Crisis in Japan / Japan Faces Shrinking Construction Workforce as Govt Expands ¥20 Tril. Infrastructure Plan

The Yomiuri Shimbun

7:00 JST, March 27, 2026

This is the third and last article in a series on the critical situation surrounding Japan’s aging infrastructure networks.

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“Please let us carry out this investment, without fail, to protect our lives and the lives of those who will live in the future.”

On Feb. 7, the final day of campaigning for the House of Representatives election, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi took the microphone in Tokyo’s Asagaya district and, while promoting her signature policy of “responsible and proactive public finances,” called for stepped-up efforts in disaster prevention and mitigation.

In last autumn’s Liberal Democratic Party presidential race, Takaichi pledged to strengthen national resilience by using cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence. In her policy speech at an extraordinary session of the Diet, she went further, describing it as “the highest-priority issue that the nation must address.”

The policy underpinning that effort is the government’s basic directive, the Mid-term Plan for the Implementation of National Resilience, which calls for public and private sectors to spend a combined amount of more than ¥20 trillion over the five years beginning in fiscal 2026 to develop disaster-resilient infrastructure. The plan sets annual targets, including completing the replacement by 2030 of large-scale sewer pipes that have been in service for more than 30 years and face elevated risks of damage.

The collapse of ceiling panels inside the Sasago Tunnel on the Chuo Expressway in Yamanashi Prefecture, which killed nine people, prompted the government to designate 2013 as the “first year of social infrastructure maintenance.”

Since then, the government has required managers, including at local governments, to conduct visual inspections of bridges and tunnels once every five years. But while infrastructure has continued to deteriorate year by year, securing enough engineers has emerged as a challenge because of the shrinking working-age population associated with aging demographics. According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the number of workers in the construction industry stood at 4.78 million in 2025, down 30% from the peak of 6.85 million in 1997.

Against this backdrop, the National Institute of Technology, Maizuru College in Kyoto Prefecture established its Infrastructure Maintenance Educational Center in 2014 under the slogan “Protect local infrastructure locally.”

The college holds training sessions for students, municipal employees and corporate engineers. On Jan. 24, senior officials from the ministry’s Kinki Regional Development Bureau instructed eight technical college students on how to inspect bridges and roads. “I want to work in bridge maintenance,” said Yuki Watanabe, who attended the session.

Local governments, particularly in regional areas, are also growing more alarmed. Since fiscal 2019, Iwate prefectural government has worked with prefectural high schools to inspect bridges managed by the prefectural government. By fiscal 2024, a total of 144 students from five schools had taken part, and some later found jobs in the construction industry. Even so, 40% of the roads and bridges in the prefecture are already more than 50 years old, and that share is expected to double to 80% in 20 years. “If the population keeps declining at this pace, we could face a serious shortage of engineers,” a prefectural official said.

With national and local governments facing limits on both budgets and manpower, preventive maintenance has become indispensable to countermeasures against aging infrastructure.

Tenchijin, Inc., a Tokyo start-up backed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, began a business in fiscal 2023 that predicts the risk of water-pipe leaks by combining satellite data, including ground-surface temperature and shifts in the earth, with more than 100 other types of information, including water-pipe data held by local governments.

Using map data color-coded by risk level, local governments and others can inspect the most urgent areas first and do so more efficiently. In some cases, the number of leak locations found per 10 kilometers of water pipe increased sixfold, while costs were cut by nearly 80%. Norito Higuchi, an executive officer at the company, said, “It is necessary to build support systems that allow local governments to make full use of advanced technologies.”

Last year, the company also launched a demonstration project in partnership with Aisin Corp., a major auto-parts manufacturer in Aichi Prefecture, and the city of Iwata in Shizuoka Prefecture. The project analyzes information gathered by vehicle-mounted cameras, such as cracks in road surfaces, together with deterioration in water pipes buried beneath those roads. The approach is known as “regional infrastructure group regeneration strategic management,” a method for managing multiple types of infrastructure more efficiently. What is being tested now is whether cutting-edge technology, together with the combined ingenuity of industry, government and academia, can maximize the returns on such investment.