However, businesses are losing their strength and becoming increasingly small particularly in provincial areas, and therefore, a decreasing number of businesses are capable of undertaking projects to maintain local communities, such as disaster response, snow removal, and infrastructure operation and maintenance, which are less profitable and require them to secure a certain number of workers and machinery. If this situation continues as is, some communities may have difficulty even in keeping the operation and maintenance of their infrastructures at a minimum level. For this and other reasons, there are cases in which, or there is concern that, the maintenance of local communities is hindered. Most of the local governments are

also concerned about the future of projects to maintain local communities, and in particular, many of them complain that there are already problems with snow removal work in particular. For this reason, the Cabinet revised part of the Guidelines for Measures to Make fair Bidding and Contracts for Public Works at its meeting in August 2011 to introduce community maintenance type contracts as a new method to conclude contracts in order to maintain supporters of community maintenance projects. In November of the same year, it established working rules for the effective use of joint ventures of constructors for community maintenance. MLIT and local governments have started to figure out good ways to maintain supporters of community maintenance projects. One example is to conclude contracts that cover several community maintenance projects or multiple-year ones with joint ventures of companies for some of the projects they implement, if necessary.

Moreover, in March 2012, the Ministry introduced the Reconstruction JV System in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima Prefectures with the aim of maintaining engineers and skilled workers, whose supply is insufficient in stricken areas, in a flexible way from a broader perspective while allowing construction companies in these areas to jointly receive orders for construction with those in other areas and thus contributing to the maintenance of employment.

## 2 Renewed recognition of the importance of redundancy and networks

(Elimination of missing links in expressway networks and improvement of project evaluations)

The Great East Japan Earthquake hit National Road 45 and made it impassable, but the road along the Sanriku Coast, which was partially in service, and other expressways were practically not damaged because they were elevated taking into consideration the tsunami that had stricken the coast before, and even after the earthquake, they played a major role as bypasses for the national road and emergency transport routes. As a result of the seismic retrofitting performed taking the previous earthquakes into account, meanwhile, main trunk roads did not sustain fatal damage and returned to normal early on. Furthermore, as alternatives to expressways on the Pacific side, whose use was limited after the earthquake, the network of trunk roads on the Sea of Japan side served as supplies transport routes. As these examples show, the Ministry recognized anew the important roles expressway networks play when a disaster occurs.

In terms of disaster prevention, however, national roads have problems as exemplified by the fact that the only national road in a community is still liable to be hit by tsunami, easily making the community isolated, and some sectors of the national roads actually remain vulnerable to disaster. MLIT has recognized anew that a road network functions only if all its roads are interconnected and is working to strengthen the road networks mainly by increasing the ability of vulnerable communities to cope with disasters, viewing early establishment of road network functions to protect national land as a top priority task, and striving to eliminate missing links in the expressway network.