TOKYO — Japan has funneled much of the money it promised to disaster-ravaged communities into an array of unrelated projects, recent independent audits have shown, setting off outrage among a public already wary of the government and its response to last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear crisis that followed.

An accounting released last week by Japan’s Board of Audit, an independent agency, also revealed that about half of the country’s reconstruction budget of 19 trillion yen (nearly $239 billion) has yet to be spent amid confusion and indecision over rebuilding strategies in the wake of the catastrophes in March 2011.

The audits have cast a harsh light on the bureaucratic morass slowing Japan’s reconstruction effort, made worse by outlays of money to the unrelated projects seen by many as a throwback to the country’s days of unrestrained pork-barrel spending. The revelations are an embarrassment for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, whose Democratic Party promised to make public spending more transparent when it came to power in 2009.

Among the projects that secured a slice of the reconstruction budget, according to the agency, are 330 million yen (about $4.1 million) in fixes to a sports stadium in central Tokyo; 500 million yen (almost $6.3 million) to build roads in Okinawa, over 1,000 miles from the disaster zone; and 2.3 billion yen (almost $29 million) toward measures to protect Japan’s whaling fleet from environmental activists.