In this edition of TPR News: Prime Minister Fukuda gives his first press conference of the year; the DPJ polls thirteen points ahead of the LDP; both camps get ready for a general election; Nagano joins Juki Net; the Nikkei plummets; Tokyo Stock Exchange President blasts the government and regulators; Toyota passes Ford; casino bill to be presented to the Diet; prisoners are unhappy with their pajamas; Waseda opens a journalism school; and more.

Politics

The kerfuffle over whether or not Ichiro Ozawa was resigning, the inability to use an Upper House majority to get anything done, public opinion polls showing people see gridlock in the Diet as a worry, and a new Prime Minister from the LDP have not been enough to turn people away from the Democratic Party of Japan or boost confidence in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. According to a Mainichi Shimbun survey, 82% of respondents were interested in a possible general election, 51% said they’d vote primarily based on issues, and 46% said they hoped for a DPJ victory, as compared to only 33% wishing for an LDP win. The poll shows the DPJ’s advantage over the LDP increasing from a 7% lead just after the DPJ’s victory in the July 29th Upper House elections to 13% in the most recent poll.

Presumably, voters are angered by the flood of scandals that have poured out of the LDP over the past year or so and by the myriad instances of LDP mismanagement. From a solid majority approval rating when he took office in September, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s approval rating has fallen to around 30%.

At the end of his four-day trip to China at the end of 2007, Fukuda made comments taken by many to be a hint that he would bow to pressure from within his party and reshuffle the Cabinet before the start of the ordinary Diet session on January 18th. However, on Friday, in his first press conference of the year, the Prime Minister nipped such rumors in the bud, saying, “The current Cabinet members are doing their utmost in dealing with the policy issues they face. They have only been in office for a short period. I want those ministers to continue with their work.”

Explaining his reasoning, Fukuda cited the obviously tight time frame in which a reshuffle would have to be done, there being less than three days between the end of the twice-extended extraordinary Diet session and the opening of the ordinary Diet session - a period that will also include the party conference. He also said he did not intend to dissolve the Lower House and call general elections prior Japan’s hosting of the G8 Summit in Toyako, Hokkaido in July.

Despite Fukuda’s assertions, both his own ruling LDP-New Komeito coalition and the DPJ-led opposition camp are preparing for an early general election, with both major parties having chosen candidates for 219 of the Lower House’s 300 single seat electoral districts and the LDP having chosen candidates for 61 more and the DPJ for 13 more as of Monday.

The LDP will be looking at having to decide whom to back in six districts where postal privatization rebels who won seats through proportional representation will be facing their replacements and will have to decide what to do with ten rebels who lost their seats in 2005, but are trying to make comebacks.

In a departure from its previous policy, the Japanese Communist Party will not field candidates in every district, possibly contesting as few as 140 seats.

In the press conference, Fukuda also said that during his first 100 days in office “not everything went according to my intentions” and that “it was a 100-day period in which it became extremely clear what had to be overcome.”

Addressing possibly the most serious problem facing the government, the fiasco at the Social Insurance Agency, the Prime Minister apologized to the holders of the 50 million missing or misidentified pension accounts and that a new social insurance advisory panel tasked with delivering an interim report this summer was expected to be set up this month. This follows Fukuda’s invitation to the DPJ to join a “People’s Council” on the issue, which was rejected by DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa on the grounds that the proper place for such discussions was in the Diet.

Iwakuni native Yoshihiko Fukuda, an LDP Diet member in the Lower House, announced on Saturday that he would run for mayor of his Yamaguchi hometown at the request of local politicans and businesses that support the relocation of an American fighter wing to the city. The previous mayor, Katsusuke Ihara, resigned on December 28th after the city council repeatedly voted down his plan to issue bonds to make up for central government subsidies lost due to his opposition to the relocation. Fukuda (no relation to the Prime Minister) would like to cooperate with the relocation and “link it to the revitalization of the community.” In other words, get those subsidies back.

On Monday, Nagano prefecture reversed the policy of former Governor Yasuo Tanaka and became the last prefecture to begin using parts of the Juki Net national registry system. Nagano had previously rejected the system on the basis of inadequate security and privacy provisions being in place.

While in office, Tanaka not only opposed the Juki Net system, but broke up the press clubs and worked hard to make the prefectural government as transparent as possible. Would that people like him ran the whole country. This observer, for one, is saddened to see his reforms start to dissipate and the whims of Tokyo bureaucrats again take precedence over the needs of the people across the land.
On Sunday, a two-day conference of Japanese and Chinese historians concluded in Beijing. The scholars agreed that they needed to do in-depth research that took into account the historical background of Asia and the rest of the world and expressed a hope for improved relations between their countries.

Business and the Economy

The Tokyo Stock Exchange opened its 2008 session on Friday and was pummeled over the course of the year’s first day of trading. When the dust settled, the Nikkei index closed down by 616.37 points, finishing at 14,691.41, for a loss of 4.03 percent. It was the largest fall ever for an opening day of trading and sent the Nikkei index to its lowest level since July 2006.

On Monday, things got less bad. The Nikkei opened by dropping sharply, but regained a bit before the break for lunch. When trading resumed, however, the index fell yet again, and finished the day down 190.86 points, closing at 14,500.55, for a 1.30% loss on the day. The Nikkei has thus lost about 5.27% of its value in the first two trading days of 2008.

Although Toyota shares slid in trading, there was good news for the firm this week as the Japanese auto giant announced that in 2007 it had sold 48,226 more cars in the US than Ford. Toyota has thus become number two in the US in terms of sales, taking the position that Ford held for 75 years. For 2007 US sales, General Motors moved 3.82 million vehicles, down 6% from last year. Toyota sold 2.62 million cars and trucks, up 2.7% on the year, and Ford’s sales slipped 12% to end up at 2.58 million vehicles.

Toyota has downgraded its US-based sales projections for 2008 from 3 percent to somewhere between 1 and 2 percent.

In terms of domestic sales, Japan’s automakers saw a 7.6% fall in sales of cars, trucks and buses in 2007. This was the fouth consecutive year of decline, and sales of new autos reached their lowest point since 1972, 35 years ago. Data from the Japan Automobile Dealers’ Association shows that 3.434 million vehicles were sold in Japan last year, not including mini-vehicles.

Sales of mini-vehicles fell 5.1% in 2007, showing a decline for the first time in four years, according to the Japan Mini-Vehicle Association.

As worries over the health of the US economy and soaring oil prices provide downward pressure on global equity markets, as well as those in Japan, an editorial in Saturday’s Japan Times declared:

It is imperative that the corporate sector will increase wages to stimulate personal consumption, which accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s GDP. The government, on its part, must stabilize the pension and other social security systems to increase people’s confidence in their future.

In an interview published by the Nikkei over the weekend, Tokyo Stock Exchange President Atsushi Saito told the newspaper, “Government regulations and court rulings regarding hostile takeover bids prompted many foreign companies to leave the country last year. The Japanese government and the financial industry want to turn Tokyo into an international financial center, but it has all been talk so far, with few concrete actions taken.”

Last Wednesday, Jiji Press reported that some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party intend to submit a bill to the Diet in 2008 that would make it legal for casinos to be build in Japan. Back in 2006, the LDP announced plans to open a small number of casinos in Japan in order to evaluate how they would operate. The goal is to have the casinos be set up by cities and towns and run by private firms. Ultimately, lawmakers hope the establishment of casinos will help to draw in foreign tourists and provide a shot in the arm to economies in regional areas.

In a venture that may be less of a - well - gamble, Digital Garage has announced a business tie-up with Twitter, the California-based provider of mircoblogging services. Digital Garage, which manages online brands such as Kakaku.com and Technorati Japan, plans to invest about $10 million in the project and bring microblogging to a wider Japanese audience. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by Evan Williams, who also developed Google’s Blogger platform.

Society

Five years ago this week, at least 20 people were hospitalized across Japan because they nearly choked to death while eating mochi, a sticky rice treat that is traditionally consumed on or around New Year’s Day. People 65 years of age and older tend to be the most susceptible to choking on the gummy rice cakes.

At least 16 people in Tokyo were hospitalized during the first two days of 2008 because they bit off more mochi than they could swallow. It is generally advised that the rice cake be chopped into small pieces before eating.

Five Kanto-region residents died during the holidays after choking on mochi this year.

A survey of Japanese prisoners who were released during the year to March 2007 confirmed that the pajamas they wear while doing time are, in fact, unfashionable.

The lack of space and poor food quality were also derided by the ex-cons.

While many may view the conditions inside Japan’s correctional facilities as just another necessary part of justice, Amnesty International’s Makoto Teranaka reminds readers that the conditions inside violate the prisoner’s human rights. Additionally, Japan’s extraordinarily high conviction rate, which is receiving increasingly critical press coverage these days, might also mean that a portion of those prisoners should not be in there in the first place.

A frozen baby mammoth made its public debut in Tokyo on Wednesday January 2. The mammoth, believed to be about 37,000 years old, was unearthed near a river in Siberia in May 2007.

The 50 kilo baby female (a little heavier than an adult German Shepherd) is in nearly perfect condition as it was encased in permafrost for more than 350 centuries.

The mammoth, named Lyuba, will remain on display at the Marunouchi Building near Tokyo Station in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, until February 3, 2008.

Lyuba is in Japan for CT-scanning (to be scheduled around her hectic schedule in the limelight) which should help provide some more details about the environment in which she lived.

Waseda, an elite private university in downtown Tokyo, is planning to start training proper journalists bycreating a school of journalism within Waseda University’s graduate school. The journalism courses that are a part of the political science and economics department are to be expanded to cover all aspects of journalism and journalists.

There is currently no school of journalism in Japan that preps aspiring reporters in the trade to the extent that is common in Europe, Australia, and North America. Reporters and media agencies in Japan, severely handcuffed and muzzled by the press club system, are not inclined to conduct anything resembling investigative reporting. Reporters routinely wait until they are instructed to report on something that is newsworthy and are forced to rely heavily on press releases provided by the organizations they cover, lest they be expelled from the press club and lose their access to sources. This results in uniformity across media outlets and the press arriving before investigators when major business and political scandals break.

One of the founders of the new department, Seishi Sato, has expressed hopes that graduates of Waseda’s graduate school of journalism will work to reform what ails Japan’s media from the inside.

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