip of Ishinomaki's shoreline where 6,500 homes once stood has been declared too dangerous to build on. And many local government officials, who would otherwise have played a role in reconstruction, either died in the tsunami or had their homes destroyed and are themselves living in temporary dwellings.

"It's the largest such operation ever attempted in modern Japan," says Kazusue Konoike, a special adviser to Konoike Construction Co., which is building public housing units in the country's northeast. "The construction industry as a whole has several times the amount of work it used to have before the disaster. That's why naturally there is a shortage of workers and machines."

Prior to the earthquake and tsunami there were five buildings with reinforced concrete that were taller than five storeys in Ishinomaki, says Hirotaka Kamata, a sales representative at Endo Kogyo, a construction company working in the city. "Right now the city is building about 20. It's like building something in three years that took 50 post-war years to build."

Kamata says his company is also worried about making long-term investments when it knows the tsunami-fueled building boom will only last a few more years. "The reconstruction budget is huge," he said. "The more money you pump the faster the construction companies will run away. There's no way we can take on any more work."