Society

A strain of H5 avian influenza was confirmed as the cause of death of 3,800 chickens on a farm in Miyazaki, marking the first known outbreak of the virus in a year. Testing is still going on to confirm whether or not the bird flu in question is the virulent H5N1 strain. Last January’s outbreak in Ibaraki was of the H5N2 strain, which is less dangerous to humans.

8,000 more chickens on the farm in Kiyotake are set to be culled by means of carbon dioxide and incineration, bringing the total to 12,000. No human illness has been reported and there is no evidence to suggest a danger to humans from the consumption of poultry or eggs. Retailers such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hokka-Hokka-Tei have responded calmly, neither cancelling orders nor expressing concern over the safety of chicken from Miyazaki, nevertheless the Agriculture Ministry is worried about panic.

A magnitude 8.2 earthquake in the Kuril Trench, 30 km under the sea and over 500 km east of Hokkaido, spurred the evacuation of 110,000 people in Hokkaido and the Pacific Coast of Tohoku to higher ground in the face of a four-and-a-half hour tsunami warning yesterday. Despite the quake being the largest on record at that location, the resulting tsunami was forty centimeters at it’s largest, down in the Ogasawara Islands a few days by boat south of Tokyo, and was between ten and thirty centimeters high in Hokkaido.

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Business

A record high 8.1 million foreign visitors entered Japan in 2006. Korea sent the most tourists to Japan, with 2.37 million, followed by Taiwan (1.35 million) and mainland China (980,000). Visitors from those three nations accounted for approximately 58% of the total visitors to Japan in 2006.

Peko-chan may be cute, but she’s dirty. On the heels of it’s announcement that it was the rancid milk that made 16,000 of their chou-cream pastries so tasty, Fujiya Co. admitted that it had shipped 113 of the pastries from its Saitama production facility to retail outlets. The pastries were filled with more than just rotten cream, they also had over ten times the permissible level of harmful bacteria of a type unspecified in news reports. (The irrational fear engendered by the mere mention of “bacteria” could be a fine place to launch into an opinion piece, but this is neither the time nor the place.)

Perhaps we’re being too hard on Fujiya. The expired milk thing was just an unfortunate call by one veteran employee - after all the milk was only a day past it’s expiration date. What’s that but the action of one bad apple?

Oh! Bad apples! 500 apple pies were produced in Niiza using processed apple past its expiration date. So much for defending Peko-chan and her corporation. Rats.

Oh! Them, too! Fifty of the filthy little buggers were caught in a single month in 2004 - and those were only the ones that couldn’t get out of traps they got into in the first place. Not only in the factories, either. While the bad milk was used last Fall, Fujiya endeavored to cover it up, not necessarily telling employees to keep their mouths shut, but indirectly threatening them with the loss of their jobs by sending out a memo that said, in part: “In recent years, many corporate scandals related to compliance have resulted from whistle-blowing. If the use of milk that has passed its expiry date is revealed to the media, it is inevitable our firm will become another Snow Brand Milk Products Co.”

Rats in the factories, rats in the head office, dirt all over the place.

Politics

Liberal Democratic Party Diet member Yamasaki Taku, who caused significant irritation to the kantei and LDP leadership by traveling via Beijing to Pyongyang, where he stayed for five days in violation of Japan’s sanctions against North Korea, held a press conference in Beijing, where he said he had met with a number of government and Korean Workers’ Party officials, including Song Il Ho, the DPRK’s ambassador in charge of diplomatic normalization talks with Japan. Yamasaki said the officials told him they hoped to resume the Six-Party talks immediately after a January 22nd meeting with the United States to discuss the freezing of North Korean assets, including Kim Jong Il’s entertainment stash in Macau.

Song told Yamasaki American actions would determine whether or not North Korea carried out a second nuclear test and complained about Japan’s unilateral sanctions, saying North Korea had no intention of resuming normalization talks with Japan until the “severe discrimination” against the DPRK ended.

In Paris at the end of a five-day European tour that included London, Berlin, and Brussels, Prime Minister Abe said he “was able to carry out assertive diplomacy and win support during this trip.” He wanted to gain support from European leaders for Japan’s sanctions against North Korea and expressed concern over the lack of transparency in China’s military build-up.

Abe also told French President Jacques Chirac of his intention to draw up plans to revamp the UN Security Council. While unable to draw a response from Chirac, whose government supports lifting an arms embargo against China, Abe was able to get Chirac’s public support for Japan’s ascendance to a permanent seat on the UN Secuirty Council.

Despite his self-described success in Europe, Abe holds an increasingly tenuous position at home. Public approval of the kantei dropped and disapproval rose, each by 3.6 percentage points, putting the Cabinet’s approval rating at 45% and disapproval at 38.9%. Japan’s press has finally stopped saying that disapproval of the Cabinet stems from readmission of the 2005 postal reform rebels, which never made much sense to this observer, and has opened its collective eyes to the 74.2% of respondents to a Kyodo poll who said that Abe had not dealt appropriately with the accounting scandals within his own Cabinet. Considering Abe defended three successive Cabinet members who were all guilty of rather significant abuse of their positions and public funds, is how 25.8% of those polled think he didn’t handle the scandals inappropriately. Presumably every country has eligible voters who don’t let reason get in the way of their support for certain politicians.

In the same poll, 22.3% said Abe’s leadership met or exceeded their expectations - a group that would include this observer, who had very low expectations from the start - and Abe’s lacking leadership became the main reason for disapproval of his job performance for the first time.

Trans-Pacific Radio’s favorite incompetent Cabinet Minister, Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei is involved in an accounting scandal, bringing the total number of corrupt Abe appointees to four. Kozo Kaikaku Kenkyukai, the “structural reform study group,” which was dissolved in 2002 after an affiliated Diet member’s arrest, and Meifukai, both associated with Ibuki claimed 47 million yen in operating expenses in 2005, despite the registry of both group’s as Ibuki’s rent-free Diet member’s dormitory and the discontinued existence of one group. Ibuki, who heads Kenkyukai, and is most famous recently for telling suicidal kids not to write to him, said the money was spent on entertaining, although no receipts were attached to the filing, as they should have been, and it’s unclear whom a defunct group would be entertaining.

Wait, not four corrupt Abe cohorts, make that as many as eleven. Political fund reports show that five as yet unnamed Cabinet Ministers and two executive directors of the LDP declared 680 million yen as operating costs of fund-management firms set up in their rent-free domiciles. This number could include Sata, Matsuoka, and Ibuki. This observer is waiting for criminal charges, but doesn’t expect to see them.

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First he didn’t think Japan had supported the US invasion of Iraq, then he was apparently unaware of an agreement the government had made with the US over the relocation of an air base in Okinawa, now newly minted Defense Minister Kyuma Fumio wants to give history more of a chance to repeat itself.

“Fifty years since its inception, is it really worth keeping the system intact?” Kyuma asked about the civilian councilor system in which eight defense councilors, civilians by law, assist the Minister in monitoring military and political developments and reining in uniformed officers. As the Asahi Shimbun puts it:

The councilor posts were created when the former Defense Agency was established in 1954 to serve as a check against moves by the SDF to embark on disastrous courses of action, such as those by the wartime military.

The system was intended to allow civilian bureaucrats to rein in uniformed officers within the agency.

Kyuma is now considering either allowing uniformed military officers to become councilors or abolishing the council altogether.

Foreign Minister Aso Taro, another favorite here at TPR, who would surely be an even bigger hit if Japan had American-style late night shows, is at it again. Long a fan of manga in general and Rozen Maiden, in which a high school boy recovers from a nervous breakdown with the help of a coterie of comely young apparitions, in particular, may have hit on a good idea. Noticing that pop culture, including manga, anime, video games, and J-pop music, was one of the country’s most successful exports, the Foreign Minister has decided to make policy around it.

Aso is probably correct when he says, “Kids first pick up Japanese by reading walk-through manuals for video games. Then they listen to the anime show tunes in Japanese. That is why we are seeing a growing number of children who have a keen interest in studying Japanese now.”

He is probably also correct when he says pop culture is a way of increasing interest in Japan.

However, as is his wont, he is taking things a little too far. In order to capitalize on Japan’s trendiness abroad, he has formally asked bureaucrats, most of whom admit they don’t watch much TV or read manga, perhaps because they’re spending their time on foreign policy for some reason , to begin “awareness training,” which entails their reading and studying manga and anime. Aso’s new policy also includes sending up-and-coming young anime and manga artists abroad as cultural ambassadors.

One Foreign Ministry official, devouring manga as the first step in his awareness training, notes that the private sector has a much deeper knowledge of pop culture than the Foreign Ministry, understandable, one would think, considering it is the private sector that produces pop culture.

Granted, the focus is not only on manga - Aso also visited a sumo stable in Bulgaria, home of ozeki Kotooshu - but could it be that his excitement over the worldwide popularity of his passion is causing the Foreign Minister to focus on the wrong things? Is Foreign Ministry involvement really going to help things?

With recent political news this rich, today’s Last Word is: ‘Nuff said.

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