Laying out a vision for reconstruction of Japan’s tsunami-devastated north-east coast, a government-appointed council of experts made clear the goal should be much more than merely rebuilding the region’s shattered towns. “It is our most profound wish,” wrote the panel of worthies from academia, regional government and the private sector in June, “that the reconstruction efforts following the disaster will reverberate around Japan, leading to the revival of the entire country.”

Such hopes are easy to understand. The destruction wreaked on communities along hundreds of kilometres of the Pacific seaboard has created that rarest of things in a developed nation: an apparently blank slate, crying out for a new approach.

Few in Japan would argue against the notion that revival is needed. Anaemic economic growth, dysfunctional politics and increasingly unsustainable state debt have contributed to a sense of national malaise, compounded by the failure of safety systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crippled by the tsunami on March 11. In a May interview with the Financial Times, Naoto Kan, prime minister, said the nation had found itself at something of an impasse. “As we overcome the crisis created by this disaster, we must also overcome the preceding crisis, what could be called Japan’s structural crisis,” he said.