Typhoon supplementary budgets arrive with big totals and thin schedules. Voters deserve line-item tables that show which crews hit which municipalities before local election petitions close, not another stack of ministry press conferences.
After Typhoon Dujuan, cabinet offices floated a second fiscal 2026 supplementary package focused on Chiba and the Izu chain. Ministers cited “swift restoration,” yet prefectural officials still negotiate crew assignments through faxed spreadsheets. That gap matters because petition windows for unified local elections begin in two weeks, and challengers will ask what concrete work happened before ballots print.
Numbers without calendars mislead
The Ministry of Finance published a headline figure exceeding 400 billion yen without binding dates for fiber splicing teams or water-tank deliveries. When only aggregates are public, incumbents claim credit while contractors sit idle waiting for permits. Opposition lawmakers are right to demand Gantt-style disclosures, even if the charts embarrass slow ministries.
InfoHandle Editorial does not oppose disaster spending; we oppose opacity. Supplementary budgets should attach crew-level calendars scrubbed of security-sensitive details but rich enough for auditors to match invoices. If a line pays for “emergency generators,” publish prefecture-level delivery timestamps.
What good transparency looks like
Hokkaido’s post-earthquake dashboards in 2018 set a usable standard: map layers for road openings, shelter counts, and power restoration updated nightly. Chiba deserves the same after consecutive typhoon hits. Tokyo’s metropolitan government already publishes water outage polygons; national ministries can reuse that API instead of inventing another PDF.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi campaigned on execution. Publishing crew calendars would prove execution without new legislation. It would also reduce fraud: vendors posing as relief contractors prey on households when nobody knows which streets are scheduled for work.
A simple ministerial pledge
Before the Diet reconvenes, each disaster-facing ministry should post a CSV with three columns: municipality, contracted vendor, and earliest crew arrival date. Update it daily until projects complete. If national security redacts a row, mark it redacted with legal citation rather than omitting the town.
Voters are not asking for perfection; they are asking for schedules they can check against what they see outside their windows. Supplementary budgets without those schedules are just expensive press releases.
Opposition governors in Chiba and Shizuoka said they would publish parallel calendars even if Tokyo withholds national rows. That patchwork helps locally but undermines nationwide fairness; a single ministry CSV would settle arguments about who was left off the fax list.