TPR News is finally back from its lengthy Winter hiatus just as Tokyo is finally starting to look wintry. Last year’s record for the latest recorded snowfall in Tokyo (officially none) will remain very safely intact as a couple inches of the stuff of Irving Berlin’s dreams piles up - the most we’ve seen for at least a few years now.

In this edition of TPR News: The Diet session opens; Fukuda gets a bump in popularity; the DPJ and LDP get set to tussle over the gas tax; Disney ties up with SoftBank; no smoking in cabs; fewer new adults; and a record number of death sentences.

Politics

The ordinary Diet session began in Friday. Last week’s polls show a slight increase in approval of the Cabinet over last month, with the Asahi Shimbun showing a three point bump, from a low of 31% in December to 34% in the most recent poll, with 45% disapproval. The Yomiuri Shimbun registers 45.6% supporting the Cabinet and 41.6% not supporting it. The Mainichi Shimbun and Sankei-FNN polls show results similar to those of the Asahi poll. Jun Okumura of GlobalTalk 21 has placed the polls in parallel, along with some comparisons between now and how the LDP and DPJ were polling shortly before last July’s Upper House elections.

Although the LDP would almost certainly lose a few seats in a general election and recent polls have shown the DPJ with and advantage over the LDP when respondents were asked who they’d like to win the next election, the DPJ is polling less favorably compared to the LDP now than it did last July when respondents are asked which political party they support, with the LDP leading the DPJ in a Yomiuri poll 32.2.% to 25.6% last year and 35.5% to 16.9% last week. (Yes, Yomiuri polls do tend to look better for the LDP, just as Asahi polls tend to look better for the DPJ.)

The recent Asahi poll also shows the public spit over the LDP’s use of its supermajority, in accordance with Article 59 of the Constitution, to override the DPJ-controlled Upper House’s rejection of the MSDF refueling bill, with 41% expressing approval and the same expressing disapproval. Again, this shows an improvement for the LDP over December’s poll, when 43% were opposed to such an action and 37% thought it appropriate.

A week after the ruling coalition passed the refueling bill, Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba ordered the MSDF to resume its mission. Two ships are slated to leave Japan this week and reach their destination in about three weeks.

Last Wednesday, LDP Election Strategy Council Chairman Makoto Koga and Policy Research Council Chairman Sadakazu Tanigaki agreed to unite their factions in the hope of taking on a larger role within the LDP. Both factions were part of the former Kochi-kai led by former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Koga said that both his and Tanigaki’s factions, like the Kochi-kai’s first Chairman, former Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, focused on people’s livelihoods, provincial areas, and good relations with other Asian nations, and that it thus made sense that they work together. Tanigaki added that Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda had similar ideas and that the newly united factions would work to support the Prime Minister together.

The new faction will have 61 members, making it the third largest in the LDP.

Last Friday, Prime Minister Fukuda opened his first ordinary Diet session by proposing a slew of policies in his policy speech, many, if not most of which his Government is already pursuing in one fashion or another. Refreshingly, considering that he came into office and presided over a twice-extended extraordinary Diet session that spent far too much time on the relatively unimportant MSDF refueling bill to the detriment of issues of greater concern to the public and the country’s future, namely domestic economic ones, Fukuda laid out priorities that ought to be priorities, things that are serious problems that need to be addressed. To pilfer a translation from Observing Japan’s outstanding analysis of the speech:

“In the midst of the change in the global economy symbolized by the rapid growth of China, India, and others, how do we preserve our country’s economic strength, how do we maintain our social security system in tough economic conditions, how do we deal with the problem of declining birth rates, how do we deal with the problems of expanding irregular employment and stagnant regional economies, and also, how do we deal with the fierce global competition in technology, and how do we deal with the problems of the global environment, natural resources, and energy?”

If the Prime Minister can make a sincere start on answering any of those questions, he will have vastly improved on his own record to this point and substantially outshone his predecessor, whose policy pronouncements had all the variety and insight of a Yoshio Kojima routine (and left us feeling like repeating Kojima’s incessant and ubiquitous punchline.)　With the ever-present possibility of being forced to call a general election, an opposition camp that acts like one, and less-than-enthusiastic support from hoi polloi, though, Fukuda has his work cut out for him.

As Ken and Garrett discussed in Seijigiri #39, the Prime Minister also proposed a new portfolio to handle consumer affairs, taking on some responsibilities currently handled by the consumer affairs bureaus of various ministries. This was in line with his desire to see ordinary citizens and consumers play a leading role. It also trumps the DPJ’s proposal for a consumer affairs ombudsman.

In addition, Fukuda spoke of the need to cut carbon emissions.

At this point, it appears that the hotly contested bill of the ordinary Diet session will be an extension to the current temporary gas tax rate. The DPJ sees the tax as an unnecessary economic burden for consumers, who have pay higher prices at the pumps for gasoline and kerosene, whereas the LDP sees the tax as necessary to the maintenance of tax revenues for local governments. The DPJ is expected to stall legislation on the gas tax in the Upper House until the tax expires at the end of March. If that happens, the LDP could again use its supermajority to force a bill through, as the Prime Minister has hinted he would. Again, the DPJ has threatened to submit a censure motion against Fukuda if the LDP-controlled Lower House overrides the decision of the opposition-controlled Upper House.

Stay tuned to TPR for more on the ordinary Diet session as it heats up.

Business and the Economy

The insider-trading scandal involving tax-funded broadcaster NHK appears to have been limited to the three employees implicated earlier this month. An in-house investigation reported by embattled NHK president Genichi Hashimoto revealed that so far there has been no indication that other employees had used inside information gleaned from their jobs to gain personal benefit. 522 out of the 5,470 NHK employees with access to pre-broadcast news strips admitted to trading stocks last year, but none of them are suspected of insider-trading at this point. Two employees revealed that they had bought and sold stocks while on the clock, which is against company regulations, but they do not appear to be connected to the current scandal. (http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080123TDY02310.htm)

The scandal stems from a report that three NHK employees used their professional knowledge of an upcoming business merger involving Kappa Create Co., a sushi company, to conduct advantageous stock transactions. The three suspects made between 90 and 510 thousand yen each as a result of the transactions. Thursday January 24 marks the end of Hashimoto’s term as president of NHK. In addition, managing directors Hiroji Hatakeyama and Eijiro Ishimura resigned on Tuesday to take responsibility for the scandal.

After failing in America, Disney has decided to make another attempt at becoming a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) by creating a line of phones in cooperation with Sharp and offering its services via Softbank. Disney will be Japan’s first MVNO which is basically a company that buys capacity from another company in order to offer its cell phone services. By buying Disney phones, consumers will be able to carry handsets sporting Mickey Mouse logos and enjoy free access to Disney graphics. The first three Disney phones were paraded before the media on Tuesday, but prices have yet to be announced.

In November of last year, oil and food price inflation sped up at a rate not seen during the last ten years. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) took this into consideration along with other dour news regarding the slowly recovering Japanese economy, such as decreasing wages for 11 straight months, when it decided not to touch the benchmark interest rate by keeping it 0.5 percent. Toshihiko Fukui, governor of the BOJ, also blamed the subprime-mortgage problem in the US as being another reason why the bank decided not to increase the rate. He said that the economy is now expected to grow at a slightly slower rate than the 1.5 to 2 percent predicted for the year ending this March.

Society

Tokyo recently became the 15th prefecture in Japan to ban smoking in taxis. The ban went into effect on Monday January 7th, and it covers roughly 95% of the cabs in the capital. The only major incident reported by the media since the ban went into effect was in Saitama where a drunk man punched a driver after he was told he couldn’t smoke in the car. It turned out that the passenger was himself a taxi driver.

The number of young men and women reaching the legal age of adulthood in Japan was only 1.35 million people or 1.06% of the entire population. There were 40,000 fewer new adults than last year, and marks the lowest tally on record. 1987 was a year when only 1.36 million university aged individuals attained the right to drink and vote, and the new record low is another sign of population woes to come.

Another record, which was set last year, was the number of death sentences handed down by the courts in Japan. 46 defendants were added to the number of inmates on death row in 2007, and that marked an increase of two over 2006 which was the previous record holder.

A group of 58 plaintiffs in Aomori has failed in their attempt to nullify a decision by the local government back in 1990 to OK the construction of a low-level nuclear waste disposal plant in the city of Rokkasho. An appeal of a lower court decision siding with the defendant was upheld on Tuesday by the Sendai High Court.

Open since 1992, the disposal plant, which is part of a larger nuclear complex in Rokkasho, is currently home to about 200,000 drums of low-level nuclear waste and will be maintained indefinitely. It takes roughly 300 years of underground storage for low-level nuclear waste to lose most of its radioactivity.

Finally, in the ever-escalating battle between anti-whaling activists (who can’t seem to resist actions that make them look unreasonable) and the pro-whaling camp (who seem to be largely reactionaries with a miraculous lack of understanding of the reasons their opponents oppose whaling), a new tool has been released: the game Harpooned: “Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator.”

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