In this edition of TPR News: Lee Teng-hui’s visit to Japan and Yasukuni, more on the Upper House elections, protests in Okinawa, the Whopper comes to Japan, office rents are up, student suicides hit a record high, and the lay judge system is tested.

Politics

Last Thursday, 84 year-old former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where his older brother, who was killed while serving in the Japanese military during the second world war, is enshrined. On Sunday, Foreign Minister Taro Aso said that he saw no problem with Lee visiting the shrine, saying, “Mr Lee is 84 years old and has retired to private life. His older brother is honored at Yasukuni Shrine and I wonder what problem there is in his having visited it while he is still healthy.”

For his part, Lee made his hosts happy by saying that China and South Korea have attacked the Japanese leadership over Yasukuni because of domestic troubles in their own countries and that the media had politicized his visit to the shrine. Without specifying the domestic problems China and South Korea were obscuring with their harping over Yasukuni, Lee called for Japan to resist pressure from outside in the matter, saying,

Yasukuni issues have been made up just because China and Korea could not handle their own domestic problems. And Japan has been too weak (in reacting to the protests.)

Lee rounded out his trip by retracing part of poet Matsuo Basho’s 17th century trek through Tohoku and, optimistically for an 84-year-old, said he planned to return to finish the trip.

On Friday, during his first meeting with an abductee repatriated from North Korea since becoming Chief Cabinet Secretary last September, Yasuhisa Shiozaki was asked by Hitomi Soga for the Japanese government to increase its efforts in searching for her still-missing mother, Miyoshi, who was abducted to North Korea along with Hitomi in 1978. North Korea claims that Miyoshi Soga never entered the country.

In news related to the upcoming Upper House election:

According to a Kyodo poll published on Sunday, an overwhelming majority of registered Japanese voters chose social security issues as the main factor that would influence their vote in the upcoming election. The opinion poll found that 74.9 percent of respondents, up by 23 percentage points from December, felt that social insurance issues would be one of the two issues most important to them at election time.

The issues that voters ranked most important looked like this:

1. Social Security: 74.9%
2. Employment and economic disparities: 38.7%
3. Constitutional reform: 18.6%
4. Tax and fiscal reform: 17.5%
5. Education reform: 13%
6. Political ethics: 3.4%

According to Kyodo’s own press release:

46.9 percent of the respondents expressed hope the Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, the New Komeito party, will lose its majority in the upper chamber, compared with 43.6 percent who said they want the ruling parties to maintain their majority.

Former Nagano Governor Yasuo Tanaka has thrown his hat into the ring and will run for a seat in the proportional representation part of the election as a member of the New Party Nippon, the party that he founded in August 2005.

During the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, numerous civilians committed suicide en masse. While the extent to which the Japanese Imperial Army was involved in those suicides is unclear, there is no serious doubt that it was involved, probably by handing out hand grenades to civilians and explaining that they were to be used to commit suicide. The problem is that the Ministry of Education, in yet another episode is a scandal that rears its ugly head once every few years, doesn’t think students should know that. MEXT instructed history textbook publishers to downplay the military’s involvement in the tragedy.

Some residents of Okinawa disgaree. About 1,000 people in Naha held a protest rally on Saturday demanding that MEXT rescind its controversial directive. About twenty of Okinawa’s 41 municipalities have passed resolutions to the the same end, but LDP members in the prefectural assembly have predictably declined to make a decision on the grounds that what happened remains unclear.

Business and the Economy

Burger King has returned to Japan. After a six year hiatus from the Japanese market, Burger King Japan opened their first new shop in Shinjuku on Friday, strategically (or symbolically) located near to the McDonald’s Japan headquarters. Burger King returns to Japan with an entirely new management team, after the previous group was forced to pull out of the market after operating from 1996 to 2001 and losing in a price war to McDonald’s. This time, Burger King is being run as a joint venture between Lotte (which owns the Lotteria chain of hamburger shops) and Revamp, the management consulting firm responsible for bringing Krispy Kreme to Japan.

This time around, Burger King Japan is betting on the recent trend in large-sized fast food portions to bolster its sales in Japan. A second shop is slated to open in Ikebukuro on June 22.

Last Thurday, the Ministry of Finance announced that the value of Japan’s foreign reserves decreased by $4.49 billion in May, to $911.14 billion. This was the first fall in five months, and comes on the heels of April’s third consecutive record-setting increase.

According to Miki Shoji’s quarterly Tokyo Office Building Market Research Report for April 2007, the average office rent in March 2007 stood at 20,509 yen per tsubo, or 3.3 square meters. This was up 10.88% from March 2006. The average rent at newly built buildings stood at 32,075 yen per tsubo, up 18.56% from a year ago. Average rent at existing buildings was 19,822 yen per tsubo, up 10.13% from a year ago.

By ward, Shibuya remains the most expensive place to rent an office, with Minato (2nd) and Chiyoda (3rd) slowly catching up. Rents in Chuo Ward also increased, though at a slower pace, and rents in Shinjuku came in last, the only ward showing a decline in rent per tsubo since the last quarter.

Foreigners were on the buying end of 25% of Japan’s real estate sales transactions last year.

Thanks to Japan Probe for bringing this story to our attention: New Material, a firm based in Osaka, has been selling miniature torii gates resembling those found outside Shinto shrines that have proven effective in deterring people from illegally dumping their trash on municipal property. New Material’s president told reporters:

If you’re Japanese, you’re bound to have some sort of fear of the gods. We started making them because we thought that if you stick a torii gate up in an area where people have been illegally dumping trash, people are going to think twice before throwing anything else away for fear that the gods may punish them and won’t dump anything…We’ve got to promote these things or they won’t sell. But if we promote them too much, people will realize that they’re not really torii and they’ll lose their deterrent effect.

Society

Should current social trends continue, it has been projected that 40.5% of Japan’s population will be over the age of 65 by 2055, according to the government’s 2007 White Paper on Aging Society. In 2005, 20.1% of Japan’s population was over the 65 year mark. According to Kyodo News, “The white paper recommends that companies promote employment of the elderly and help people in their 50s and beyond shape their postretirement plans.”

Not-exactly reputable news source ZakZak published a piece speculating that Tatsuya Ichihashi, the assumed murderer of Lindsay Ann Hawker, might be hiding out in Tokyo’s seedy Kabukicho district. According to the article, police have searching the area, and have even shown a picture of Ichihashi to several Kabukicho denizens, including a female bar owner in Golden Gai.

According to the Yomiuri, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has ordered each prefectural board of education to reinforce any school buildings that may not be able to withstand an earthquake with an intensity of upper 6 on the Japanese scale, which goes up to 7. The ministry believes that there may be as many as 4,300 buildings at risk of collapse in the event of a powerful earthquake. According to a survey done by the ministry, 38.8% of the nation’s 129,559 school buildings and gymnasiums are lacking in sufficient earthquake resistance, though this figure could rise.

According to a survey conducted in May by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, as many as 13.8% of women who gave birth in 2006 had undergone infertility treatment. According to the paper, 3.5% said that their husbands had received some form of infertility treatment. In 2004, the Japanese government cited financial support for infertility treatment as a priority measure aimed at reversing the downtrend in the birthrate.

In 2006, suicides by students hit a record high in Japan, according to data released by the National Police Agency. Although the total number of suicides, at 32,155, was down 397 from last year, 886 students killed themselves and increases were marked in both the 60 or older and 19 or younger age brackets. The total number of suicides in Japan topped 30,000 for the ninth consecutive year.

As Japan prepares for the implementation of the lay judge system (similar to a jury system), the kinks are being worked out. The first big hurdle has been to make sure lay judge duty will not cause great damage to people’s jobs or companies. On Wednesday, the system got its first test in a mock trial at Tokyo District Court. Setsuko Kamiya of the Japan Times has written an informative pair of articles on the process.

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