Japan builds great roads, fishing ports, islands and other public-works projects that nobody needs.
In a letter dated February 5, the Japanese government protested toWilliam Baldwin, New York-based editor of Forbes magazine, over an article entitled ''The yakuza's revenge'' that appeared in Forbes' issue of February 8. Wasting all that money has greatly weakened Japan's economy. The letter added for good measure that Japan must give more emphasis to public infrastructure development now, while it still has abundant resources from its high savings rate, ''before the advent of full-fledged aging society. Perhaps in the interest of brevity, Kodama chose to overlook certain other points raised in Forbes, such as the survey finding that 17.5 percent of top executives at the largest 100 construction companies are former government officials. Gyosei, the company that publishes the Japanese-language edition of Forbes, prudently made the decision not to run the article in translation.