The Beauty Builders.(Japan aims to restore areas damaged by unchecked construction)

On a recent fall morning, dozens of elderly locals used tongs to pluck garbage from the banks of the Kotoni-Hassamu River in western Sapporo. It is a seasonal ritual and typical of the Japanese approach to nature, which is to keep it wonderfully tidy after paving it over. The waters of the Kotoni-Hassamu flow over and through a maze of concrete riverbed fortifications that have become standard features of the doken kokka, or construction state.

But now there are rumblings of an effort to recover some of Japan's lost nature. One of the tasks on deck for Nobuteru Ishihara, the newly appointed Minister for Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MLIT), is to carry out a beautification plan the ministry calls "Toward the Construction of a Beautiful Nation." Critics wonder how the ministry can possibly "construct" anything beautiful, as it continues to dole out many of the massive public-works contracts that are destroying the environment. On paper, however, the plan looks genuinely green, calling for a new law requiring "landscape assessments" for building projects. It seeks 265.1 billion ($2.4 billion) over five years to bury electric and telephone lines, remove ads around cultural treasures like Kyoto temples and cart away concrete erosion-control tetrapods from oceanfronts like the Ryoutsu-kou coast in Niigata prefecture.

The "quick fix" projects, like removing ugly guardrails from parks and historic sites, are slated to begin this winter. More fundamental changes--zoning for traditional-looking neighborhoods, expanding green spaces in cities, cleaning up nine famous beaches and burying power lines--await Diet approval in 2004. Ishihara already has come down hard on the Japan Highway Public Corp. (another pillar of the construction state) for fiscal mismanagement and possible corruption, fueling optimism that he will support cleaning up the concrete mess.

The beauty scheme marks a rare admission from Tokyo that unchecked construction has hurt the nation. According to the Kyoto Journal, Japan has poured roughly 30 times more concrete per square foot than the United States. But public-works spending has been dropping by about 5 percent per year since 1999. "There is regret about what went wrong in the past," says Kengo Ochi, deputy director of the MLIT division in charge of the beautification plan. "After World War II, the ...