Deep in the Ibaraki backwaters, far from anything useful and tucked at the end of an orchard-lined B-road, workmen are putting the finishing touches to a beautiful Japanese disaster: an international airport with (almost) no planes.

Pitched ambitiously as “a third hub for Tokyo”, the nearly completed airport may represent one of the twilight lunacies in Japan’s 30-year obsession with public spending.

The country’s addiction has created a public debt mountain worth nearly 190 per cent of GDP and a wasteful network of roads to nowhere, suspension bridges over mountain streams and dozens of “zombie airports”.

As the country’s 99th airport, Ibaraki is nowhere near Tokyo, doomed to make losses from the outset and the passenger projections that were used to justify its construction were almost certainly plucked from thin air. Its opening comes as most regional airports are in the red and more than 70 per cent of domestic routes are being run below their break-even levels of passenger numbers.

But it is unfair, according to Ibaraki airport’s future managers, to describe the £180 million hub (the military provided the runway) as a total failure. Yes, it has no public transport system ready to connect the place with the outside world; yes, Tokyo already has two huge airports with expanding capacity; and, yes, Japan Airlines and All Nippon, the domestic carriers, refuse to touch it with a bargepole.

However, the “open gateway to Asia” will be handling one small aircraft per day. The precious flight — owned by Asiana, the South Korean carrier — will fly in from Seoul and then make the return journey. People might use the daily flight, Land Ministry officials suggest, to fly over and play golf.

The problem, the bureaucrats admit, is that even if all 140 seats on the Asiana flight were filled with golfers on both the inbound and outbound flights every single day of the year, the airport would still be missing its annual passenger number targets by about 700,000. “It is not about meeting a prediction, but about changing ourselves to meet the demands of the new environment,” one official said.

The fear is that the environment may deteriorate fast. Concern is growing among a few bearish observers that Japan’s ageing population and anaemic economy eventually may become incapable of servicing the spectacular debts it has amassed over the years. Even if apocalypse is avoided, one former Cabinet Office official said, the madness of the past three decades of public spending starts to look less amusing and more reprehensible.

Japan’s addiction to public spending has been a long and destructive experiment, some observers say, in one reading of Keynesian economics. Dotting the country with new and wholly unnecessary airports is the equivalent of a government paying people to dig holes and fill them in: it creates construction jobs at first and service jobs later. By effectively forcing Japan Airlines (JAL) to run loss-making routes to these new airports, the hole-digging projects have been unnaturally extended and their redundancy disguised. By grudgingly serving these airports, JAL itself has emerged as the greatest zombie company of them all: it is at death’s door in terms of image and morale and may run out of cash altogether by the end of this month. If it is restructured back to health, routes will be cut and many airports face closure: in the prefectures where the airports provide fake jobs, the protests have already begun.

As Japanese public spending projects go, Ibaraki airport is neither especially expensive nor especially ridiculous — it just happens to come at what is nearing the end of Japan’s patience for this sort of waste. Shizuoka airport, which cost many times more and was built to meet an equally non-existent demand, required an entire mountain to be levelled. The Tokyo Aqualine tunnel — 15km long and costing $1 million per metre to build — was justified on what has since been disclosed as entirely fictitious traffic projections.

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