He was soon able to match five of the seven images with reality. They were all from the East Wing construction site, so it was impossible to claim that the images were wholly unrelated to the tweets…but it was also almost certain that none of the claims from those posts were true. Mitsuhiro still felt uncomfortable about it—perhaps even a little angry now—and that was likely why he was getting thirsty.
Before he tried to track down the remaining two images, he sat down on a pile of construction materials and started on the breakfast he had brought along. Eating here in the dark underground with nothing but his headlamp to guide him ensured the experience was completely unappetizing. He couldn’t have purchased that sandwich too long ago, but it was weirdly dried up. He washed it down with some tea as he looked at the five images he’d taken with his tablet.
The first “construction error” one, he realized, was referring to the piles—the steel and concrete driven into the ground to support the structure of the building. It turned out the ground layer supporting the building ran deeper than expected, so the piles didn’t reach fully into them. However, after checking the progress report he had saved on his tablet, Mitsuhiro found that crews had already completed work to embed the tips of the piles more than a meter into the supporting ground.
—Some “construction error.”
He wanted to shout at whoever had sent this tweet. All it took was a little extra low-risk construction work to address it. Still, the malice behind this tweet was far more serious than he had first imagined. After all, it was these piles that were causing the most concern for his boss and the management at large.
The whole thing started with the Park City condo complex project that started in 2005. It was completed in two years, and then in 2014, seven years later, some of the handrails in the corridors of one building began separating from the walls. The following year—in other words, February of this year—the main contractor examined the frame of the building and found that while it was generally sound, the western block had sunk by two centimeters across all the floors.
They conducted a drilling survey to determine the cause, and it confirmed that some of the piles below the building didn’t reach down to the ground layer meant to support them. Out of the fifty-two piles put in place, eight either didn’t reach the supporting layer at all or failed to be rooted at least one meter in. One pile also had an incomplete cement footing. These should have been the underground pillars supporting the building; instead, they were just floating around freely in the earth.
To make matters worse, subsequent investigation revealed that the ammeter data used to confirm the reach into the supporting ground layers had been doctored. There were four apartment buildings in total and a total of 473 piles supporting them, but the data for a staggering 70 of them had been tampered with.
Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism took this very seriously, ordering an investigation to search for any other falsified data. They found a total of 360 cases, over 10 percent of the 3,000 or so projects they surveyed, and the repercussions quickly spread nationwide. The problem wasn’t just with the ready-made concrete-pile industry—even large firms were found to have faked their data, leading to further distrust. The number of investigations was likely going to reach 20,000 nationwide by the end of the year, and now everyone was associating pile construction with at least some degree of data fudging.
All the piles in this Shibuya redevelopment project were being closely monitored, the data being double- and triple-checked to ensure nobody was making up any numbers. It was causing the schedule to gradually slip, and the burden of the work was building up like a set of body blows.
In essence, these tweets could be the work of someone with ties to the industry who was pinpointing this project in particular in order to shift the blame. It was IR’s job to quickly confirm that these accusations had no basis in reality and prepare materials to counter the tweets.
Mitsuhiro had repeatedly compared the images of the five sites he had already checked on with the pictures from the tweets.
Just being there makes you sick
The image from that tweet was taken in one corner of the worksite on the second basement floor, but there was nothing wrong to be seen anywhere.
Something absolutely harmful coming out
This was a picture of a wall from the same second-floor site. The toxic-gas detection system was functioning normally; the only thing Mitsuhiro could find was the slight smell of sewage. That could be due to the diversion work on the underground culvert, or it might be from the large water tank being built underneath the station’s east exit to drain water during heavy rain events.
The wall after the fire
Another fire here
These were taken from the foundation space adjacent to the water tank. One site report stated that some of the lighting cables shorted out due to the extreme dryness, leading to a small fire. The smell of burning metal in this underground space couldn’t have been pleasant, but as far as Mitsuhiro could tell, there were no longer any signs a fire had taken place.
This, too, felt like a pointed attack, and not like the one aimed at the piles. It targeted the site’s lack of manpower—not just a seller’s market for workers, but a tremendously serious shortage. The birthrate was declining, the population was aging, and the younger generation that should have been inheriting the skills of their blue-collar elders were avoiding the construction industry entirely. Unless they welcomed in a large number of foreign workers, large-scale construction like this would become all but impossible in much of the country.
That problem was compounded by the sudden demand for construction following the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, several major redevelopment projects launching at the same time, and then the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, first announced in 2013. All this reconstruction, redevelopment, and revitalized tourism were good things, but the Olympics demand in particular had only exacerbated the worker shortage.
This was supposed to be a year of recovery for Japan’s construction industry. A lot of the major construction contractors had seen a downward trend in their financials, but they were all doing much better now, and by June, every firm was seeing significant profit increases over the previous year. Construction investment, also on the decline, was showing signs of its own recovery. Fears of a labor shortage could easily bring about another downturn; without enough workers, projects across Japan would grind to a halt. Costs would exceed profits everywhere, and the industry as a whole would fall off precipitously.
Amid all of this, the Shibuya Station redevelopment was now something that the Shimaoka Group, its related firms, and the local landowners couldn’t back out of.
The underlying cause of this was in the gradual aging of this station’s travelers and commuters, along with a new direct line making it possible to get between Yokohama and Ikebukuro Stations in less than an hour.
The impact was clearly seen in the sales of the department store connected to the Shibuya Station building, its shelves lined with products aimed at the local elderly population. Families who used to be frequent visitors quickly dropped out of sight. The nature of the customer base had taken a turn for the worse as well, with people bringing a Mardi Gras–type atmosphere to the streets of Shibuya for things like Halloween and live showings of World Cup games. The police did their best, but there’d been broken shutters and signs, along with trash-lined streets. The “fashion capital” image of Shibuya was taking a serious hit, and the neighborhood as a whole was losing its appeal.
At this rate, people thought, Shibuya would become nothing but a stopping point on the way to somewhere else. It was seen as a crisis, and it brought people with often conflicting interests together to create a redevelopment project on a scale and time frame like nothing seen before. The rise in job openings this presented would normally be welcome, but the reality was that chronic worker shortages were now the norm at all construction sites. Staff weren’t willing to put up with poor working conditions and low wages—and even if a site was free of problems, bad rumors like these were still enough to keep people from applying.
—Is someone in the industry trying to sabotage this site?
That greatly expanded the suspect list—rival firms, subcontractors with a grudge, even factional strife within their own group. In a case like this, you could be caught off guard at any moment.
—I can’t make the call by myself.
Mitsuhiro tried to keep himself from getting all gloomy about it. He’d find the two remaining locations, ask Takenaka to make a decision, and the real work would come after that. He put the sandwich wrapper in a plastic bag, rolled it up, and tossed it into the bag he had slung over his shoulder.
—It sure is dry, though.
He sipped his bottle of tea. It was probably the least refreshing breakfast he’d ever had the misfortune to endure. He thought about putting the bottle back in his bag, but he was thirsty, so he took another sip, and then another. Now there was only a third of the bottle left.