Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, March 23, 2023—Approximately 80 percent of lumber imported to and logged domestically in Japan clear international and domestic regulations on illegal logging, yet the Japanese government has submitted legislation to reinforce the already stringent law, and with it, creating more work for local governments.
On Feb. 28, 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries submitted through the cabinet a bill to amend the ‘Clean Wood Law (the May 20, 2016 law on legally logged lumbers, enforced on May 20, 2017), as stipulated in the law for amendment in five years after enforcement.
The bill is expected to clear the current session of the Diet (parliament) and amendment would be enforced in 2025, an official of the MAFF Forestry Department told The Prospect March 23, 2023.
The ministry’s survey had shown that 44 percent of lumber consumed in Japan are certified by MAFF-registered sawmills and other businesses that are engaged in imports and domestic logging, and a separate survey including unregistered businesses showed 80 percent of wood in distribution clear the law’s requirements.
The official said confirming the legality of much of the remaining 20 percent will be a tall task because of difficulty to identify origins, so the ministry would urge more businesses to register as certificating entities while suspecting that most of illegally-logged lumber are believed imports and there’s ‘hardly any’ illegal logging in Japan.
Even so, MAFF would toughen certification and verification rules evenly on imports and domestic lumber based on the World Trade Organization’s most-favored nation treatment of imports from WTO member economies, he said. It’s an apparent over-regulation but the official did not respond to The Prospect’s comment.
For local Japanese municipalities, this means staffing extra manpower – jobs – to handle paperwork related to logging permits and certification of cut logs, and for loggers, cost increases and higher lumber selling prices though their take may remain little changed. It’s the reason why many local governments are expanding their forestry and environmental sections.

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TOKYO, March 22, 2023—Effective April 1, 2023, all bicycle riders in Japan will be ‘required to strive’ for wearing a safety helmet, ten days after the country’s compulsory COVID-19 face-mask rule was lifted but having little visible effect on the Japanese to remove it, in an onerous sign of peer pressure to thrash out violations in favor of totalitarianism under bureaucracy oversight.
The settings are very different, but this totalitarianism move could accelerate if/when the state seeks to exploit the accomplishments of the famous, as it did in the run-up to WWII: Shohei Ohtani, for one, who March 23, 2023 was labeled widely as ‘the world’s best baseball player’ contributing to Japan’s victory of the World Baseball Classic tournament, like Eiji Sawamura who drew enthusiastic Japanese baseball fans (numerous young Japanese men) to the front line at the order of the Imperial military and was killed by enemy fire.
Sawamura died in 1944 at age 27.　His uniform number was 14. Ohtani’s number is 16, the same number as the late Yomiuri Giants manager Tetsuharu Kawakami who was revered as Japan’s baseball giant.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced March 20 that the Japanese government has amended the Road Traffic Act and starting April 1, 2023, all bicycle riders – both those that ride and on the back seat such as infants – will be ‘required to strive’ to wear a safety helmet. The Tokyo municipal government’s revised ordinances provide that guardians must ‘make efforts’ to encourage dependents to wear helmets when on bike.
The new act and new ordinances do not have to carry penalties because the Japanese public diligently observes many if not all rules once enforced – like the face-mask mandate against COVID-19 infections. Police officers from local police stations in Tokyo and elsewhere March 22 rode bikes wearing a helmet as ‘an example,’ telling passers-by on bike and pedestrians to wear a helmet when riding a bike, according to Japanese media reports. In a country where the bureaucracy is still viewed (old folks honor/revere) as ‘Kami (god),’ the presence of helmet-clad cops suffices in encouraging people to follow suit (though less so than before).
In fact, it’s a big reason why most Japanese continue wearing a face-mask, indoors and out, 10 days after Fumio Kishida, the prime minister, formally lifted the mask mandate. Whether most Japanese will take off the mask may not be known until April 1 when the relaxed mask wearing rule is scheduled to be lifted in schools and public places in the second stage, meaning public entity workers will become mask-less, and then in early May when With-COVID-19 checklist in offices are scheduled to be abolished.
But whether it’s an implicit policy or not, pro-totalitarianism campaigners look to have score a degree of success in managing Japanese society to one where people would accept government instructions more closely.

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TOKYO, March 18, 2023—Katsuhiko Tokita, 77, served as the CEO of Tokai Co., a publicly traded company, for more than 10 years after retiring as the head of the Small and Medium-size Enterprise (SME) Agency, one of top government bureaucrats that supposedly set the nation’s course. He liked women, good sake and wine (probably), theater and sumo, among numerous trades of pleasure.
After retiring as the director-general of the SME Agency, in a typical path laid for bureaucrats, Tokita was appointed in 1999 as a director of the now-defunct Japan Petroleum public corporation, a Ministry of Economy Trade Industry arm, which was consolidated into Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security Corporation (JOGMEC), a governmental entity, in 2014. In 2002, he joined a regional gas utility,Tokai as an advisor, the post that many Japanese companies reserve for retired bureaucrats to grease connections with the government, in its case with METI that administers oil and gas business. In 2003, Tokita became an executive VP, and in 2005, CEO.
Tokita must have demonstrated his self-proclaimed business acumen and ambitions during those years, convincing the stuffy Tokai board that he can help the gas company to widen its business areas further into cable television, telecom, housing, insurance and others. Tokai’s share price, which had been meandering low, doubled and tripled.
Importing the entertainment culture he was given by businesses during his times as the head of the SME Agency to Tokai, he treated himself and a small group of people, including his relatives, to naked coed hot bath with female companions at the company’s resort facility in Tateshina, Nagano Prefecture, kabuki theater, sumo tournament viewing and many other treats – all with Tokai’s travel and entertainment expenses, according to an online version of a Japanese magazine, President, Dec. 20, 2022. In 6-1/2 years, Tokita engaged in as many as 253 entertainment experiences, the magazine said.
Tokita was demoted to a Tokai director in September 2022 but remains on the Tokai board as the only director.

Eijiro Katsu, 72, CEO of a second-tier telecom carrier, Internet Initiative Japan and a former vice administrative finance minister, was implicated in the 1998 ‘No-pan (no panty) shabu-shabu (hot pot stew) Incident’.
Katsu was exonerated from the incident and served in the No. 2 Ministry of Finance post for an unusually long two years, recommending successfully raising the consumption tax rate to the current 10 percent from 5 percent and introducing the My Number’ national taxpayer ID card system by prevailing over the then prime minister Yoshihiko Noda.
Katsu has been heading IIJ for as long as 10 years and, like Tokita, is known as a domineering figure among IIJ employees. He has picked a former senior bureaucrat of the Ministry of Communications as IIJ executive vice president, effectively surrounding him with ex-bureaucrats.
Katsu services as auditor of Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, Japan’s largest print daily, and a member of the ANA Holdings management advisory committee.

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TOKYO, March 17, 2023—There were 14 people at an after-work-hour meeting of volunteers and city government officials on that night, four days after the Japanese government lifted a face-mask mandate, telling the Japanese that it’s up to them whether to wear one. All of them entered the conference room with a mask on, except me, and only one person removed his during the 100-minute meeting, though he put it back on immediately when other people gave him a dirty look.
As I wrote some while ago, it’s not easy for the Japanese to kick a habit once enforced, be it an administrative guideline, tax, or government policy. The mask mandate, which was introduced three yers ago, is one of the latest practice.
Like with numerous other practices, the Japanese are shy about becoming a top runner (this expression had been used and abused by bureaucrats as a key strategy for Japan to retain its global leadership status in key environmental technologies such as energy conservation and efficiency. It’s now dead words).
Making it complicated to remove the mask is the impression gap between the mask-on and off face that gives to other people. This holds true especially for women who might have inferiority complex about how they look without a mask. Random street research I have done proved that hardly any women were seen walking on the street without a mask while some men are occasionally spotted bare-face.
Plus, there’s a quasi-discrimination issue: During the mask-on three years, women didn’t have to put on makeup, a not-so-small expenditure, particularly for low-income earners. When they remove the mask, it’s become an extra expenditure and since many want to look better than three years ago, they need to spend more to go for luxury brands. Those who continue wearing a mask may not be able to afford such a luxury because many saw their income shrink during the pandemic.
What can prod this Japanese pack mentality to change is, exactly like in the 270-year Edo feudal period, public service employees, from central government and small town office offices, take off their mask. Until then, the face-mask may stick to Japanese faces.

Wages rise in pack except for SME workers
For years, Japanese businesses and workers have been slighting the ‘Shunto’ or the annual spring labor offensive, in which employers and unions negotiate wage increases. ‘Shunto has become obsolete and meaningless,’ top business lobby and labor leaders would say, as new tech companies give fat pay raises and bonuses to workers while old brick-and-mortar firms struggle to keep paying workers.
Not this March, the month when employers and labor sit across the table to negotiate wages from April, which is the beginning of Japan’s business year. From Toyota to the debt-laden Tokyo Electric Power, most big companies swallowed all that was demanded by labor, some, like Japan Airlines, giving more than sought by workers. The average raise of major companies is expected to top 5 percent, the highest in more than 30 years. Shunto climaxes March 17.
Why this sudden about-face from the kill-Shunto bravado? Political and administrative jaw-boning arising from centuries-long conniving between government and business with an implicit agreement that what employers give would be repatriated with tax and other incentives, in immaculately coordinated psyche of ‘It’s not scary to cross the red light together.’ Prime minister Fumio Kishida March 15 reiterated that generous wage growth is what can spur Japan’s global competitiveness recovery, meaning that businesses need to pay well to hire talented workers.
This, however, can leave behind small and medium-size companies, which represent more than 70 percent of Japanese businesses, as well as more than 40 percent of none-regular workers. SMEs are constantly pressured by big businesses to cut costs and prices, and something like 16 percent of all Japanese companies, including SMEs, cannot raise wages, some even being forced to lower.
This is how Japan is progressively becoming a country where the rich gets richer and poor gets poorer – the condition far worse than the Edo period.

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TOKYO, March 13, 2023—Except after the 47 samurai triumphantly trudged through downtown Edo with the head of their master’s rival in the 1703 ‘Chushingura’ vendetta incident and a post-World War II reconstruction period, Japan’s journalism has been subservient to authorities, selling government spoon-fed information and entertainment in large characters with sketches on cheap paper to people of the then world’s largest metropolis.
And it had become even more so over the past decade when the late assassinated Shinzo Abe was serving as prime minister (even though some major media entities struggled unsuccessfully for independent fact-based impartial reporting). And now under the current minister, Fumio Kishida’s reign, and thanks to the three years of Covid impact, the press freedom looks as if irreversibly broken.
Television media are now almost fully under government control. Hiroshi Sekiguchi, who hosts the Sunday Morning TBS TV station show, said in the March 12 program that Abe’s aide once commented ‘the government needs to make clear that errant programs must be controlled’ regarding ‘political impartiality’ of television media under the Broadcasting Law.
The comment was included in a document in which comments of former telecom minister who currently is the minister of economy and national security, Sanae Takaichi, favoring regulating the media. Takaichi said in last week’s Diet (parliament) testimony that she had no knowledge of making such comments, and thus, ignored Sekiguchi’s claims and with it, rejecting opposition demands to confirm that she favored controlling the media.
The television media are not saying anything perhaps save Mr. Sekiguchi, passively reporting and broadcasting who said what in most confusing manner that the general public are not likely to show interest. Instead, television programs are broadcasting about whether workers are wearing the face-mask after the government altered the mask-mandate to individuals’ discretion from March 13, as well as the fourth consecutive victory of the Japanese baseball team in the World Baseball Classic tournament.
This is a form of the major media’s ‘self-governance and restraint’ to handle things that upset politicians off the front page. So, as had been the Edo period ‘Kawaraban’ one-page bulletin, fun news is prioritized and the politically complicated and uncomfortable (for politicians and bureaucrats) are relegated or not reported at all – except when major events unfold, like the 1703 Chushingura and 2022 shooting death of Abe.

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TOKYO, March 8, 2023—Over the past several years, particularly the recent short months, global media have been flooded with news about China’s increasing bellicose attitudes toward its neighboring countries and the United States. China is rapidly spreading its naval fleets in the East and South China seas, reports said, warning that when its defense fault lines are secured, Beijing would invade Taiwan to end the one county two system policy, forcing the democratic island into a Chinese autocratic region and exposing 23.5 million Taiwanese under oppressive regime and destabilizing the regional security. Maybe so but reports on how do Taiwanese people see the situation are not equated and found nowhere in the western media.
The fact of the matter is that Taiwanese bear fondness toward the people across the Taiwan Strait, a strip bordering the East and South China seas less than 100 miles apart between the island and China. Which is hardly a surprise if one traces Taiwan’s history: It was in 1949 when the Kuamintang (KMT) military, which had ruled the entire Chinese continent, fled to the island after being defeated by Mao Zedong’s communist forces.
Priding themselves as the bona fide Chinese military, many of the 170,000-personnelTaiwanese military are opposed to Taiwan’s independence as they have close relatives in China. As many as 9/10th of the Taiwan military leadership are known to go to China to work after retirement, transferring Taiwan military technology, organization information to the Chinese government. Early 2023, four senior Taiwan military officers were arrested for passing on classified information to China. And it was only a small incident among numerous similar incidents.

Taiwan fishing near Senkaku
Dozens of Taiwanese fishing boats are operating around Japan’s Senkaku Islands everyday for years, but as Chinese patrol ships cruise inside or near Japan’s exclusive economic waters daily, Taiwanese are resonating with the Chinese in claiming that the islands are part of Taiwan. In fact, Taiwan president Tsai Ingwen has made that claim.

Japanese businesses paid homage to China
As tension between Japan and China rises corresponding to Tokyo’s collaboration with the United States over the Taiwan issue, Japanese business leaders rarely visit China now, but until the early 2010s, the business lobby Keidanren often did so, and before then they sent a large trade mission annually to the Chinese government leadership to ‘make donations’ of cheap financing and high technologies. Even in the current condition, Japanese business leaders would express ‘love for China.’.

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TOKYO, March 7, 2023—Could it be an overblown speculation that the March 7, 2023 launch failure of Japan’s next-generation rocket, H3, was to be blamed on the country’s bureaucracy and like-minded private-sector contractors for the disaster?
Government officials are not saying anything at all about who and which entities of the government are responsible for the accident except a Cabinet Office news release confirming that the launch failure and that the cause is being investigated.
At a news conference on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launch site of Tanegashima island March 7 afternoon, the launch director, Mr. Okada, explained that the second-stage rocket failed to activate so JAXA transmitted signals to drop the entire rocket in waters off the Philippines. He said the cause of the misfiring was being investigated.
H3 is Japan’s next-generation rocket supposedly capable of launching payloads at half the price of its predecessor, H2A. The Japanese government has invested $1.5 billion to date to develop H3, the R&D work that’s been going on since as far back as 2014. H3 was carrying an advanced reconnaissance satellite Daichi 3, $280 million satellite capable of close Earth observation as well as defense reconnaissance. After the first H3 rocket launch, Japan was planning to send H3-II later this year to send satellites from Japanese and overseas businesses.
The H3 launch had been postponed for years and was to be executed finally on Feb. 17, when the rocket malfunctions were found, forcing JAXA to postpone until the next launch deadline of March 10, and the space agency in enigmatic haste lit the fuse to the engine on March 7, leaving less than 4 weeks before fiscal 2022 ends on March 31, 2023. Mr. Okada told a virtual news conference that JAXA decided to launch H3 after fixing the Feb. 17 technical problems, denying that JAXA tried to launch before March 31.
JAXA receives its budget from more than a half dozen ministries each year. Japanese government entities must spend all budgeted monies by the end of fiscal year by long-time practice. Carryovers into the next fiscal year are basically not allowed and leftovers are forfeited with next year budgets trimmed. It’s probable that JAXA acquiesced to bureaucracy pressure and rushed the H3 launch, though it could not have been confirmed.
That JAXA probably has been under bureaucracy pressure to expedite the launch can be underscored by the fact that at least nine ministries – practically all major entities are allocating their budgets to space development by JAXA: The Cabinet Office serving as de facto secretariat (it doesn’t have offices to directly administer space policy) for the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture; Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport; Ministry of Defense; the National Police Agency; Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications； Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry; Ministry of the Environment; and the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries.
They have big stakes in space, especially after the U.S.-China relations have begun straining as they must prepare for southern Japan crises in the event of conflicts in the East China Sea.
Structure-wise, too, JAXA looks like a bureaucracy branch, with its senior officials mostly coming from University of Tokyo sharing alumni with many bureaucrats that are graduates from the same university.
This was not the first time that JAXA’s rockets failed. Its H2 developed troubles in the past taking years for its program’s redemption to schedule. H3 is feared to follow the same path because the bureaucracy is afraid of failures. JAXA’s Mr. Okada argued that his agency is not launching rockets for failures but seemed to confirm that the latest failure would further delay the H3 program – because the bureaucracy doesn’t condone more failures.
Perhaps subconsciously, bureaucrats are aware that they are no fit for tangible projects such as a space program, so, out of fears of taking risks, they might have transferred the H3 project from JAXA, which directly developed and launched rockets through the H2 program, to the private sector. Mr. Okada said at the news conference that in the H3 project, employees of Mitsubishi Heavy Industry as lead contractor overwhelmed JAXA officials, literally entrusting MHI to do everything.
MHI engineers for their part most likely worked on the project like JAXA employees, or as quasi-government employees, feeling a great sense of security and relegating innovations and risk-taking.
In an omen, MHI chucked the government-private regional commercial passenger jet program called the Mitsubishi SpaceJet after six delays. It was the end of Japan’s jet programs for regional to large-size aircraft.
The Mitsubishi jet program finale seems to illustrate, so to speak, the ‘infection’ of MHI employees to bureaucracy virus, though details were not available.

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TOKYO, March 1, 2023—For the 35th consecutive day, Chinese patrol ships have been idling in and around Japan’s Senkaku Islands March 1, 2023, with one of them spotted today for the first time appearing to be carrying machine guns, a Japanese Maritime Safety Agency official said.
Chinese patrol ships have been spotted in increasing frequency over the past year after the U.S.-China relationship began registering signs of strain.
The official told The Prospect on the telephone March 1 afternoon that four Chinese patrol ships have been idling in and out of the Japanese contiguous waters around Senkaku, some of them bearing machine guns, but he insisted that there has been ‘no extraordinary movement’ of the ships in recent weeks.
On Feb. 26, the cabinet of prime minister Fumio Kishida said, ‘Japan cannot tolerate’ the infringement of Chinese patrol ships of the Japanese sovereign waters around Senkaku. Since then, however, Tokyo has not taken follow-up action.

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TOKYO, Feb. 22, 2023—History proved that Hideki Tojo and his Imperial army bureaucracy cronies led to Japan’s spectacular World War II battle defeat by the U.S.-led allied forces. Tojo, who considered the Imperial Japanese Army invincible, prevailed in parliamentary debate and forced Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Imperial Navy, which Tojo treated as an army unit, to the blitzkrieg Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Tojo’s war began and on Aug. 15, 1947, the war ended.
Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine differs in many dimensions from the war of 76 years ago. His is a war against a neighboring sovereign country of the same ethnicity that was a former Soviet Union satellite state, speaks the same and similar languages as Russian, and centuries earlier a part of the Romanov Empire. His is a war of redemption for a rebirth of the Russian empire by pulling Ukraine and later other states back to the former U.S.S.R. universe. The Japanese military’s Pacific theater expansion was for securing oil, coal and other resources that Japan lacked almost totally with the colonization and annexation of Asian countries, fro China and India, by establishing the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Tojo, as commander general, with approval of the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, was at the helm, firing orders and receiving strategies and ideas from his commanders for the policy, initiating the Japanese military expansion of China by instigating the Chinese Eight Route Army in the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Imphal campaign in Burma (Myanmar).
Tojo carried out those and numerous other botched military campaigns with input from his cronies while giving deaf ears to opinions from Yamamoto and other cabinet and senior military officials. Putin is doing that increasingly visibly: He is ignoring Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary unit Wagner that has made meaningful assault in parts of Ukraine while Russian military proper units made little or no progress.
Prigozhin reportedly disdains bureaucracy and accused Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, of deliberately starving Wagner of supplies, according to the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/world/europe/wagner-russia-military-prigozhin.html).
The Feb. 21 Russian television footage showed the two Russian military officials among a dozen military officials at Putin’s state of the nation address, but not Prigozhin. Tojo did not send supplies to Iwo Jima, where more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers were defending the island from fierce U.S. bombings under the commander, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, known as a true samurai as illustrated in a Clint Eastwood film. Not a bureaucrat, Kuribayashi, who studied in the United States, knew Japan’s defeat.

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TOKYO, Feb. 11, 2023—In an abrupt haste, the Japanese government will lift its three-year-long COVID-19 national mask mandate on March 13, telling its people to exercise discretion on whether to keep it on in trains, public places, medical facilities and other locations of high infection possibilities. Why the rush is easy to trace to: In May, Japan will host the annual G7 summit in Hiroshima (https://www.g7hiroshima.go.jp/en/), and the government is feeling the heat to prepare for it. Hence, the total disregard of coordination with local governments, industry lobbies and consumers.
But the question is whether the Japanese, who are less resistant to wearing masks than other peoples and have arbitrarily found it comfortable wearing, would comply with the government decision. Schools are scheduled to hold graduation ceremonies in March, more than half of grade to high schools after mid-March and reportedly are planning to require students wear masks.
The health minister, Mr. Hagiuda, told reporters Feb. 10 that whether not to wear a mask will be entrusted to each individuals’ discretion. The ministry’s policy at the same time urges people to wear a mask when seeing doctors; medical and nursing facility workers to wear; people to wear a mask in crowded trains but not aboard express trains with reserved seats, as well as in private homes where family members are infected. Masks won’t be necessary in hotels, retail stores as long as appropriate anti-virus steps are taken. What about arenas, ball parks? The policy didn’t have recommendations.
Confusing? I am confused. Mandate should be lifted altogether.

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