Politics

Although Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been quoted as saying, “We can leave an appraisal of the work of politicians to later generations of historians,” it is the current opinion of him that may bring his premiership some trouble. After admitting that many “Town Hall” style meetings were staged, Abe’s cabinet has seen its approval rating drop quickly. In an attempt to save face over the fiasco, the Prime Minister has offered to return three months of his salary.

On the eve of the resumption of the Six Party Talks, North Korea has accused Japan of kidnapping one of its own citizens. The accusation, issued on Saturday by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), claims that Kim Thae Yong, a North Korean linguist working at a college on Russia’s Sakhalin Island, went missing in 1991 and has subsequently written letters from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Japan’s Foreign Ministry refused to give any comment on the issue.

In a special to the Daily Yomiuri, former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has published a piece entitled, “Stay focused on achieving nonnuclear North Korea.” Armitage discusses the “scenario that no one ever discusses,” or the idea that North Korea might make gradual economic reform and emerge a stronger state.

Foreign news and media sources have continued to publish stories related to Japan’s problem with school bullying and suicides. This week, The Lexington Herald-Leader brings us a piece by Emi Doi entitled, “Japan beginning to turn attention to bullying, suicides.” Although the article, which was published on Sunday, December 17, does not seem to be fully up-to-date, it reflects the ongoing interest that the foreign media is still taking in the issue.

In another victory for the Liberal Democratic Party, Yoshinobu Nisaka, a former trade ministry official backed by the ruling party, won a landslide victory in Sunday’s Wakayama Prefecture gubernatorial election, which was held in order to fill the post vacated because of a bid-rigging scandal. Nisaka handily defeated Toshitaka Izumi, who was backed by the Communist Party of Japan.The Democratic Party of Japan, the LDP’s main opposition party, did not field a candidate.

For those interested in voices coming from outside Japan, the American Spectator has recently published a piece entitled, “Japan, the Rising Sun…Again?” by George H. Wittman, a founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy. Wittman provides a summary of developments that have taken place since Shinzo Abe has assumed the premiership, and focuses on what role Japan-China relations will play in the future, and how that relationship will be effected by the direction taken by Abe’s cabinet.

Business and the Economy

Commentators for the Financial Times have noted that despite Japan’s five year-long economic expansion, the yen has been experiencing a further and further weakening in global currency markets, claiming that, “Currency traders overlook Japan’s recovery.” I’m sure that those currency traders in the audience can verify that Japan’s recovery is hardly being overlooked by them, since there is no direct causal correlation between currency rates and economic performance.

Bloomberg and others are now saying that Japan intends to hold interest rates steady in December, with eyes on pushing them higher in January. Last week’s Tankan survey of business confidence failed to show strong enough evidence that the world’s second-largest economy is accelerating from the slowest pace growth in almost two years in the third quarter. Between now and the BOJ’s January meeting, the Japanese government will publish reports on household spending, retail sales, jobs, industrial production and inflation. These should dictate the direction of interest rate moves over the winter.

A Kyoto district court has found Isamu Kaneko, a researcher at Tokyo University, and author of the popular peer-to-peer network sharing software known as Winny, guilty of enabling copyright infringement. Kaneko was fined 1.5 million yen. The director of the League of Software Engineers told the Daily Yomiuri newspaper that, “This ruling will stop the development of information technology in Japan. Programmers will no longer be willing to develop new technologies.” Extensive and intelligent commentary on this case may be found at Joi Ito’s blog.

The Japanese government will be changing the rules that govern which types of firms may bid for certain contracts. Under the current situation, companies seeking to bid are ranked in accordance with average annual sales over a certain time frame, the size of their core capital and the length of time in which the companies have served in designated business categories. The government intends to alter the rules so that startup firms will have more of a chance in the bidding process.

Finally, in an ongoing story that could fit into any of our three categories, the Japanese government has revised its projected future birth rate figures, lowering its anticipated 2050 birth rate from 1.39 to 1.2 children per woman in that year. The revised figure is a serious reversal for the government, since it anticipates that Japan’s low birth rate will worsen rather than improve in the future. The birth rate currently stands at 1.25 children per woman. The government blames the sinking birthrate on “a growing tendency among Japanese women to get married or give birth later in life, as well as seek divorce.” Men do not seem to be at blame.

Society

On Saurday morning, a young man’s torso was found in an opaque white bag near Tokyo’s busy Shinjuku station and his limbs were found shortly thereafter near the tracks of the Yamanote line. While police are not releasing any information they may have about the man’s identity or the circumstances surrounding his murder, they did say that the body appeared to have been dismembered by a hacksaw, appeared to be Japanese or East Asian, and was killed elsewhere and moved to the location where it was found. The nearby Kabukicho neighborhood, perhaps the closest thing Tokyo has to a red light district, is notorious for the presence and influence of organized crime. A large number of business owners had recently banded together to refuse to pay “protection” money and some observers believe this move and organized crime may be related to the murder.

Two Kanagawa police officers, one a sergeant, were arrested last week. Mochizuki Kenji, assigned to a police box in Kamakura entered the home of an elderly woman and stole and envelope containing 100,000 yen. He had visited the woman’s home three days earlier after a stone had been thrown at her window, fixed her storm shutters himself, and learned that she often went out in the afternoon and left her door unlocked. He was in uniform and on duty at the time of the crime.

Watanabe Tsuneori, a desk sergeant in Chigasaki, faked inquiry documents in August to obtain the family registry, address, and cell phone number of an ex-girlfriend. He then used the information to harass the woman, calling her incessantly to mend the relationship. Both officers have admitted wrongdoing.

Kanagawa is not alone. Gunma police issued a third arrest warrant for former Saitama police officer Osari Takao, who is suspected of having stolen a total of 5.5 million yen in armed robberies of post offices since June 5th, when he stole 1.35 million yen at knifepoint from a post office in Isesaki and fled in a stolen car.

At least ten JTB offices, including the company’s Shinagawa headquarters were raided Wednesday on suspicion that the company’s Nagoya-based subsidiary, JTB Tokai Corp. illegally used copyrighted photos of Aomori’s Lake Towadako and Iwate’s Rikuchu coast in brochures.

“Documents of Investigation on Constitutional Theories at Universities,” recently discovered in the Library of Congress, explains how the Education Ministry of the 1930s pressured prominent academics who viewed the emperor as an organ of the state, meaning sovereignty, under the 1894 constitution, was vested in the state, not the emperor, to change their views and acknowledge the emperor as the ruler of Japan, in whom power was vested. Nineteen scholars were divided into three threat categories: “Prompt Measure Requested,” “Strong Caution Required,” and “Specific Attention Required,” depending on how dangerous they were seen to be.

According to Tachibana Takashi, a noted author on issues related to the emperor, “Most of the constitutional scholars who followed and taught Minobe’s theory abruptly changed their theory all at once. I had been wondering why they would not resist the pressure even though the social atmosphere and tide of the era had changed. The new document shows us the reason.” Tachibana continues to say: “The ministry put huge pressure on each faculty through the university authorities. They created a system which would force scholars not to continue teaching. I was surprised at how fierce and thorough the national authority was.”

And, on this week’s edition of the Japan Considered podcast at japanconsidered.org, Professor Robert Angel interviews Professor Edward J. Lincoln, the new Director of the Japan-US Center at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Regarding Japan’s current economic recovery, Professor Lincoln points out that Japan’s 15-16% of GDP being spent on capital expenditure may not prove to be sustainable. Although he’s optimistic that Japan is in better shape than ten or fifteen years ago, he agrees with this observer than Japan could slip back into deflation if things are not managed properly in the upcoming months. It’s an interesting interview, and we encourage you to go have a listen.

And that brings us to The Last Word…

So, what can $90,000 buy you in Japan?

By now, it’s no secret that the Liberal Democratic Party has used the “Town Meeting” framework as a means to cynically influence public opinion. As Norimitsu Onishi points out:

They were supposed to be exercises in grass-roots democracy, events during which Japan’s political leaders met and talked with voters more accustomed to a political system in which decisions were simply handed down…But a government report released Wednesday concluded that 40 percent of the town meetings organized by the government since 2001 were Soviet-style performances, in which plants were paid to ask questions favorable to the government.

Onishi’s assesment may seem a tad harsh (and he’s well known for that…curious slant), but the essential fact remains that the Japanese public has been mislead and treated like dumb animals by the very politicians they have elected to safeguard their futures. Given such a betrayal of trust, one would expect some degree of anger and/or outrage from the public, but that is not coming. In several recent staff editorials, the Japan Times has bemoaned the fact that there is so little public anger over what the LDP has done.

Given that, it seems hardly surprising that the Prime Minister is getting away with returning three months of his salary as a ‘punishment’ for what happened. Three months of his salary? That comes to about $90,000. Yes, the Prime Minister pulls about $30,000 a month. But, here’s the kicker: As of September, when he became Prime Minister, Mr Abe declared 147.9 million yen in personal assets. That works out to about $1.6 million. He also received a bonus of 5.8 million yen just two weeks ago. Of course, he agreed to immediately give back about a million yen of that.

Point is, money is one thing the Prime Minister has plenty of. His not getting paid for three months is akin to me foregoing a shower for three days: It stinks, but will be instantly forgotten once over. Don’t forget: this is a self-imposed punishment. Abe decided it himself. He decided to give up three months of salary because it sounds like a lot of money; the average Japanese person would have trouble making ends meet without it. Abe, however, won’t.

The true message here should not be lost on every citizen and taxpayer in Japan: this is what you’re worth. Tricking you, lying to you, setting up staged town hall meetings just to pull the wool of government agenda over your eyes: it only cost about $90,000. And that, my friends, is a bargain basement price. An unbelievable price in order to ram through nationalistic education reform, the upgrading of the Defense Agency to Ministry status and judicial reform. $90,000. Who would have thought the public came so cheap?

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