WHEN a huge emergency budget was enacted in June 2011, a few months after Japan's triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, at the last minute a line was jotted in, saying that the funds were not just for reconstruction. They were to "revitalise Japan".

Unsurprisingly in the context of Japanese politics, that tiny sentence opened the floodgates to a river of pork-barrel spending. A recent government audit has shown that about a quarter of the $150 billion-odd that has been budgeted for the emergency has gone to projects that seem to have little to do with rebuilding the north-eastern coastline, where more than 300,000 people still live in temporary accommodation. Economic "revitalisation", it seems, has run the gamut from bolstering supply chains (sensible) to promoting nuclear-power research (insensitive under the circumstances) to protecting whalers from hostile environmentalists (downright ludicrous).

Cue outrage from politicians of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who claim the government has used the disaster funds to promote its own interests. Even though, reportedly, it was the LDP who demanded the revitalisation clause be inserted in the first place. Cue a belated pledge by the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, to "wring out" the more egregious misspending, and cue too apologies to the people in the disaster areas.