Introduction
Nuclear power plants, dams, and airports cover the Japanese landscape as visible
reminders of dokken kokka, or the “construction state.” Millions of tons of concrete and steel
hem in river beds and direct their flow so that no river flows unimpeded into the ocean. Despite
the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 50 nuclear power plants dot the coastline
producing more than one-third of Japan’s energy. Notwithstanding one of the highest urban
population densities in the world, more than 90 airports, some sinking perceptibly into landfill
offshore, deliver people and goods through a government-supported transportation network.
These controversial, and often hazardous, facilities did not spring up over night, nor can their
proliferation be explained simply by reference to a passive political culture.
This paper presents an institutional approach to controversial facility siting. The
Japanese government, concerned about citizen opposition to its national energy and
transportation plans, intuited and developed a variety of strategies and policy instruments to
modify citizen preferences. Recent studies underscore the importance of the ways in which
political elites shape public opinion and citizen preferences (Nordlinger 1981, McAvoy 1999,
Jacobs & Shapiro 2000) and govern restive citizens (Garon 1997, Nakamura 2002). Many
political scientists continue to view state response to contestation in terms of the standard models
of immobilism, incrementalism, or punctuated equilibria.
Under the immobilist view of states, when confronted with opposition to their policies,
central governments in effect respond with the same strategies, if they respond at all (Kitchselt
1986). Incrementalism, perhaps the oldest and best known approach to state response, is the
“method of social action that takes existing reality as an alternative and compares the probable
gains and losses of closely related alternatives by making relatively small adjustments in existing
reality” (Dahl & Lindblom 1953: 82). Incrementalism involves small, step-like alterations in
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Convention