As 200 economists said ^[1] in the New York Times, ” More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s.”

And it looks like Times reporters can confirm that ^[2]:

Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.