NAGANO — Walking the streets of Nagano, it is difficult to ignore the obvious halts in development.
There may be a shiny new building with fancy restaurants and clothing shops, but just a few doors or blocks away stands a run-down apartment complex with rusty stairs or a commercial building looking for tenants.
Residents say the local economy is going downhill. It used to be that new buildings were springing up all the time, but that was several years ago and these days construction has all but dried up.