Yes, it's the Japanese equivalent of the U.S. Shuttle program: A welfare program for aerospace bureaucrats.
Back around '73 or so, I was a student working in the wind-tunnels at NASA Ames Research Center when, one day, one of the scientists gloomily announced that NASA had passed a momentous milestone -- they now had more than one bureaucrat for each scientist.
They were tweaking the Space Shuttle design then. At the time it wasn't much more than a decade since the maned spaceflight program began. But now, almost 30 years later, what's there to show for transport? (Yes, their funding got cut -- but I'll bet the bureaucracy was last to go...)