TPR News: Wednesday, October 25, 2006 - Cellular phone number portability and Kim Jong Il
Business
The big domestic news story all week - headlining newspapers, websites,
TV news shows, and radio alike - has been the introduction on Tuesday of cellular phone number portability, which enables customers to keep their phone numbers, but not their cellular e-mail addresses, as they move from one cellular service provider to another. The move has sent Japan’s three major cellular companies - NTT DoCoMo, au by KDDI, and SoftBank - scurrying to introduce new features, primarily centered around music downloading and network accessibility, to keep current customers and attract new ones. SoftBank emerged has an early winner by offering its customers free daytime calls and e-mails to all other SoftBank customers. It’s been a good year for SoftBank in some respects, their baseball team, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, just barely missed going to the Japan Series.
The impact on any of the companies’ bottom lines is still unclear.
Coming in a close second has been Sony’s worsening image in the wake of its delay in dealing with the problems found in its hot, very hot, lithium-ion batteries. While the problems seem to stem from the introduction of metal particles into the batteries during manufacturing in Kooriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, Sony has blamed the fires caused by its batteries on the system configuration of Dell and Apple computers. This hasn’t helped Sony’s image at all.
However, Sony Vice President Nakagawa Yutaka apologized Tuesday for the problems, saying that the company was not considering disciplinary actions against its top executives and admitting that Toshiba had been joined by others in suing Sony for lost business.
Society
Three junior high school students were arrested after forcing a classmate to play a “fainting game,” in other words, pinning him to the floor and pressing on his chest until he lost consciousness, then beating him in the face, head, and body, supposedly to revive him. The boys reportedly did it for fun. If precedent is anything to go by, the boys will be let off after a little public crying and a suspension from school as their parents express surprise (boys who bullied and beat a classmate into wheelchair-bound nerve damage got a mere six-month suspension from school recently) and the people who are supposed to be in charge but aren’t adult enough to stick up for their charges will go on wringing their hands at best. (Yes, I know there is blatant editorialism in the news here. I don’t think my stance here should be at all controversial, though.)
Politics & Society (Do you know where to draw the line?)
Harassment of North Korean residents of Japan (often born in Japan, sometimes even third generation) and those affiliated with North Korea, never a rare occurrence, has been on the rise since the DPRK announced its nuclear test on October 9th. A bamboo grove adjacent to the headquarters of Chongryon, Japan’s largest North Korean-affililiated group and a de facto embassy for the country, with which Japan has no diplomatic relations, erupted in arson-induded flames nearly incinerating the headquarters building itself. Police security around the facility and others similar to it has increased since the DPRK’s July 5th missile tests, but threats to such facilities, and to North Korean schools, from ultra-nationalist right-wingers have been on the rise.
(Sixty-one years ago, within a few months of this day, Harry Truman observed that it might be a good policy to just let the Nazis and the Soviets fight each other to mutual extinction. Just a reminder for both the history and current-events buffs.)
Straight Politics
On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Aso Taro said there was still a risk of North Korea carrying out further nuclear tests and that he was not optimistic about the prospects of the Kim Family Regime returning to the table for disarmament talks anytime soon despite the dispatch of Chinese diplomats to Pyongyang, which Aso praised, and South Korean reports of Kim Jong Il’s apology for the test.
Aso observed that, in his memory, nuclear tests have been like Lay’s Potato Chips - no country being able to stop at just one.
Tougher sanctions on North Korea, along with Kim’s ejection of the World Food Programme last December and the cessation of humanitarian aid from South Korea, the North’s largest donor, following the missile tests, are likely to spur yet more belt-tightening throughout the DPRK and the further slimming down of the country’s already svelte populace, with even Kim’s favored armed forces being ordered to scavenge for potatos instead of waiting grain for unlikely grain shipments.
The impact of the by-election victories of Liberal Democratic Party candidates Kamei Zentaro in Kanagawa and Harada Kenji in Osaka is, and may well remain, unclear, but the successes are widely viewed as a boost for Prime Minister Abe Shinzo a month into his administration, the assumption being that public distaste for the way Abe has handled recent events would have translated into losses for the New Komeito-backed LDP candidates, both of whom won seats vacated due to the death of the incumbents, a not uncommon occurrence in the youthful LDP. The victories are a further blow to the struggling opposition Democratic Party of Japan and their ailing leader, Ozawa Ichiro.
To end on an uplifting note, Abe Shinzo’s decision to stick to Japan’s non-nuclear principles was praised by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who told a group of Japanese academics and businessmen, “It benefits Asia as well as the people of Asia and the world that Prime Minister Abe emphasized Japan’s adherence to its three non-nuclear principles amid tensions over the nuclear issue.”
That’s all for tonight, we hope you enjoyed it, or found it informative, or both. Thanks for reading.
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Related Posts:
- Taro Aso Elected President of LDP
- Seijigiri #10 - October 19, 2006 (A little more North Korea, some Rice, then we come home for school.)
- Trans-Pacific Radio’s Most Played Audio Programs
- Seijigiri #9 - October 11, 2006 (Special Discussion of North Korea’s First Nuclear Test)
- Rod Serling’s Zero Hour: Heir Hunters, part 3
