The Way Things Work

There are four veggie airports already built, and five more under construction. However, as it turns out, flying vegetables costs six to seven times as much as trucking them, and far more labor to load and reload them from trucks to aircraft to larger aircraft and back to trucks. Kasaoka Airfield flies vegetables to Okayama City, only a few dozen kilometers away, even though flying them takes just as long as sending them by road. Boondoggle fever is infectious. It has expanded beyond government into endowed foundations and cultural groups. Even the Red Cross, it seems, is not immune. In March 1997, newspapers revealed that the Japan Red Cross had secretly diverted much of the $10.3 million in earthquake-relief donations that came from Red Cross organizations in twenty-six countries to build a facility called the Hyogo Prefecture Disaster Treatment Center. «This money was collected for victims of the Kobe earthquake,» said Vedron Drakulic, the public-affairs manager of the Australian Red Cross. «We didn't know about other uses.» One could hardly blame the Australians for not understanding the way things work in modern Japan ...»