Krugman used to discuss this quite a bit,

The other reason that Japan does not look like a country in the midst of a depression is that the government has found a concrete solution to the problem of mass unemployment. By ''concrete,'' I don't mean serious, hardheaded, substantial. I mean concrete, as in roads, dams and bridges.

Think of it as the W.P.A. on steroids. Over the past decade Japan has used enormous public works projects as a way to create jobs and pump money into the economy. The statistics are awesome. In 1996 Japan's public works spending, as a share of G.D.P., was more than four times that of the United States. Japan poured as much concrete as we did, though it has a little less than half our population and 4 percent of our land area. One Japanese worker in 10 was employed in the construction industry, far more than in other advanced countries.

Without those public works programs, things might have been much worse. For there is no question that enormous public spending has helped keep the economy from sliding into a true, unambiguous depression. As one Japan expert, Adam Posen of the Institute for International Economics, points out, the record of the 1990's is unmistakable. Every time the government tries to scale back its spending, as it did under Prime Minster Ryutaro Hashimoto back in 1997, the economy goes into a recession. Every time the government goes back to its free-spending ways, as it did after Hashimoto resigned in disgrace, the economy perks up a bit.

Now for the bad news: deficit spending has slowed the Japanese economy's slide, but it has not reversed it. That is, the public works programs provide only temporary, symptomatic economic relief. The favorable effects last only as long as the spending itself. They don't seem to lay the basis for a permanent turnaround.

And meanwhile, though Japan has thus far avoided mass unemployment, its policy of massive public works spending has produced many nasty side effects. One is the vast environmental damage that has been inflicted in the name of job creation. Another is pervasive corruption, as rakeoffs and kickbacks have become a way of life, distorting the whole economic and political system.

Furthermore, a decade of huge deficit spending has left Japan with an enormous public debt. Japan last ran a budget surplus in 1992. In that year, the nation's public debt was about 60 percent of G.D.P., about the average for advanced countries and slightly less than the figure for the United States. The years of deficit spending since then have pushed Japan's debt above 130 percent of G.D.P. That's the highest ratio among advanced nations, considerably worse than either Belgium or Italy, the traditional champions. It's almost twice the advanced-country average and 2.5 times the figure for the United States.

but here's someone else's article from 2008:

Here at The Daily Reckoning we’ve never met a tax cut we didn’t like. But we smell sushi. No country ever tried as much fiscal stimulus as Japan. After cutting rates down to “effectively zero,” the Japanese embarked on the biggest program of unnecessary government spending in history. With no military to waste money, it had to turn to public works. New highways to nowhere…new bridges… new rail lines, by the late ’90s, the little island of Japan was pouring more concrete than all the fifty states. It was very stimulating to cement sellers. But as to the economy…it did nothing. Here we are, 18 years later…and the Nikkei index is still down by two thirds.

Interestingly, on the way I ran across this from Financial Times:

Any discussion has to start with China, which poured more concrete between 2010 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th century. A reading of the recent history of investment-driven economies — whether in Japan before the oil shock of the 1970s and 1980s or the Asian tigers in the late 1990s — tells us that growth does not fall off gently.

A board manufacturer in Europe was telling me the need to go to China for what he produces is fading - automation removes Chinese advantages, and the long distances and poor communications complicate things. Is a shift nearing for Asian production?