Subscribe to TPR News by RSS
Subscribe to all TPR audio releases by RSS
Grab a copy of this release only

Politics

Eleven of the twelve LDP “rebels” who opposed then-Prime Minister Koizumi’s postal reform bill in the summer of 2005, but defended their seats independently, were allowed back in to the ruling party. Koizumi kicked thirty-seven rebels out of the party before the September 11, 2005 snap election, pulled all LDP backing for them, and ran high-profile celebrities, so-called “assassins,” against them. Given a chance to explain their opposition to the popular bill, the former rebels either said they hadn’t really been opposed to it or had changed their minds. One, Horiuchi Mitsuo, compared being kicked out of the LDP to being forcibly stripped of his citizenship.

As sanctions take effect, police in Tokyo and Kanagawa have cracked down on groups and companies aligned with North Korea.

On Monday, Tokyo police drew protests from North Korean residents of Tokyo when they searched the Bunkyo-ku headquarters of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, in the course of an investigation into a Korean woman’s attempts to smuggle intravenous solutions to North Korea.

One of the woman’s relatives is believed to be a member of Kakyo, a group afiliated with Chongryon that promotes scientific and technological research exchanges among North Koreans in Japan.

Kakyo entered the spotlight on Wednesday, when one of its members, a 74-year-old former executive of Taiho Sangyo, an employment agency, along with a current executive, had their homes searched by Kanagawa police in connection with suspected illegal dispatches of employees.

Employees were dispatched to an electronics and machinery company in Ota, Gunma in June 2004, where they are believed to have been involved in plans to smuggle manufacturing technologies to North Korea. The employees were dispatched without proper notification or permission from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, in violation of the workers dispatch law.

The sanctions against North Korea, imposed October 14th, have not been airtight, though, with it having been discovered that materials exported from Japan were used to fabricate electromagnetic denoising coils under a pre-sanctions agreement, and were then exported to Japan, in violation of the sanctions.

Tokyo-based powder technology equipment maker Seishin Enterprise Co. was fined fifteen million yen and slapped with a two-year export ban for illegally shipping two mill grinding machines, useful in the manufacture of missiles, to Iran in 1999 and 2000.
Seven people, including former Governor Sato Eisaku’s brother, were indicted in Fukushima on charges of buying votes in Sato’s successful 2004 bid for a fifth term. Sato Yuji, the former governor’s brother, had been indicted ealier on charges of obstructing fair bidding and bribe-taking over a public works project commissioned by the Fukushima prefectural government. The governor himself was arrested and indicted on bribe-taking charges.

It was revealed this week that the government spent a total of 28 million yen on town hall meetings to promote judicial reform in Okinawa and Miyazaki, averaging 67,000 and 56,000 yen per participant, respectively, or well over double what the government spent per head, on average, at town hall meetings from 2003 to 2005. In both cases, the government rented excessively large meeting halls and sent far too many staffers to the events. In addition to the suspected purchase of favorable questions from attendees, it is believed that the government paid some people to attend. This follows closely last Thursday’s revelation that 100 Ministry of Education officials acted as government plants at a meeting on education reform in Ehime in 2004.

In very closely-related news, Mutant Frog Travelogue tipped us off to some important attendant information. When the town hall meetings to promote government initiatives began, the advertising juggernaut Dentsu, which has a long history of working hand-in-hand with the government to promote policy, was awarded a no-bid contract, resulting in a price tag of 395 million yen, or 24 million per meeting, for the first sixteen meetings. After bidding was opened up in 2002, the price tag dropped to somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven million yen per meeting, substantially more expensive than the town hall meetings of Nagano Governor Tanaka Yasuo, one of the few public figures to publicly name Dentsu, which brings us to the odd point: Because Dentsu has an iron grip on the advertising industry in Japan, with over twice the market share of Hakuhodo, its largest competitor, and thus controls a sizable portion of the vital ad revenue flowing to most of Japan’s periodicals, the name Dentsu has yet to appear in the press, with the firm being referred to generically as “an advertising firm” and the firm’s direct involvement being downplayed.
Business

In an effort to reinvigorate the rural sector and secure the relatively powerful votes of Japan’s rural areas, Prime Minister Abe made the Ministry of Agriculture’s plan to produce six million kiloliters of bioethanol a year a policy priority. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry dismissed the plan as a pipe dream, Minister Amari Akira saying that Japan would need to double it’s sugarcane fields in order to meet the goal.

Nippon Steel Corporation plans to spend over one trillion yen through March 2009 to upgrade equipment and facilities, the first time the company has exceeded one trillion yen in capital investments. Nippon Steel, one of Japan’s few steelmakers to make it through the lean post-bubble years, has shifted its focus to high-end steel products to compete with cheaper foreign rivals. The new capital investment highlights a marked change from the downsizing and cost-cutting in the industry in recent years.

Toyota’s exports to the US in the first ten months of 2006 topped one million units for the first time in over twenty years.

Society

NHK moved forward in its bid to make examples of 33 Tokyo households, out of over a million nationwide who have refused to pay the obligatory NHK fees in the wake of several scandals and NHK’s difficulties in competing with private rivals in terms of programming and ratings, by demanding that the Tokyo Summary Court force the households to pay outstanding fees averaging 59,000 yen, or nearly three years of subscription. The defendants were selected at random from nonpayers in Tokyo’s 23 wards and NHK has sent notices warnign of legal action against 190,000 nonpayers, which brings us to a very brief. . .

Final Word

Dear NHK, if you want people to pay absurd fees levied on every household, regardless of whether or not they own a TV or radio, regardless of whether or not they use it, and regardless of whether or not you provide entertainment programming few of your viewers find entertaining and news programming that includes the reporting of Tohoku earthquakes as second North Korean nuclear tests, you should begin by addressing the scandals that dot your sluggish hull like barnacles. You could, for instance, take visible steps to insure that yor executives don’t embezzle millions in production funds, which are important to the development of programming people will want to watch or listen to. You could also show a little backbone by standing up to an absurd government directive to push the already heavily-pushed North Korean abduction issue. Moreover, the costs of your random legal actions against people who either decided not to pay for what they weren’t watching or decided not to ignore your scandalous mismanagement will far exceed the revenue you might gain from forced payment. The money you gain from forced payment will never make up for the ill will you will continue to engender. Your fees will continue to dwindle, and your network will continue to suffer as you continue to miss the point by focusing on suing individuals rather than cleaning up your act and making good TV.

Thank you for listening.

Instant errata: NHK technically doesn’t bill people who own neither a TV nor a radio, but the onus is on the household to prove such a state to NHK’s satisfaction. Luddites are still harrassed and the assumption is that every household has at least one TV, which is probably a safe bet.

Listen Now:

 TPR News: 12/01/06: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download