In this edition of TPR News, we look at gubernatorial, prefectural assembly and municipal assembly election results, Mr Ishihara’s plans for his third term as Governor of Tokyo, Wen Jiabao’s visit to Japan, China’s formal recognition of the North Korean abduction issue, KDDI’s move into the US market, and the continuing manhunt for Tatsuya Ishihashi, the prime suspect in the killing of Lindsay Ann Hawker.

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Politics - Local Elections

With just over 2.8 million votes, Shintaro Ishihara was re-elected as Governor of Tokyo on Sunday, saying, “I feel like the defending champion who won his boxing match.” His vote count represented 51.1% of all votes cast. His closest challenger, former Miyagi Governor Shiro Asano, came just short of 1.7 million votes, garnering 30.8% of the vote. Japan Communist Party-backed Manzo Yoshida, the only candidate to have been officially supported by a major party, earned just shy of 630,000 votes, or 11.4%.

At a post-election press conference, Ishihara announced that he would do everything in his power to make good on his campaign pledges, including his campaign for Tokyo to host the 2016 Olympic Games, a plan for future shared use of the U.S. Air Force’s Yokota base in western Tokyo for military and commercial flights, and intentions to move Tokyo’s Tsukiji’s fish market - the largest such market in the world - to a location facing Tokyo Bay. Ishihara also plans to remain a thorn in the side of the central government by ignoring its standards for approving day-care centers to support working mothers and instead creating the capital’s own set of regulations.

In an interview with NHK television on Sunday evening, Ishihara continued to assert his claim that his role was to step in where the central government was not serving the people, citing the growing number of residents of Tokyo (as well as the surrounding prefectures) who suffer from kafunshou, or hay fever, and the central’s government’s inaction on this problem thus far.

On the day following the election, Ishihara awoke early and began his round of eight media interviews from the hotel where he had stayed. In response to criticisms that he had failed to explain some issues in sufficient detail, including expenses incurred on his official trips, Ishihara told reporters, “I’ve held press conferences once a week. If reporters had asked questions, I would have answered them.”

The Japan Times has summed up last Sunday’s unified local elections in a piece entitled, “Voters turn to the safety of status quo,” which points out that all nine incumbent Gubernatorial candidates were re-elected by their constituencies. Regarding the supposed drift of voters away from non-major party candidates, Aiji Tanaka, a political science professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, commented:

Voters couldn’t find what they were looking for in the (new) candidates and that is why they voted for the incumbents — they were the acceptable choice. What the voters want is someone with a clear vision and leadership, regardless of political ties.

The Asahi Shimbun issued a similar analysis of the election, noting that many exit poll respondents in Kanagawa and Hokkaido Prefectures who had said they would like to see a change in prefectural politics nonetheless voted for the incumbent governor.

In races for prefectural assembly seats, 190 out of 367 women who stood for office were victorious, representing a record number of women gaining prefectural assembly seats in Japan.

Despite the Democratic Party of Japan having fielded candidates in only 5 of the 13 gubernatorial elections, in what the Yomiuri has described as a ‘warning’ to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the DPJ made solid progress at the prefectural assembly level in Sunday’s election. DPJ-backed candidates won 375 seats in 44 prefectural assemblies, raising their numbers from the 205 seats that were won in the previous elections in 2003. On the other hand, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party took home 1,212 seats, short of the overall majority of 1,273, and down from 1,309 in the unified elections in 2003.

The percentage of prefectural assembly seats now held by the LDP stands at 47.6%, which is the lowest figure in the party’s history. The DPJ’s gains increased its holdings to 14.7% of nationwide assembly seats.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, LDP Secretary General Hidenao Nakagawa played down the effects of the DPJ’s gains, saying, “The DPJ gained more seats than before, but I think it’s the effect of municipal mergers,” and that the result, “stems partly from the fact that we narrowed down candidates. We think it was a firm outcome given that there are independents who are affiliated with the ruling parties.”

With the additions of Kochi, Kagoshima and Yamagata, the only remaining prefectural assembly that does not have a single DPJ member is that of Okinawa, which is not elected as part of the nationwide local elections. The only prefecture which has a majority of DPJ members in its assembly is Iwate Prefecture, home of DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa.

The DPJ fared especially well in urban areas. In the 15 major municipal assembly elections that were held Sunday, the DPJ became the majority party in Nagoya and Kawasaki, gaining 28 seats in Nagoya (where it now holds 5 more seats than the LDP), and 18 seats in Kawasaki (one more seat than the LDP).

On Monday morning, DPJ Secretary General Yukio Hatoyama told reporters, “We have been able to lay the groundwork for the Upper House election. The party’s policy to field candidates in a proactive way proved effective.”

National Politics

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in Japan from South Korea today, becoming the first Chinese leader to visit Japan in seven years. Bloomberg reports that he and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will discuss improved ties and environmental and energy issues today. Wen is set to address the Diet tomorrow.

The Yomiuri has reported that Wen and and Abe are to issue a joint document “stating China’s willingness to cooperate on resolving the abduction issue.” This would be the first formal mention between the two countries on this issue. In addition, they are set to discuss the lifting of a ban on Chinese rice imports to Japan, intellectual property protection, promotion of studies by a joint research panel of Japanese and Chinese experts on historical issues, and the disposal of chemical weapons abandoned in China by the Imperial Japanese Army.

Business and the Economy

KDDI, the operators of Japan’s AU mobile phone company, have announced plans to enter the US market. It appears that KDDI intends to focus on the market of Japanese living in the United States. Digital World Tokyo tells us that:

KDDI Mobile, as the new company will be known, is aimed mainly at Japanese people living in the US, which will disappoint the booming numbers of Japanophile gadget fans in that country. Fortunately, they don’t need to fret about missing out on the high-end phones Japan is famous for, as KDDI Mobile will initially offer only the rather uninspiring choice of a drab Sanyo 2400 handset or an LG 225.

Putting aside the question of why anyone, Japanese or otherwise would not just go for the better selection of phones on Sprint, it’s interesting to note that media coverage so far has focused on the absence of ‘cool’ Japanese handsets at the new company’s launch.

On Monday, the Cabinet Office released it’s Economy Watcher’s Index for March. The index surveys 2000 workers who deal with the nation’s consumers in order to gauge the strength of domestic demand. For the first time in six months, the index climbed into an overall ‘optimistic’ score, although when quizzed about future prospects, all six industries surveyed showed a decrease in optimism about the future when compared to last month.

On Tuesday, The Bank of Japan’s policy board decided to leave benchmark interest rates unchanged at 0.5 percent, as economists had expected, after having doubled the rate to 0.5 percent in February. The BOJ’s nine Policy Board members unanimously reached the decision at the end of a two-day meeting, and issued a statement saying that the bank, “Will encourage the uncollateralized overnight call rate to remain at around 0.5 percent.”

Economic cooperation between Japan and Vietnam continues, as the municipal government of Ho Chi Minh City has apparently approved the construction of Vietnam’s first subway system, for which the Japan Bank for International Cooperation will provide $904.7 million. The subway is expected to cost a total of $1.1 billion; 83 percent of the money is set to be provided by Japanese aid. Japan remains the single most generous donor to Vietnam. It has pledged $890 million in aid for this year, which is 6.5 percent higher than the $835.6 million it promised in 2006.

Society

Two and a half weeks after the grisly slaying of Lindsay Ann Hawker, the whereabout of prime suspect and assumed murderer Tatsuya Ichihashi remain unknown. The story is slowly but predictably fading away from major media attention in Japan. Shawn from Let’s Japan put it well on his blog: “The media did its part in plastering Ichihashi’s face all over the TV but it’s role is acting as the mouthpiece for the police, and the police have been very tight-lipped. After two weeks in the media, the story is about out of gas. There’s nothing fresh to report.” He then commented that due to the lack of fresh material, the foreign media has been, “asking questions about safety in Japan.”

That brings us to a recent article in Britain’s Daily Mail that has sparked some controversy, as well as plenty of discussion in the English Japan-o-blogosphere. The article, I was stalked in Japan like Lindsay, has drawn fire for statements such as, “Another British teacher describes how she nearly suffered the same fate as Lindsay Hawker at the hands of a Japanese man obsessed with Western women,”, “…she wasn’t warned by the teaching organisation (JET) about the strange fascination some Japanese men have for Western women,”, “Because we’re so much taller and more curvaceous than Japanese women, the local men can be a little bit leery and pay you far more attention than would be acceptable or polite in Britain,”, “All Japanese women are absolutely tiny,” and so on.

If you are seeking information on the murder of Lindsay Hawker, our advice is to pretty much forget about the traditional media and bookmark this page at Japan Probe.

In a recent piece entitled “Is help really on way for the working poor?”, the Japan Times asserts, “As Japanese society becomes more polarized between successes and failures, the widening income disparity is threatening to become permanent.” The piece points out that on Tokyo’s minimum wage of 719 yen in Tokyo, working full-time for 2,000 hours a year, one would earn between 1.3 million yen and 1.4 million yen. Monthly, this breaks down to about 126,500 yen, which is lower than the 140,000 yen per month that single people in certain age brackets can earn on welfare.

Finally, if you’re considering getting divorced and taking half of your husband’s pension, it might be more complicated than you think. It has been pointed out that not only do divorcing couples have to reach an agreement on how to divide the pension payments, but that under the pension law, the wife must be considered as having paid into the pension scheme for at least the minimum of 25 years (either by working herself or by being the spouse of a salaried worker). In principle, she must also wait until she turns 65 before collecting her share of the pension.

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