In this edition of TPR News: The government is working on a plan to deal with North Korean refugees, the Prime Minister pushes to make Constitutional reform a priority, another Cabinet member turns out to be a bad seed, some defense lawyers will be allowed to call some of their clients, the stock market is up, Japan’s biggest bourses consider a merger, and the Defense Agency Chief continues to receive a gentleman’s C for his public statements.

Politics

Japan’s government has begun drawing up contingency plans to deal with as many as 150,000 North Korean refugees in the event of a new outbreak in hostilities on the Korean Peninsula. The number is the result of a year-long study by a special task force including Cabinet members that began in 2003. South Korean experts have estimated the total number of refugees at between two and four million. Japan’s number does not include possible refugees from South Korea. The contingency plans coincide with joint US-Japanese operational plans being discussed by the Bilateral Planning Committee and American plans to deal with a variety of disasters, military and natural, in North Korea, including the death of Kim Jong Il and widespread civil unrest.

Saying he has “no such plan at all at this point” to call snap Lower House elections to coincide with July’s Upper House elections, Prime Minister Abe used his New Year’s press conference to express his desire to see Constitutional reform become the defining issue of the July elections. Abe, who continues to use the words “research” and “study” to mean “garner suport for what he wants,” said he’d like to see research into reform of the current interpretation, specifically of Article 9, that prevents Japan from engaging in collective defense. “In order to contribute to peace in international society, there is a need to restructure legal systems on security that would go along with the times.”

Abe also said at the press conference that he would “make this year one in which the public can actually feel the recovery of the economy and the results of structural reforms,” and that he would come up with “all-out strategies” to halt the decline in the birthrate. Specifics were wanting in both cases.

Farm Minister Matsuoka Toshikatsu joined Tax Commission Chief Honma Masaaki and State Minister in charge of Administrative Reform Sata Genichiro in being defended by the Prime Minister in the face of charges of wrongdoing. To briefly draw out of a few threads of the tangled web surrounding Matsuoka as well as House of Councillors member Uozumi Hirohide, both men are accused of improperly using their influence to push for the granting of nonprofit organization (NPO) status to a firm called WBEF. The problem is that WBEF was set up by asset management consulting firm FAC from Fukuoka, which is under police investigation for collecting funds from investors without a license to do so. While the application for NPO status was being processed, WBEF advertized that “videotapes on investment hints will be sent once a 1-million-yen investment has been made, and a monthly 50,000-yen dividend will then be paid,” despite not being licensed as a financial institution and being in the midst of applying for NPO status.

Matsuoka acknowledged receiving a one million yen contribution shortly after being named Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, which he failed to report (Uozumi got 20 million.) Despite this and government records of the time and nature of his calls regarding WBEF’s NPO application, Matsuoka continues to deny that he ever had any contact with WBEF and the Prime Minister continues to support him.

Despite the implementation, in November, of a national LDP policy to deny support to incumbent governors and mayors seeking reelection beyond a third term in order to reduce to corruption by preventing the consolidation of political power in the hands of powerful local politicians, many local parties are throwing their weight behind long-time incumbents and the national party is even supporting those who had been chosen by their local parties prior to the start of the policy. In what would seem to be a direct contradiction of both the letter and spirit of the policy, one LDP member said, “There’s no reason we shouldn’t support strong candidates backed by voters.” Likewise, party Secretary General of Fukuoka, Nakamura Akihiko said the policy didn’t mean support had to be withdrawn from all candidates seeking fourth or later terms, despite explicit statements from the national party that preventing people from occupying their offices for longer than three terms was precisely the intent of the policy.

The Daily Yomiuri ran an interesting column by Aoyama Akihisa explaining the impact that the dodecennial unified elections that mark each year of the boar have on local politics and, by extension, the national stage.

Society

In a pilot program at eight detention facilities a considerable distance from legal facilities, prisoners will be allowed, for the first time, to consult with defense attorneys via telephone or fax, as opposed to only face-to-face or by letter. The step was deemed necessary in the face of hearings to be held on consecutive days under the lay judge system to be introduced in 2009, which will require more frequent consultation between lawyers and clients. What wasn’t introduced was the concept that a defendant might have a chance at acquittal. With a 99% criminal conviction rate, it’s hard to see how much help more frequent communication on the inevitably losing side will make or why there was any opposition to it in the first place.

In what this observer sees as an oddity in the opposite direction in Japan’s legal system, the fifteen-year statute of limitations for the apprehension of the murderer of real estate company president Kashiwagi Akio, 54 on January 3, 1992, expired. Should any reader have an idea as to why a potentially capital crime would carry such a relatively short statute of limitations, this observer would enjoy seeing any comment said reader should care to leave below.

The government hopes to increase the percentage of the workforce telecommuting, or working from home using the Internet and other technologies, to twenty by 2010 as part of its e-Japan initiative. A panel of experts is to be assembled in the next fiscal year, which begins in April, to work toward implementing such a system for public servants, especially those on maternity or nursing care leave, thus allowing idle workers to remain productive.

In an experiment at the Ministry of Communications and Internal Affairs in September, six workers with young children each took a day of the week to telecommute, but kept regular 9:30 to 6:30 hours and followed a schedule identical to that which they followed while in the office.

The Environmental Ministry is set to convene a panel to designate a new category of sea sanctuary to join those in place to protect attractive coral reefs and other high-profile undersea scenery. Increasing public interest in biodiversity and environmental issues was cited as one primary cause of the decision. Marine forests and tidal lands will be the main targets of the new protections.

Business

According to new rules that took effect on Thursday, bank customers wishing to transfer more than 100,000 yen will no longer be able to do so from an automated teller machine and will instead have to show identification over the counter.

In response to growing security concerns and the abuse of personal information Mixi, Inc., Japan’s largest social networking site, with 6.6 million members, has halted it’s policy of encouraging users to use their real names and is following its competitors in establishing different levels of disclosure, thus enabling people to keep information like name and sex private.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), Osaka Securities Exchange, Nagoya Stock Exchange, Fukuoka Stock Exchange, Sapporo Securities Exchange, and JASDAQ Securities Exchange could be merged by 2009 under a plan currently being considered by Japan Securities Dealers Association officials. The plan calls for the formation of a holding company tentatively called Japan Stock Exchange.

Some of the Japanese companies listing on those exchanges are losing trillions of yen to Chinese counterfeits, especially those shipped to and distributed throughout the Middle East, which has low tariffs. Japanese companies and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry have asked the Chinese government to institute stricter penalties. Judging by the figures in The Daily Yomiuri’s article on the story, though, the “trillions” figure is likely based on lost sales, assuming that every counterfeit sold would have been a legitimate purchase of the real thing, which is not at all a reasonable assumption, as has been pointed out in mnay discussions over music and film piracy. The goods are also valued according to full retail price, not profit or a reasonable estimate of the firm’s actual receipts.

Bullish in the Boar Year, the Nikkei closed at an eight-month high on Thursday, the first trading day of 2007. The average gained 127.84 points, ending the half-day at 17,353.67, a 0.74% gain since last Friday and the Nikkei’s highest level since April 21st. The first-day rise is the sixth in a row. Investors seem to believe in an economic recovery and the staying power of this year’s growth, though.

A brief return to politics and the Last Word

Defense Agency Chief Kyuma Fumio, who was lambasted in an editorial on this site on December 12th, has yet to top his laughably false claims that the Koizumi government never supported the US invasion of Iraq, but he is continuing to show himself to be ineffective and poorly-versed in his own portfolio.

Japan and the US agreed on a final plan to go ahead with the construction of a a controversial V-shaped pair of runways on the coast of Nago, Okinawa. The town agreed on condition that planes not fly over the town, which is supposedly avoidable because the runways will be largely built on landfill on the coast. The plan would move the US air station out of densely populated Ginowan. The main remining concerns are over an island a mere one-hundred meters off the coast of the proposed site that will probably be damaged in the construction.

Okinawa’s recently elected Governor Nakaima Hirokazu, who has said he accepts the move, but has unspecified concerns over the runway plan, got a little help from Kyuma Fumio recently. The Governor, whose approval would be needed for any landfill project, welcomed Kyuma’s statements that he might not approve the V-shaped runway plan. On the positive side, Kyuma was trying to make sure the locals were kept happy. He said he’d prefer a one runway plan, which, he astutely pointed out, would be cheaper and would help the government deal with its strained budget.

On the negative side, Kyuma has shown us once again that he doesn’t have a solid grasp of the issues he’s supposed to be handling. The Foreign Ministry immediately sent spokesman Sakaba Mitsuo out to say that Japan would go ahead with the plan. Kyuma called for his proposed single runway to be built off the coast, but without interfering with the aforementioned island one-hundred meters from the coast. Now, perhaps I’m overestimating the size of a runway and its attendant facilities, but a runway itself is a fairly wide thing, the island that would need to be built for it would have to be a good bit wider than the runway, and there would also need to be space for a few things other than the runway itself. Can this be done in under one-hundred meters? If so, consider me impressed.

Kyuma’s plans in and of themselves are not necessarily bad, the problem is that he consistently shows a disconnect between what has been done, decided, and endorsed, and what he proposes. Shouldn’t the head of the Defense Agency, soon to be a Ministry, be aware of public Cabinet decisions and government policy? He’s part of a coterie of fools who can’t be any help to the already ailing Prime Minister Abe. Considering Abe’s apparent search for talent in his appointment of special advisors, why doesn’t he demand competence in his Cabinet?

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