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Newsround brings to your desktop, every week (ish), a round-up of the news affecting Japan. The editor will go to no effort whatsoever to be either objective or impartial. JUN 24 - JUN 30 Boy kills family over 'poor grade' At the end of last week, a house fire in Tawaramoto in Nara prefecture killed a woman aged 38, her son, 7, and daughter, 5, who had been asleep at the time. The father was not in the house and the 16-year-old son was then reported to be missing.The boy was eventually tracked down in Kyoto, and confessed to police that he had started the fire. He was reported to have told police that he was afraid of his parents finding out he'd lied about the result of an English test as they were due to attend a PTA meeting the next day. Much has been made of this in the media, with stories of unbearable pressure being put on the boy by apparently overbearing parents, both of whom were doctors, and expected him to follow in their footsteps. While the boy had always got top grades at elementary school, his family had transferred him to an expensive elite private high school where he struggled, and was regularly beaten by his father for his failure. Confusingly, while some coverage of the story has not made it clear whether the boy intended to kill the family or just ensure his parents missed the meeting by burning down the house, some newspapers were reporting that the bodies "bore knife wounds", though autopsy reports later stated the cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning. ...And never the twain shall meet On June 3 a high school student died when he was pinned between the floor of a lift and the 12th floor ceiling in a block of flats in Tokyo's Minato-ku. The lift was built by Swiss company, Schindler Elevator KK. Some days later and Schindler had not, as the Japanese custom dictates, made any form of public apology, which hugely upset the Japanese media, who then turned the story into something of a witchhunt. Meanwhile, at their Swiss headquarters, Schindler were admitting nothing, as is the Western tradition, until a full investigation had apportioned blame, as they clearly believed that blame lie not with them but with the (Japanese) maintenance company who it was claimed had failed to carry out the requisite maintenance. President of the company Roland Hess's statement to a news conference - "We never, never had a fatality due to product designs" - clearly puts the onus on the maintenance company. One can claim that Schindler had been doing business in Japan long enough to know the lie of the land, and should have offered up an abject apology straight away. But if a car goes wrong, who is to blame - the mechanic who services it, or the manufacturer? Schindler's argument was that they weren't about to issue an apology until it was established that it was them that is was due from. The Japanese media's uniform line appears to be that they should have anyway. And while the name of the Japanese maintenance company hasn't even been revealed in the press, Schindler's reputation in Japan has effectively been shot. Stupid is as stupid does The most incredible story of the week comes from Nagano where a woman was swindled out of a great deal of money. Big money swindles are common in Japan, with credulous people falling prey to schemes which have famously included phone calls purporting to be from local police demanding that the person post bail for a family member who's just been arrested. Rather than check first, many gullible citizens have just gone straight to the bank and in some cases transferred millions of yen to the given bank account. But this latest one seems simply to have stemmed from an incredibly stupid person answering some faxed spam. Last December, the woman's company received a fax from purporting to be from a Tokyo loan company offering her loans. She answered the (presumably unsolicited) fax asking for ¥10million (£50,000). The spammer informed her she would need to secure the loan with a deposit of ¥800,000 which she duly sent without question. She was then told that other companies would loan her company money and was asked to pay further deposits to each of them. When she had paid all these, she had reportedly made 86 separate payments totalling ¥30million. But then apparently, "the woman became suspicious when she did not receive any loans, and asked that her loan contracts be cancelled." Yes. Only after handing over nearly £150,000 (when she needed a loan in the first place) did she 'become suspicious'. But wait. There's more. The ever resourceful con artist, sensing the contest wasn't yet over, chanced his arm by telling her that she needed to pay "cancellation charges". She then made a further 18 payments totalling ¥17 million. (Are you keeping up? This person who needed a loan has now handed over ¥47,000,000 - very nearly a quarter of a million pounds.) Apart from the obvious questions about this person's astonishing stupidity, you also have to ask where on earth does someone who feels it necessary to apply for a loan lay there hands on that sort of money, because it certainly wasn't from "the loan company" who faxed her. JUN 17 - JUN 23 Will they, won't they? Rumours were flying this week that North Korea was about to test launch its new Taepodong-2 missile, a little number with an estimated range of up to 6,000km, so quite a few governments got a bit jittery. Not that they did much beyond moaning about it in public, and saying that 'someone' should do something. Japan's hoping the US does something. The US is hoping China does something. Everyone's given up on South Korea doing anything about it.North Korea last launched a missile in 1998, prompting outrage and sanctions, but has been observing a self-imposed moratorium since then. Or just ran out of missiles. Who knows. Japan has been itching to say that if the test goes wrong (or right, depending on the motives) and any part of the missile lands on Japan, it'll be considered an act of war. But of course they're constitutionally not allowed to say that. So they've just been making promises of 'appropriate responses' and 'stern actions', but of course encased in such damp language that it amounts to not much more than a finger-wagging. Coming or going? After announcing on Monday that Japan Self-Defence Force troops would extend their humanitarian mission in Iraq, PM Koizumi then announced on Tuesday that in fact they were all coming home. There have been months of speculation about when Japanese troops would be pulled out of what has been a domestically devisive mission, leading to unusually vocal criticism of the decision to commit troops in the first place. Although when asked about the timing, Koizumi said that it wasn't a factor in the decision, making the call now will mean that most troops should be back around the time that Koizumi steps down himself in September. Nice day at school, dear? Seven kids from a Tokyo kindergarten had to be taken to hospital on Monday after a tear gas leak. I can hear all your questions and I'll try to address them. They were going to be taken for a walk, and the member of staff accompanying them took a can of tear gas out of a box in order to take it with her, when it evidently leaked, affecting the children. Why did the staff member take along some tear gas? I don't know. Is this common practice in Japanese kindergartens? I don't know. What exactly would the purpose of said tear gas have been? Was it to be some extreme form of toddler crowd control? I don't know. OK, so I didn't address many of your questions. Sorry about that. Clarity, people! The Mainichi Shimbun is not the best-written of 'newspapers', but one of its stories left me confused this week. CHATAN, Okinawa -- Foreigners are suspected of using a counterfeit 20-dollar note at a convenience store here, police said Saturday......seems to imply that all 6.6billion of us (look how alike we all are!) were somehow involved in this misdeed. That would require a 20 dollar note of hitherto unseen proportions, so it's probably safer to assume that the number of crooked foreign scum involved is somewhere between 2 and 6.6billion. (Perhaps a little closer to the former than the latter.) JUN 10 - JUN 16 Aso in "Doesn't say something offensive" shocker! Far from it, in fact. Whose leadership election votes is the boy after? The Yasukuni Shrine controversy was back on the table this week. Until now, politicians have shied away from it on the basis that under the separation of state and religion, the government can't interfere in religious affairs, choosing instead to say that any actions taken should be voluntary. But this week, Aso tabled a proposal that Yasukuni be stripped of its status as a religious entity, which would open up the possibility of the separation of the enshrined class A war criminals from the majority. Is this finally a bit of progressive foreign policy?Japan puts its foot down Japan moved a step closer to imposing sanctions on North Korea this week "if it does not cooperate in clearing up its past abductions of Japanese citizens". By contrast, DPRK says that the abduction issue is settled and Japan's refusal to let it lie will result in stern actions from Pyongyang. The issue is of course far from settled with the Koreans vacillating between refusing to acknowledge it, to deliberately fogging the issue with false information (viz. sending "the wrong bones" back to Japanese relatives last year, which turned out to be the remains of not one, but 5 random people). Sanctions are said to include a ban on docking of North Korean ships at Japanese ports, and a halt to private money transfer from Japan to the DPRK. Pyongyang has always said that the imposition of sanctions would be regarded as a declaration of war, but at the same time has also refused to negotiate or deal diplomatically. It's raining again Tsuyu, the rainy season (the mystical 5th one), has finally arrived with a vengeance. Torrential downpours have triggered huge landslides in southern Japan, most notably in Okinawa, where in 3 towns, 370 people have been evacuated, and in Naha, residents of a hillside apartment block were moved out as the entire building teetered on collapse into a nearby newly-opened up chasm. Flooding and landslides have been predicted widely throughout Kyushu and Shikoku. How to pass time in the corridors of power Those in the know routinely report that Prime Minister Koizumi is an extraordinarily crude fella. Visiting dignitaries and colleagues alike are treated to suggestive stories, lewd anecdotes and filthy jokes. Koizumi, who has remained unmarried since his divorce in 1982, likes to play up his bachelorhood and according to those close to him, can't keep casual conversation off the topic of sex for long. From the Shukan Gendai magazine this week comes a story involving an unnamed politician. He reports that not long after Koizumi assumed power, they had a conversation in which Koizumi reportedly confided, "Gee, you're lucky. You're free. Ever since I've become prime minister, all I've been able to do is this," making the universal gesture for... manual stimulation. Which confirms what people of many countries say about their top politicians. JUN 3 - JUN 9 Akita murder The story that has Japan gripped this week is the development in the heart-rending story of the murder of 7-year-old Goken Yoneyama just weeks after the apparently accidental death by drowning of his friend 9-year-old Ayaka Hatakeyama.On Monday police took in Ayaka's mother Suzuka Hatakeyama for questioning in connection with the murder of the Goken. By Tuesday she was admitting to having moved the boy's body to where it was eventually found, after police found forensic evidence in her car. By late on Tuesday, police were quoted as saying that she had been "hinting at having killed the boy". Police have spoken to the press about her questioning every day, revealing that her story has now changed many times, and that by Thursday she was claiming to have found the boy dead in her house when she got home. Some had been speculating about the level of the woman's involvement in the murder, and whether she could possibly have been covering for an as yet unnamed accomplice. Privately, there had also been questions about whether her own daughter's death was really an accident. But on Friday she admitted to the murder. Selective law enforcement With that naughty Takafumi Horie, former chief of Livedoor, firmly in the grip of the law, police descended this week on another upstart who's been upsetting the established order (ooh, that slipped out), namely investment fund manager Yoshiaki Murakami, and charged him with insider dealing. So that'll signal a systematic rooting out of corruption in the financial sector then? Haha, bless you no. They're not after a particular crime, they're after particular criminals. Or as those dreadfully cynical types at the Financial Times put it - "It is curious that authorities have concentrated their efforts so heavily on two figures whose flamboyantly swashbuckling methods have earned them national fame. The authorities may believe that choosing two such prominent targets will serve as a warning to others. But in the eyes of many members of Japan's business establishment, the two men's biggest crime is to have upset the traditional order by aggressively challenging incumbent managements."These guys don't have a gang of powerful Old Japan friends behind them, and have stepped on more than a few important toes on the way. This is their payback for not knowing their place. While these arrests may act to deter any future colourful parvenus is irrelevant, they won't be striking any fear at all into the hearts of the financial establishment. After all, where will the investigators have got their tip-offs from in the first place? A detente? Japan decided to restart paying China's pocket money this week. Someone a while back evidently piped up in a cabinet meeting, "Hang on. These guys are going through the biggest economic resurgence in world history. They have a space exploration programme. Meanwhile we're in the longest recession in our history, and they keep calling us all the bastards under the sun. Why are we still paying them?" So Beijing gets 74 billion yen this year, and loans will continue until the agreed phase-out date of 2008. Or until they start arguing again. Whatever. One to ponder Imagine you're a high-ranking civil servant in local government. Probably more used to wearing a plain suit day in day out, imagine what goes through your mind when you're standing there in a miniskirt and a wig, being handed into the police after being dragged off a train by the 3 unimpressed schoolgirls who you've just waved your parts at. Or imagine you're the policeman who's just started his shift and has to deal with that. The man on the indecent exposure charge is 56-year-old Hiroshi Ikeuchi, (former) "general affairs manager at the Health and Welfare Bureau of the Amagasaki Municipal Government". Way to throw your career and livelihood away! World Cup Special Japanese TV network TBS has announced they've recruited a World Cup reporter for the weekday news programme "Evening Five" - Shizuka Arakawa. She's the figure skater who won Olympic gold in Turin. Famously straight-faced Arakawa, who won't actually be in Germany for the cup, admits that she knows little about football and this is the first time she's turned her hand to reporting, but she'll do her best to "convey the magnificence of the event". I'll be tuning in. Let's hope the pioneering figure-skater is breaking down barriers that might mean we see a retired David Beckham turning commentator on figure-skating, or Roy Keane on Come Dancing. The future's bright. MAY 27 - JUN 2 A rude awakening Inconsiderate drivers are in for one this week. After years of the police doing little or nothing about illegally park motorists blocking city streets, the Road Traffic Law was amended this week, and authority for its enforcement was extended to private companies of traffic wardens.Some motorists complained that the revised law is too strict, as if it there was something more complex to do in order to avoid parking fines than just not park illegally. In the past, wandering plods would in theory "mark the car's tires with chalk and issue a ticket after half an hour had passed", if at all. In practice, many city streets turned into a free parking free for all. The new traffic wardens will be issuing tickets the moment an errant car is spotted. Or at least they would if their little hand-held gadgets worked. The first day was marked by the breakdown of a huge number of the devices, and the central computer system. One Tokyo warden admitted, "We had tested the machine only indoors," and that the problems stemmed from the device "being exposed to direct sunlight." It seems also that there'd been no training before D-Day, with many patrollers in Tokyo admitting to being "baffled" by the devices. A police officer with them said, "We probably need to accompany them until they get used to the devices." Many motorists had ample time to return to their cars and drive away before operatives had managed to get all the necessary info into the computer and issue a ticket. Though it should take less than 10 minutes, many were taking up to 45 minutes to cobble a ticket together. No need to rush your dessert, then. Official - jTV makes you sick! The Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) had to make an apology this week after about 160 viewers were struck down with virulent diarrhoea and vomiting after following a diet invented for one of its programmes. The diet included rice sprinkled with lightly roasted and ground white kidney beans. Kidney beans apparently contain lectin which will strip your insides if not cooked properly. So as far as weight loss is concerned, you'd have to admit it was quite a success. Even so, viewers have since been warned against eating partially cooked kidney beans. They haven't however been warned about believing every bit of pseudo-scientific crap on telly masquerading as fact. The amazing power of denial Michael Jackson arrived in Japan this week. He still has hordes of screaming fans here, who turned up at the MTV do, where Jackson was to pick up some sort of award. He's spending a few days here, apparently. While he's here, he's going to be visiting an orphanage. *stunned silence* My worst fears were almost confirmed when I read in the press that other than collecting his award and meeting his fans, he would also be "visiting an orphanage, doing a bit of shopping." That's an awfully important comma. But it turns out it's misplaced. He is here to add to his collection of future therapy cases (current score: 3). The only question is whether the Japanese adoption authorities will consider those pesky child molestation charges 'a bad thing' or will be happy to sign over a child into the loving, caring and mentally-balanced family home that only Michael Jackson can provide. MAY 20 - 26 Oh so quiet... So let's talk about the impending departure of Koizumu and the election of his successor again. Hitherto bookies' favourite Shinzo Abe had his hand forced this week by the massively growing popularity of rival Yasuo Fukuda. Abe had avoided officially putting his name forward in a bid to avoid awkward opposition questions in parliament, principally about whether he as Prime Minister would visit Yasukuni shrine. But with Fukuda, who also hasn't given any official word on his intentions, constantly gaining ground (at least in largely irrelevant public opinion polls) it was felt Abe should announce his candidacy before he gets overtaken by the moderate Fukuda who has already stated that improved relations with Korea and China are a priority. While Abe would continue very much in a Koizumi vein (and supports Jun-kun's visits to Yasukuni), Fukuda as Prime Minister would see quite a departure from the current ultra-conservative line.So so quiet... The only other item of note this week is the impending shake up of the elementary and high school teaching standards. News came out of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology that "a subpanel of a government advisory body on education" (I'm padding, can you tell?) came to an agreement that teachers currently employed would be "subject to license renewals". Current teachers' licences are valid for the entirety of a teacher's career, but the ministry said that this "is not necessarily a sacred right and that a fresh limit can be imposed on the license within a reasonable scope". Needless to say the Japan Teachers Union is up in arms, saying that there's no reason to think that "the renewals would lead to an improvement in the quality of teachers." How on earth could it not? If teachers are monitored and checked regularly, there will no longer be any hiding place for poor teachers. Perhaps the Union is more concerned at how much its membership's going to be cut by. Gold star to the Ministry. MAY 13 - 19 Foreign = Terr'ist Despite the fact that the only terrorist atrocities committed on Japanese soil were carried out by Japanese citizens, parliament passed a law this week meaning that every foreigner entering Japan will be photographed and fingerprinted. Will Japanese citizens, too? Well, no. Because, err... because...If you want to stay any length of time in Japan you'll be photographed plenty of times anyway, but fingerprinted? There are the usual spurious arguments in 'favour' of this. "America does it too." Right, and how is that relevant? America has a slightly different level of risk from terrorist attack. America also has well established and highly organised intelligence agencies with established links to other international agencies. Japan doesn't. And not a week goes by without a story of some government official, civil servant or police officer 'losing' public information or 'accidentally' leaking it onto the internet. The security agencies in Japan are notoriously weak in this area. Which is exactly where the second argument - "If you keep your nose clean, you've nothing to fear" - makes me nervous. Really? Nothing? Ok then. Even so it smacks more than a little of speaking to a suspect. In an age when Japan needs to be attracting more foreigners as tax-paying workers to aid its perilously mounting pensions responsibilities, this sends out entirely the wrong messages. If Koizumi's government was serious about this being an anti-terrorism measure then it would, on the basis of experience, be constructing a national fingerprint database of its own citizens too. But they'd never get away with that. And curiously... On Monday, Peruvian Jose Manuel Torres Yagi finally appeared in court charged with the murder of 7-year-old Airi Kinoshita last November. Of course the beginning of the trial of the foreigner Yagi is covered in all the papers and on all TV news. The non-Japanese has admitted to the killing, but denied he meant it. Difficult to say what kind of verdict the immigrant is going for with that, but there you have it. So you'd imagine that gruesome slayings would be the in vogue news story this week. Particularly after Fuji TV reported the murder of a Kanagawa man by his girlfriend (believed to be Japanese) who stabbed him in the neck while he slept, and lived with the body for several days before cutting of his head. The woman (believed to be Japanese) was arrested on Monday. But while the Fuji News site has one or two sentences on the story and a link to a video of its own coverage, the story was absent from most national online Japanese newspapers, nor did the story make it into a single English version. Goodness, how odd. And there's more Staying in Kanagawa... It's finally my turn to roll out the cliché "Police in [insert unlikely sounding place here] got a nasty surprise when..." and leave you for a moment to fill in whatever horrifying or baffling details you see fit. Let's see if I can out-weird you, shall we. In Atsugi, a tenant of an apartment was evicted after non-payment of rent, leaving behind the bodies of over 100 dead cats in the apartment. All were in plastic bags tagged with the cat's name, and bags then put in boxes, drawers or left lying around. Mmmnice. Actually the police only arrived on the scene later. It was the estate agent who made the grizzly discovery. So every cloud has a silver lining. The woman, in her 30s (so not your average mad cat lady), apparently took in stray cats over a period of 5 years and when they died, couldn't bear to cremate them. How many stray cats were there in her neighbourhood if she was bagging up nearly 2 a month?? MAY 6 - 12 Ooh, that's cold! In a direct snub to PM Koizumi, seen by Beijing as the key obstacle to improved relations between China and Japan, Chinese leaders have invited new leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Ichiro Ozawa, to Beijing in October to have direct talks with President Hu on strategies to smooth the strained ties. Even though Koizumi will be gone by October, and it won't be clear for some yet who will be in charge by then, the governing LDP are going to be far from chuffed about this one.I wish to register a complaint So how would you complain about your favourite programme being cancelled? Tut irritatedly but deal with it? Write a stiffly worded note to the TV station? Or would you protest, like a disgruntled viewer from Yokohoma with a neat line in macabre threats, by sending a note in a bag of cremated bones? Apparently TV Tokyo had dared to extend coverage of a table-tennis championship, which meant that the viewer's video didn't record what he expected it to. Where the bones were from, or whether someone or something was cremated especially for the complaint is as yet unknown, though police are said to be investigating. One down... As I've always said, the Japanese should by all means be allowed to build F1 cars but, for everyone's safety, not drive them. And someone at the FIA is listening, it seems. Japanese F1 driver Yuji Ide's season is over after they revoked his super licence. Whatever the FIA's reasons, and Ide's smashing Christijan Albers out of the San Marino GP will have contributed, Ide, who came to F1 with no particular pedigree anyway, is out and will be replaced by Frenchman Franck Montagny for the time being. Takuma Sato must be looking nervously in his wing mirrors. For once. APRIL 29 - MAY 5 Oh. My. God. There are rumblings, mainly from the man himself, that Taro Aso should be able to muster enough support to enter the LDP leadership election. What sort of a world do we live in where up to 20 people could support the idea of Taro Aso being the next Prime Minister of Japan? It's done Japan nothing but damage having him as Foreign Minister, where his uninformed and blinkered pronouncements make right-thinking folk cringe on a daily basis. So in September, when Koizumi's presidency of the ruling party expires, Aso's name will be on the list.Aso belongs to the Yohei Kono faction within the LDP, so is probably guaranteed the votes of its 11 members. Aso also said "LDP politicians belonging to factions that would not field candidates in the presidential race would probably cast a vote for their favorite member". Well, at least he appears to understand how a leadership election works. That's something. I love nutters I'm always ready to give a write-up to an out and out nutter, particularly if said nutter shows a bit of imagination. South Korea appears to be home to a special type of Protestor Nutter these days. If they're not setting the Japanese flag on fire, they're eating it. Or they're lopping their fingers off. Enter, Mr Ahn Sang-gyu, who on Tuesday protested the Japanese claim on the Korean-occupied islands known as Dokdo in Korea and as Takeshima in Japan. By covering himself in nearly 200,000 bees. He was only stung 200 times. Top work, nutter! |