Politics

Support for Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s cabinet has dropped to 48.6%, according to a Kyodo News telephone poll. This is the first time since taking office that the approval rating of the Abe cabinet has dipped below 50%. The Japan Times posits that the LDP’s re-admission of the postal reform rebels led to the lower level of support. No mention was given to bid rigging, the town hall meeting scandal, the incompetent handling of school bullying issues, and the LDP’s passage of nearly undebated reforms to the 1947 Fundmental Law of Education.

Former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has said that he would be willing to make a return visit to North Korea, this time as the envoy of his successor. Koizumi would ask the Kim Regime to abide by the 2002 Pyongyang Declaration, in which North Korea promised to maintain peace and stability in Northeast Asia. While the date of such a visit has yet to be decided, Koizumi has said he wants to take on the responsibility of denuclearizing North Korea.

The practice of amakudari, or descent from heaven, in which bureaucrats are hired, upon retirement, into the private sector industries they once regulated, is set to receive its last rites as private sector members of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy propose that central government agencies be completely prohibited from arranging post-retirement jobs for their officials. Despite opposition from some bureaucrats, the Abe kantei will approve the measure to demonstrate its resolve on reform.

Secretary-General Nakagawa Hidenao said, in November, that the LDP “will prohibit administrative institutions from systematically arranging the rehiring.”

It is hoped that the elimination of amakudari will reduce corruption as the practice played a central facilitating role in recent bid-rigging scandals. While bureaucrats are already barred from taking certain positions in companies with which they worked closely while officials for two years after retirement, the regulation is in principle only and is ignored or worked around by placing retiring officials in companies with which they did not work in a direct close relationship. The new measure will also introduce criminal prosecution as a possibility for former bureaucrats who request special treatment for their current employers from their former bosses and colleagues. The two-year ban, on the other hand, will be rescinded.

Three civilian police officers are to be dispatched to Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) as part of the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), which attempts to quell resurging violence in the country. Japan will first send a fact-finding team to Timor-Leste before dispatching two prefectural and one National Police Agency (NPA) officer in January. The officers are to explain Japan’s koban (police box) system, believed to be an effective measure in establishing law and order.

During a recent visit to Japan, U.S. Deputy Defense Undersecretary for Asia and Pacific Affairs Richard Lawless said it would be “crazy” of Japan not to shoot down a North Korean missile headed for the United States. Lawless expressed frustration with Japan’s interpreting its pacifist Constitution as prohibiting collective defense and told Former Defense Agency chief Ishiba Shigeru, who heads the Liberal Democratic Party National Defense Division’s subcommittee on defense policies that such an interpretation did not cast the US-Japan alliance in the best light.

Lawless joins US Ambassador to Japan, Thomas Schieffer, in expressing a desire to see more debate on the issue of collective missile defense. Two years ago, Fukuda Yasuo, then Chief Cabinet Secretary said Japan’s missile defense system would be solely for self-defense, not for the defense of a third country, so it would not pose a constitutional problem. Last month, though Fukuda’s successor, current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo spoke of a reconsideration of such an interpretation.

Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, best known for his inflammatory racist, sexist, and xenophobic remarks, thinks eight years has not been enough. Among other things, Ishihara feels Tokyo’s renaissance is only halfway done and wants to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to the city, which means, he says, that he should be elected to a third term so that he can manage the city at least until the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Ishihara’s announcement drew the ire of DPJ Assemblyman Tanaka Ryo who said the Governor had no plan and was attempting to base a possible third term on the possibility of the Olympics.

Society

The BBC has published a piece on bullying in Japan’s schools that features Mrs. Midori Komori, the mother of a fifteen-year-old who committed suicide because of bullying, who was discussed here on Trans-Pacific Radio in Seijigiri #11. Mrs. Komori visits schools throughout Japan to talk about her daughter a bit and urge children to live by the Golden Rule. While Japan’s school administrators tend to want to cover up or ignore incidents of bullying, some teachers stress the importance of every student hearing Mrs. Komori’s message. Students across the board worry about bullying, but are not sure how to prevent it or if they’d be able to do so.

In related news, Hokkaido Board of Education Chief Akiyama Masayuki sent an e-mail to the administrator of the blog Japan Probe requesting the he take down links to no longer accessible YouTube videos of bullying at a bus stop near a Hokkaido school posted by the bullies. While Mr. Akiyama offered no explanation as to how it would occur, he said that linking to the videos violated the victim’s human rights and could lead to further bullying. In the e-mail, Akiyama expresses concern over the unfortunate publicizing of the event multiple times, but fails to express concern over the root problem, viz. bullying. The e-mail confirms points made on both Japan Probe and here on Trans-Pacific Radio concerning the primary motivation of education officials.

As if that weren’t enough, four 17 and 18-year-old boys were arrested in Tokyo for assaulting a 17-year-old classmate at a Musashino park in front of a group of girls from their school, beating, stripping, and photographing him.

One of the arrested attackers was suspended from school, but in a move reeking of the inability of school administrators to deal with bullying, the victim, who has yet to return to school was asked to stay home.
Sixty-four people have been arrested by Metropolitan and Nagano Prefectural Police in a major bust involving passport and foreign resident identification card forgeries. Four suspected ring members and sixty customers were nabbed in Japan’s largest-ever identification document forgery crackdown. The ring is believed to have forged and sold over ten-thousand alien registration certificates. The search of the Yokohama apartment of a Chinese man caught with forged papers in June led police to computers containing information on thousands of forged documents in 32 prefectures.

A passport and alien registration card set apparently went for 35,000 yen, a driver’s license for 8,000.

Business

YouTube is under pressure from Japan. JASRAC, the Japan Society for the Rights of Authors, Composer, and Publishers, sent a letter to YouTube’s CEO, Chad Hurley, and Chief Technology Officer, Steve Chen, asking the popular video sharing site to develop and put in place software that would automatically identify and remove copyrighted material from the site, as opposed to the current system in which copright holders must find the material and notify YouTube to have it removed. JASRAC, which asked YouTube to remove 30,000 files in October, feels that it is incumbent upon the site given its “current status” to prevent the posting of copyrighted material. They also asked for a notice on the site, in Japanese, explaining the illegality of uploading copyrighted material and a response by December 15th.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s tax plan met with stiff opposition from the LDP. One of Abe’s key fiscal reform proposals is to cap road spending in an effort to control Japan’s growing public debt. To this end, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki Yasuhisa presented about sixty LDP members with a proposal to begin making legal reforms in 2008 that would allow the use of road-tax revenue for general pusposes, as opposed to solely for road construction, which is currently the case. Two-thirds of those present were opposed to the move.

Predictably, the strongest opposition came from the representatives of Japan’s relatively poor, but politically powerful rural districts, which often benefit from large, public-works type construction projects often of dubious value. Long-serving Representative Eto Seihsiro said that more, not less, road construction was necessary if the kantei truly wanted to reduce the disparities between urban and rural areas.

Last Word

In place of an editorial comment, TPR urges its listeners to listen to or read the editorial “Bully, knock it off. Teacher, wake up!” if they haven’t yet done so. The full text of Hokkaido Board of Education Security Chief Akiyama’s e-mail and more information on the authorities’ desire to keep things quiet first and address the problem second can be found in the article “Bullying in Hokkaido” and, of course, at Japan Probe.

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