TPR News: Monday, January 29, 2007 - Women are Machines, Kyuma is a Headache, Bird Flu is on the Rise, & more
In this edition of TPR News, Welfare Minister Yanagisawa joins the gaffe parade, but Defense Minister Kyuma is not to be outdone. Abe continues to leave out the details, the Upper House Vice President resigns amid scandal, Japan tries to protect its whalers, Horiemon says he’s being persecuted, Fujiya gets dirtier, and more fretting about the birthrate.
Politics
In a clever step to improve the beleaguered ruling party’s popularity and to show his understanding side, Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare Yanagisawa Hakuo lamented the falling birthrate by saying,
“The number of women between the ages of 15 and 50 is fixed. The number of birth-giving machines (and) devices is fixed, so all we can ask is that they do their best per head.”
That’s right, he called women “birth-giving machines” while pushing for people to pull together in what this observer thinks is hardly a crisis, as explained in last week’s edition of TPR News. At least the comment was made for domestic consumption.
D’oh! The story has been picked up by a bit of the Western media, with even blog giant Boing Boing deciding to dedicate a post to the minister’s words, thus raising the question of whether or not Japan’s ministers are aware that in the information age, what they say can make them look bad in more than one country.
Defense Minister Kyuma Fumio, determined to strain Japan-US relations on what appears
to be a tenuous grasp of the facts related to his job, has publicly criticized Japan’s closest ally for the second time in a week. This time, Kyuma said, “The United States doesn’t understand (the importance of) spadework,” meaning that the US had been ham-handed in dealing with the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa. While both governments had agreed on the plan, Kyuma said the US had ignored the objections of Okinawa’s newly-elected Governor Nakaima, who has expressed reservations over the design of the runway at the new base.
After Kyuma’s ill-advised comments on Iraq, which he clarified by blaming it on the translators, US State Department Director of the Office of Japanese Affairs, James Zumwalt, said any further public critical comments could make it difficult to hold the so-called “two plus two” talks between Japan’s Foreign and Defense Ministers and the US’s Secretaries of State and Defense.
Kyuma’s comments have caused concern within the Government, which has said Japan should extend its support to President Bush as an ally in the face of the criticism he faces both at home and abroad. Kyuma showed that he had a handle on government-speak by issuing non-apologies while refraining from sticking his neck out. He said the Cabinet had issued a statement, so he stood by it, while at the same time saying he’d thought something was amiss when the US invaded Iraq (despite apparently not remembering that Japan had supported the invasion.)
In a policy speech on Friday, Prime Minister Abe continued his push for constitutional reform, saying Japan had to put World War II behind it and increase its role in international security, which would entail revision of the Constitution. He also said the country needed to instill patriotism in the classroom and bolster its alliance with the US. (Presumably he has Kyuma working on that.) While Abe repeated his goals and his mantra about a “Beautiful Country,” observers still await more concrete details.
As political scandals expand and engulf both parties, DPJ member and House of Councillors Vice President Tsunoda Giichi stepped down on Friday amid allegations that he had failed to report 25 million yen in political donations. Tsunoda had been subjected pressure from within his own opposition party, which had hoped to focus attention on the financial misdeeds of the ruling LDP in the newly begun ordinary Diet session.
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Society
The Marmot’s Hole, an excellent blog on all sorts of issues related to life in Korea, has published a piece on the number of foreigners living in Korea. Apparently, 1.84% of Korea’s population is now made up of foreign residents. The raw number of foreigners living in Korea has jumped from 49,500 in 1990 to 891,000 as of November 2006. Government projections claim that the number of foreigners living in Korea is calculated to reach 9.10 million by 2050. The original article, for our Korean-reading listeners, is here.
After New Zealand’s government released Air Force footage of Japanese whalers at work in the Ross Sea, Japan urged them not to reveal the exact location of the vessels, which plan to kill and process 910 Minke and ten Fin whales this year, citing concerns for the safety of the crew. Greenpeace has a ship on the way the Sea to attempt to interpose itself between the whales and whalers and Sea Shepherd has outfitted one of its ships to be able to ram the whalers.
As investigations into the falsified earthquake-resistance data supplied by first-class architect Mizuochi Mitsuo continue, officials in Toyama prefecture, where 119 of his 168 buildings are located, ordered emergency inspections of over 100 of his buildings.
Based on the continuation of the current pension system, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare projected that pensions might be able to continue to constitute over 51% of income for retirees in the future, but could also slip to as low as 47%, should the birthrate remain at 1.26 per woman. The report concedes that a wide variety of factors - from the country’s economic growth to the birthrate to the wisdom of the investment decisions made could influence that number quite a bit.
In a related story, the same Ministry reported that Japan’s population could drop to 100 million by 2055 if steps were not taken to arrest the declining birthrate. This, of course, does not accout for possible increases in immigration or other such mitigating factors.
The times, they are a-changin’. Remember the good old days of over a century ago when a woman got divorced, had a baby within 300 days of the divorce, and the child was automatically assumed to be her ex-husband’s? Remember ‘em like they were yesterday? Yeah, that’s because that’s still the law. The law, Article 772 of Civil Law, is set for review, though, as cases of separation preceding divorce and premature birth start to cause an increasing number of legal headaches. Why is this even an issue? It’s 2007. Two words: paternity test.
Avian influenza appears to be spreading. The Agriculture Ministry reported that bird flu was suspected in the deaths of 22 chickens in Takahashi, Okayama. The report comes on the heels of the revelation that the recent outbreak in Miyazaki was, in fact, the virulent H5N1 strain. Until tests are confirmed, the Ministry is requesting that farmers not move livestock.
According to a government poll, the percentage of people who said they would support a revision to the Civil Code that would allow married couples to use different surnames decreased by 5.1 percentage points from 2001, while the percentage of those opposed to such a revision increased by a comparable amount. While many respondents said it would be OK for married women to use maiden names as common names, only a fifth of those who supported a revision said they themselves planned to use or used a different surname from their spouses.
This observer’s neighborhood doesn’t count. Despite the fact that I would swear there was an ever-so-faint sprinkling of rather dry snow in Nakano last week, the Meteorological Agency only counts Otemachi and says this year’s mild winter is on pace to have Tokyo’s latest first snowfall since records began to be kept in 1876. The current record-holder is 1960, when the first snow fell on February 10th.
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Business
Taking advantage of improved political relations in the wake of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo in December, Japan and India have made plans to start negotiations on a comprehensive free trade deal next week.
While Japan’s trade with India was a mere $6.2 billion in 2005, not much next to $173.4 billion with China, Japan sees enormous room for growth in India and will seek to begin negotiations with steps such as the reduction of India’s 100% tariff on imported cars. India will seek a loosening of Japanese visa rules for medical professionals and engineers and a reduction in tariffs on products such as shrimp. The deal will be Japan’s eighth trade pact since signing its first with Singapore in 2002.
Fujiya’s dirt continues to pile up as living moth larvae were found in a can of assorted chocolates in Gifu. Despite moths being found in Fujiya’s chocolates in Asahikawa, Hokkaido in 2003 and 2006, the company said the Gifu incident was a strange accident and issued no recall. A spokesman for the company said, “We carry out thorough sanitary management,” which is, if I may be so bold, obviously untrue.
“I found this frightening, I’d been working hard, and it happened so suddenly and without any warning,” said former Livedoor CEO Horie Takafumi, better known as Horiemon, as he shed a tear and explained that he was being persecuted by prosecutors who wanted to take him down a peg by trying him on trumped up charges. The flamboyant celebrity businessman, on trial for using phony companies and other swindles to inflate Livedoor’s stock price, said he was not questioned by Securities officials prior to his arrest, as is standard practice in cases of white collar crime in Japan. If convicted (a near-certainty in any criminal trial in Japan), he’ll face four years in prison.
Last Word
(One of the shortest to date.)
Horiemon is only 34 now. He flew around on a private jet with myriad ladyfriends. He tried to change the way Nippon Pro Baseball did business when he vied for the Sendai franchise that went to his rival Rakuten. He openly criticized those with whom he disagreed. He was one of Koizumi’s “assassins” in the 2005 snap election, although he was not an official LDP candidate, in which he ran against veteran Diet member Kamei Shizuka in Hiroshima. During the campaign, he did what he did best, he mocked Kamei, calling himself richer and better-looking. He lost. Perhaps Horie’s greatest talent was making enemies in high places. Does this have anything to do with the ferocity with which prosecutors have gone after him? I’m not saying it does.
But I’m not saying it doesn’t, either.
Related Posts:
- Defense Minister Kyuma is Gone: Shouganai
- Seijigiri #23: Abe, Aso and Kyuma to the US, and the state of constitutional reform in Japan
- Seijigiri #28: The Upper House Campaign Gets Underway, Kyuma and Koike
- When a Gaffe is Not a Gaffe and Why It Matters
- In Defense of ex-Defense Minister Kyuma and His A-Bomb Remark
