But when a giant tsunami hit Japan’s northeast on March 11, the breakwater largely crumpled under the first 30-foot-high wave, leaving Kamaishi defenseless. Waves deflected from the breakwater mbt footwear are also strongly suspected of having contributed to the 60-foot waves that engulfed communities north of it. Its performance that day, coupled with its past failure to spur the growth of new businesses, suggested that the breakwater would be written off as yet another of the white elephant construction projects littering rural Japan. But Tokyo quickly and quietly decided to rebuild it as part of the reconstruction of the tsunami-ravaged zone, at a cost of at least 650 million. After the tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, some Japanese leaders vowed that the disasters would give birth to a new Japan, the way the end of World War II had done. A creative reconstruction of the northeast, where Japan would showcase its leadership in dealing with a rapidly aging and shrinking society, was supposed to lead the way. But as details of the government’s reconstruction spending emerge, signs are growing that Japan has yet to move beyond a postwar model that enriched the country but ultimately left it stagnant for the past two decades. As the story of Kamaishi’s breakwater suggests, the kind of cozy ties between government and industry that contributed to the Fukushima nuclear disaster are driving much of the reconstruction and the fight for a share of the 120 billion budget expected to be approved in a few weeks. The insistence on rebuilding breakwaters and sea walls reflects a recovery plan out of step with the times, critics say, a waste of money that aims to protect an area of rapidly declining population with technology that is a proven failure. Defenders say that if Kamaishi’s breakwater is not fixed, people and businesses will move away even faster for fear of another tsunami. “There may be an argument against building a breakwater in a place with little potential to grow, but we’re not building a new one — we’re basically repairing it,” said Akihiro Murakami, 57, the top official in Kamaishi for the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, which oversees the nation’s breakwaters. “At this point, it’s the most efficient and cost-effective choice.” After World War II, Japan built a line of coastal defenses that was longer than China’s Great Wall and ultimately stretched to a third of the Japanese coastline. The defenses allowed more Japanese, whose numbers rose to 125 million from 72 million in the five decades after 1945, to live and work hard by the sea. Yet, even before the tsunami, the affected zone’s population was expected to age and shrink even faster than the rest of Japan’s, contracting by nearly half over the next three decades. Critics say that in cities like Kamaishi, where the population dropped from 100,000 people four decades ago to fewer than 40,000 before the tsunami, people should simply be moved away from the ravaged coast. Japan’s dwindling resources would be better spent merging destroyed communities into inland “compact towns” offering centralized services, critics say. Unnecessary public works — Kamaishi’s reconstruction plans include building a rugby stadium — would merely hasten the tsunami zone’s decline by saddling it with high maintenance costs. “In 30 years,” said Naoki Hayashi, a researcher at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, one of Japan’s biggest policy groups, “there might be nothing left there but fancy breakwaters and empty houses.” A Web of Collusion Even though the breakwater yielded economic benefits only to the vested interests that have a grip on the construction of Japan’s breakwaters, sea walls and ports, advocates of its reconstruction say it is vital to Kamaishi’s future. In addition to protecting the city against mbt tsunamis, the breakwater was intended to create a modern international port that would accommodate container vessels and draw new companies here. The birthplace of Japan’s modern steel industry, Kamaishi lived through economic booms for nearly a century, but by the early 1970s its major employer, Nippon Steel, was moving steel production to central Japan, where the flourishing auto industry was concentrated.