Society

The woes of the Japanese education system continued to accumulate as Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei announced that his ministry found approximately 80,000 students from 461 540 of Japan’s 5,408 public and private high schools had not completed enough courses to graduate.

The announcement followed a study of 5,170 high schools prompted by reports that many high schools omitted courses from their curricula in order to spend more time on preparing students for university entrance exams. World History was the main subject considered less important than getting high scores on the entrance examinations, ironic considering Japan’s foreign affairs headaches and long-standing criticism that the country has various problems with the teaching of history.

Students, 79% of whom need 70 hours of classes, will study intensively in the winter and spring breaks, before and after university entrance exams, as well as during later school terms. As for the 2% of students who need 140 or more hours, Ibuki called it “physically possible,” while allowing for changes in curricula including the downgrading of some required four-credit classes to two-credit classes in order to require no more than 70 hours of any student. The New Komeito, coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, called the plan “cruel,” as the deficiencies were not the students’ fault.

Students who have already graduated, sometimes missing as much as 300 hours of classes, will not be required to make them up. Some critics are unhappy with special consideration, usually reserved for cases of natural disaster or severe student illness, being given in cases of willful curricula manipulation.

The scandals have resulted in the suicide of a high school principal in Ibaraki Prefecture, who requested, in his suicide note, that the students not be put at a disadvantage.

A 15-year-old high school girl in Nagasaki Prefecture died after failing to come out of the coma she fell into when she hanged herself during a brass band practice at her school on Sunday. Her suicide joins the recent suicide of a student who jumped to her death Gifu and a number of others. Student suicides, especially those due to Japan’s widespread, often brutal bullying, have been given renewed attention due to the discovery that education boards around the country were attributing such suicides to unknown consequences despite clear evidence of the role of bullying. It is believed that reports were falsified in order to show success in dealing with the endemic problem of bullying.

The problem came to light when the parents of a 14-year-old in Saitama, who leapt from her family’s balcony due to unbearable stress as a result of bullying, discovered that the Saitama Board of Education announced that there had been no suicides related to bullying in the seven years between 1999 and 2005. While the Education Ministry has reopened that particular girl’s case, the Saitama Board of Education still insists they can’t be sure her suicide was caused by bullying.

In yet further troubles for Japan’s schools, it was reported today that a teacher in Osaka admitted to groping and otherwise molesting a disabled 16-year-old high school student on October 25th.

On a more positive note, the arts and letters are still in top form in Japan. Internationally best-selling writer Murakami Haruki was in Prague on Monday to receive the prestigious Czech Franz Kafka Prize, for which he was chosen in March by a jury of renowned authors and critics.

The Franz Kafka Society, which awards the Prize, said it was given to “authors whose works of exceptional artistic qualities are found to appeal to readers regardless of their origin, nationality and culture, just as the works of Franz Kafka.”

Politics

On a visit to Washington last Friday, LDP Policy Chief Nakagawa Shoichi controversially called for Japan to debate the development of nuclear weapons in conversations with what Japanese media are calling “important US officials,” a group known to include US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and a cast of “formers”: former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Nakagawa made the comments despite Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s repeatedly saying Japan has no intention of developing nuclear weapons.

Nakagawa believes a Japanese nuclear arsenal would be a step toward quickly stopping the reckless acts of North Korea.

The DPJ agreed to support the LDP’s proposal to upgrade the Defense Agency to Ministry status, which will allow it to submit bills directly to the Diet and call Cabinet meetings on special issues on its own, instead of going through the Prime Minister. Another related bill is the big deal. The Self-Defense Forces’ overseas activities will be expanded from merely supporting duties to so-called “primary duties,” which will include participating in UN peacekeeping missions, offering rear-logistical support in emergency military situations, and giving international emergency assistance.

In another very closely-related move, Prime Minister Abe told the Financial Times that the pacifist Article 9 should be revised from the point of view that the government should protect Japan and that the country should make a global contribution to security. Abe was also quoted by a government official as saying that Article 9 had become outdated in the sixty years since the end of World War II.
Look for further discussion of these issues in forthcoming editions of Seijigiri.

In other LDP moves, the Cabinet has apparently decided to improve its image and disguise its heretofore undisguised rightward swing. Chief executives were clamping down on the loose lips of top officials who have irritated the opposition and members of their own party, not to mention Japan’s neighbors, with statements ranging from refusing to eliminate the procuring of nuclear weapons from debate to declaring that former Prime Minister Kono’s apology for forcing Korean women into sexual slavery during World War II needed to be reviewed.

And on Friday, Tokyo joined Seoul and Washington in confirming North Korea’s October 9th nuclear test when Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki Yasuhisa announced that the government had concluded there was a “high probability” that the DPRK had conducted a nuclear test despite initial doubts including the absence of radiocative particles in the air samples collected by the Air Self-Defense Force over the test site at the time of the blast.

The government is adopting a “wait and see” approach toward North Korea.

Business

The DPJ has joined forces with the LDP again, this time to reform consumer loan laws and cap interest at 15 to 20% depending on loan principal. The new law closes loopholes which were exploited by consumer loan companies to charge as much as the former maximum of 29.2%.

Since September, the town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture has been engaged in its annual hunt of two to three-thousand dolphins, or justover 10% of Japan’s annual kill, for meat or for sale to marine parks. Fishermen in boats drive pods of dolphins into a cove, where they are then slaughtered. While a single dolphin can fetch a princely sum from marine parks in Taiwan or China, most are sold as meat despite containing dangerously high levels or mercury. Dolphin, like whale samples, have shown levels of mercury 22 times higher than the government’s provisional permitted level. Unlike the US, which authorizes the relevant authorities to remove from shelves any meat containing more than one microgram of mercury per gram, Japan’s Health Ministry is authorized only to urge purveyors to voluntarily restrict trade, which it would be unbiased of this observer to point out, means nothing. Studies performed by universities in Hokkaido and New Zealand have found animals with mercury levels as much as 87 times the permitted level.

Supermarkets, especially in Wakayama and Shizuoka prefectures, where dolphin meat is popular, are operating on the assumption that the absence of a ban from the government means the meat is safe.

In addition to safety concerns, animal rights activists in a number of countries, 28 last year, protested the slaughter in which dolphins are herded into a cove, kept overnight to allow stress-related hormones to dissipate, then herded into a second cove to be killed by random stabbing.

That’s the news for tonight.

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