The business people in Japan said that the Japanese government should do more to improve infrastructures in Japan. (Image via World Atlas)

Companies urge the Japanese government to improve infrastructure after Hagibis

In a survey conducted by Reuters, three-quarters of Japanese companies have been suffering from the series of unfortunate events befalling Japan in the past two years. In recent months, Japan was struck by strings of typhoons with Hagibis being the worst.

The survey was conducted by Nikkei Asian Review for Reuters from 24 October to 1 November. It involved 503 big and mid-size non-financial companies. Almost half of these companies responded to the survey as long as their names are anonymous.

They saw their office buildings get wrecked by natural disasters. Most of them (62 percent) said that the effects only lasted for at least a week; yet, a handful of them (32 percent) said that the effect could last more than a month. Not to mention, Japan is occasionally visited by earthquakes due to being located along the “Ring of Fire”.

When asked about the solution, these companies said that they want the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, to allocate more budget to strengthen Japan’s infrastructure. For 57 percent of business people, the budget allocated by Abe for ¥60 billion “natural resilience” in three years is still insufficient.

Some 74% of the 503 companies said that most of Japan’s infrastructures were built during 1960 – 1970. Therefore, it is already obsolete and restoration is desperately required.

As the Hagibis and Faxai caused rivers to overflows and broke levees, these companies said that works for preventing floods will be essential. How? They demanded the Japanese government to revitalize older infrastructures such as bridges and levees.

Nonetheless, these companies admitted that they did not have any mitigation plans for natural disasters. Only one-third of the 503 companies said that they considered diversifying bases to alleviate drawbacks due to the disasters.

Source: https://bit.ly/2p9vvOU