Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, Aug. 2, 2022—Boeing will open a new R&D facility on a bevy of new technologies on fuels, robotics, hydrogen, digitalization and composites jointly with the Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, the company announced Aug. 1, 2022, clearly an agreement initiated by the ministry’s overture. This is a rare – almost unusual – transaction between the two countries in recent years as U.S. businesses increasingly have been viewing Japan as lagging behind Korea and China technologically, especially.
The government of prime minister Fumio Kishida is promoting what he labeled as a ‘new economic policy’ that was essentially borrowed from the late prime minister Shinzo Abe’s obscure ‘Abenomics.’ Kishida’s policy is aimed at redistribution of national wealth and growth, e.g., wage rises and surgical infusion of government money into semiconductors and other key tech areas.
One example of more to come: In late July, METI said it would subsidize up to 92.9 billion yen ($715 million) to a joint venture of Japan’s Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) and Western Digital of the United States for the venture’s planned chipmaking facility construction in Japan.
Boeing’s facility will be located in Nagoya, home of Toyota Motor Corp, in central Japan and serve as the Asian R&D hub that embraces Australia, China and Korea, the announcement said. The facility will collaborate with Japan’s two international carriers, Japan Airlines, and All Nippon Airways, it said.
It was not clear whether METI will provide financial and taxation incentives to the facility but traditionally, Japan has extended credit, amortization of facility taxes and others to similar projects.
Details are as follows:
https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2022/08/20220801002/20220801002-1.pdf

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TOKYO, July 23, 2022—On July 21, the Japanese arm of the Chinese battery maker BYD announced entry into the Japanese EV car market unveiling commending sales of three models from November 2022, its decision apparently buoyed by the dominating 70 percent market share of the EV bus market in Japan.
The BYD pitch must be a big shock to the Japanese automakers that are struggling with R&D and sales of their EVs that clearly are far behind European and American rivals including Tesla.
The ATTO3 SUV, Dolphin compact, and Seal passenger car are scheduled to be sold from November.
BYD Japan, founded in 2005, sold its EV buses to the city of Kyoto in 2015, and since then has been steadily albeit slowly expanding EV bus sales, now commanding about 7/10th of 65 EV buses sold in Japan, according to BYD Japan. The Japanese public sector is in the midst of replacing diesel-powered buses with EV and gas-EV hybrid buses.
Though prices weren’t available, the BYD’s impressive market share clearly reflects its pricing advantage. While Toyota Motor’s mini EV called C-pod is priced at 1.6-1.7 million yen, China’s mini EV is less than 1/3rd the price.
Among few Japanese EV models are: Nissan Motor’s LEAF and Ariya; Mitsubishi Motor’s Outlander PHEV and Minicab MiEV, Eclipse Cross; Toyota’s 300e. Most European automakers are selling EVs in Japan, and their prices are much lower than comparable Japanese EVs.
A major reason why Japanese automakers are behind – many critics say that the Japanese are at least two rounds of a 400 meter track behind – is the failure to develop durable, powerful batteries and battery management software.
Foreign inroads into the Japanese EV market, fortunately for the Japanese manufacturers, are limited by bureaucracy red tape on motor vehicle safety and environmental certifications and standards. Japanese businesses that want to sell Chinese EV minis are required to clear dozens of regulations and tests, making the price of the mini, approximately $5,000 to at least three times, or about the same as Toyota’s C-pod.

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TOKYO, July 20, 2022—National honors had been rarely bestowed even to world-renowned Japanese with outstanding accomplishments in Japan – save twice a year decorations – until the 1980s, when lawmakers began abusing them for political gains. The state funeral for the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, scheduled for Sept. 27 as the second time in the post-war period epitomizes the degradation of Japan’s national dignity.
Typically, the state funeral is observed for a person of great achievements posthumously, which was how it was held for Shigeru Yoshida, a bureaucrat-turned prime minister as the first one in post-war Japan. Lawmakers spent months in evaluating Yoshida’s accomplishments both at home and in foreign affairs before reaching decisions for the state funeral.
Almost in contrast, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hastened his decision, announcing the state funeral for Abe at a July 14 news conference, less thank a week after Abe was gunned down – presumably only because Abe was assassinated and for Kishida’s political benefits, such as hosting foreign dignitaries.
What Abe had done for Japan and globally is still being analyzed by parties concerned – lawmakers, critics, commentators, and most importantly, the general public – and the late Japanese leader is full of controversial deeds and remarks. But Kishida went ahead anyway.
Abe’s state funeral is not the only development that amounts to cheap-selling Japan’s national honors, such as the designation of artists, actors, as ‘Living Treasures (formerly the Intangible Cultural Asset)’, and the bestowing of the National Honor Award to athletes, musicians and others.
The fixed budget limits the Culture Agency’s designation of Living Treasures at less than 200, though the agency’s bureaucrats make sure to issue designations to the budget’s limit to make sure that the budget will not be trimmed.
The National Honor Award’s awarding decision is made primarily by the prime minister. After the mid-1980s, awarding began accelerating almost becoming an annual ritual, with Abe giving out as many as seven, a record number since the honor system began in 1977. Abe gave out the award to recipients that were seen by the public as not qualified for various reasons, contributing enormously to the degradation of the honor.
But criticizing Abe alone is discriminating: Another Japanese honor, the spring and autumn decorations, is even more badly abused. Every other season, hundreds of recipients are given chrysanthemum medals – most Japanese but some non-Japanese too – for little or no active reasons, except that many of them were former government officials. One person who received a medal about 10 years ago was a Metropolitan Police Department retiree who work up the MPD ladder as a police lieutenant with no specific accomplishment.

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TOKYO, July 18, 2022—The bureaucracy never gives up, that is, Japanese government officials, particularly the projects that the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry that the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his grandfather espoused dearly. This time, METI would choose 20 technologies as top national technology areas, such as hypersonic aircraft, microprocessor chips, AI, medicine, space, energy, and deep ocean, the Yomiuri national daily reported on its website July 18, 2022.
What the newspaper described as the ‘specific vital technologies’ would be formalized as prime minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet decision – or executive order – in September, allocating 500 billion yen ($3.5 billion) from the government’s ‘economic security fund’ through a government-private-sector body to be launched later to R&D entities that would undertake work, including governmental entities. R&D entities that pursue work must clear a set of confidentiality rules and violations would be subject to a fine of up to $4,000 or one-year imprisonment, it said.
Many if not all those R&D technologies overlap with what METI’s Agency of Industrial Technology and Science (AIST), the New Energy and Industrial Technology Organization (NEDO), and other METI-supervised governmental entities are currently promoting.
There has been hardly any advanced technologies developed from those governmental organizations that promoted new technologies jointly with the private sector. On the contrary, many undertakings have flopped or exhausted, including the 1974 ‘Sunshine Plan’ that sought to develop new, clean energy technologies, and the 1978 ‘Moonlight Plan’ that aimed to reduce and conserve energy consumption with heat-pump, advanced gas turbine and other technologies.

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TOKYO, July 13, 2022—Even Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos cannot pay: The former CEO and three board members of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) July 13 were ordered to pay a record 13.321 trillion yen ($100 billion) by the Tokyo District Court for causing the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown accident that had forced hundreds of thousands of residents’s evacuation and tens of trillions of yen in economic damages to Japanese taxpayers.
The plaintiffs, who were shareholders o TEPCO, are filed for 22 trillion yen ($165 billion) in damages.
In the four separate class-action lawsuits filed by residents near the power plant, the Japanese supreme court in June ruled that TEPCO was exempt from the accident and rejected the plaintiffs’ lawsuit.
In their class-action suit, TEPCO shareholders argued that the accident – flooding of the power reactors and disabling of cooling systems, resulting in radiation leakage – was preventable and happened for TEPCO’s failure to perform due diligence.
The Japanese judiciary has historically made decisions in favor of the state in civil cases. The TEPCO case is expected to go to a high court and eventually to the top court, which traditionally ruled in favor of the state.

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TOKYO, July 11—The expected Liberal Democratic Party landslide giving the ruling party supermajority with sympathy votes for Shinzo Abe’a assassination should pressure prime minister Fumio Kishida, dubbed as Doing-Nothing PM, to take visible actions on wide fronts, notably for bolstering the weak yen to stem import inflation, securing stable energy imports, Constitution amendments and closely-linked calls to double defense spending.
All of the tasks that await the DNPM when he forms a new cabinet later this month require Herculean might as his party lawmakers and the public, emboldened by the fresh realization that ‘Japan must be strong,’ are expecting him to morph into a PM of action, e.g., going beyond Abe’s ‘Abenomics’ to bolster the Japanese economy, now near the bottom of the OECD rung in income.
Among those key tasks and numerous others, the easiest one that would yield short-term results is to appoint the successor to Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan governor that Abe appointed in 2013 for the Abenomics to keep Japan’s interest rates at zero indefinitely.
Kuroda deployed what he called the ‘bazooka’ monetary policy pumping trillions of yen into the banking system and other policy tools to keep rates zero, at some point, to negative levels, while Abe instructed the Ministry of Finance to issue government debts sky-high.
Abenomics, however, failed to buoy Japan out of the downfall that began after the bursting of the bubble economy in 1991, and on the contrary, sent government debts nearly out of control.
Kuroda’s term is July 8, 2023.

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TOKYO, July 9, 2022—The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, reportedly told police July 8 that he gunned down former prime minister Shinzo Abe not for political motivations but that it was about an undisclosed ‘religious organization’ and Abe’s relationship with it. Abe served as advisory to that religious organization, Nippon Kaigi, together with former finance minister Taro Aso for the ‘reconstruction of beautiful Japan’ by rallying the support of nationalist and rightwing lawmakers, businesses and sympathizers as its members. Abe also was an ardent supporter of the Unification Church – together with Donald Trump.
Japanese news reports said Yamagami and/or his mother made donations to Nippon Kaigi and/or the Unification Church, and as a result, their life had become a hand-to-mouth conditions – while Abe had been fattening his pocketbooks reportedly by accepting bribes from his supporters and chums, most notably the Moritomo and Kakei influence-peddling scandals.
Nippon Kaigi commands an impressive roster of members from many walks of Japanese society – literally all members of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party as well as a wide array of businesses and Abe’s electorate supporters such asToshio Motoya, the chairman of Apa Hotels Group. Motoya and his wife are pro-North Korea.
At a rally of the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), a Unification Church chapter, in September 2021, Abe delivered an on-line message saluting the church’s governor, Hak Ja Han Moon, and extolled the family value and criticized gender equality – a clear violation of LDP ethical codes and Japanese political party laws. Trump also appeared on-line at the rally held in Korea.
Abe was the first to meet Trump after Trump’s presidential election victory in 2016. The meeting was believed arranged by the church’s Moon.

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TOKYO, July 8, 2022—An assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe July 8 is likely to radically sway Japanese voters casting their ballots in the July 10 upper house election in a possible boost to the already strongly-favored candidates of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party that’s trumpeting doubling the defense budget.
Abe, 67, the longest-serving prime minister until 2020, had been quietly plotting a comeback hopefully as a Japanese leader over the coming few years if the LDP under the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, sustains a setback in the Sunday election. That scenario is now tossed and his ‘Abe children’ having been riding on his coattail are likely to wane in power and number, prompting them to regroup. LDP vice president Taro Aso, who was the finance minister under Abe and had also served as a prime minister, is set to lose his political grip significantly with the demise of his long-time confidant.
Abe’s sudden death thus would be welcome news for Kishida, who can anticipate an extra booster of ‘sympathy votes’ for his LDP on Sunday and his 4-pronged policy of economic revitalization, national security, Covid-19 measures, and social wellbeing. Abe and his LDP cronies had been arguing for doubling Japan’s defense spending to 2 percent of GDP from 1 percent. While Kishida favors raising defense outlays he has not explicitly commented on a GDP ratio target and its details.
If LDP loses upper house seats and Abe made a comeback, then Japan could have become even more hawkish and confront China and Russia. Since it won’t happen, Kishida is likely to continue serving even if LDP’s election results are less than what the party targets.
One area that is seen widely unknown as a result of Abe’s death is Japan’s de factor zero interest rate monetary policy that Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda, an Abe appointee, has been taking over years. Kuroda, a former MoF bureaucrat, subserviently serves the MoF’s treasury bureau, the issuer of Japanese government securities, that dreads about even a one percent rise of Japanese interest rates because it would mean at least 10 trillion yen ($100 billion) extra refinancing costs forJGBs coming due every year.
The assailant, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, is a former Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel. He told police that he was not politically motivated to gun down Abe with his home-made shotgun, and that he was ‘dissatisfied’ with what Abe had done, according to Japanese media reports. That leaves one thing standing out as a motive: Like Donald Trump, Abe had greased his cronies and his own pocketbook through the blatant abuse of power, often with the bureaucracy.
In 2016, Abe instructed the Ministry of Finance bureaucracy to sell a government-held land tract at almost 1/10th the then-prevailing market value to Yasunori Kagoike, who owned and managed Moritomo Gakuen School, for its new grade school site.
In another scandal, Abe in 2015 ordered the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare to approve applications to open a veterinarian department to the Kakei School own and run by Kotaro Kakei, who was Abe’s close friend.
Both cases were flush with rumors of influence-peddling and grafts-giving between Abe and his counterparts but both were not properly investigated as a result of the strange disposal of official government documents. A junior MoF official, who tried to speak the truth about Moritomo scandal, allegedly killed himself. Abe and his wife, Akie, have been under the spotlight of man other questionable activities.
Abe is the son of the late foreign minister, Shintaro Abe, and the grandson of the post-war prime minister, the late Nobusuke Kishi, the bureaucrat-turn prime minister in the 1950s who closely worked for Hideki Tojo but was miraculously spared U.S. occupation forces’ WWI criminal trials. As prime minister Kishi was attacked by a rightwing mob in 1960 and seriously injured but survived.
Abe was the only person who worked as prime minister and was assassinated in post-WWI Japan.

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TOKYO, July 6, 2022—In an election campaign trail July 4, 2022, a former Japanese prime minister yodeled his signature oratory in support of the powerful – like Russia – by sacrificing the vulnerable – like Ukraine – urging voters to back Japan’s military buildup.
‘Remember which kid was bullied in your school days? A (physically) weak kid was bullied. A physically fit was not bullied… The relationship between countries work exactly the same… The country that looks strong cannot be attacked. If the enemy country fears about a barrage of reprisal from a strong enemy country, it won’t bully (the strong country). Countries that look weak are vulnerable to invasions (like Ukraine by Russia). You voters, please remember how your school was like when you were a student.
‘The current (global geopolitical) situation is a whole different game from the past. What’s happening in the United Nations… Russia is a permanent member (of the UN Security Country), and that means the UN (mediation) functions don’t work because of Russia’s opposition. That is that the UN as an organization is broken.’
the remarks were by Taro Aso, a former prime minister who is Liberal Democratic Party deputy president, in his upper house election campaign speech in Ichikawa, Chiba July 5.
Aso is notorious for his venomous, discriminatory comments. While he was finance minister under former prime minister Shinzo Abe, he was against government Covid-19 aid payment on the ground that recipients would spending it in gambling. In a different context, the 81-year-old politician said in 2003 that homeless people don’t need shelters saying that they would complain about lousy food served by such facilities, adding that many homeless are diabetic. In 2006, he said Japan is the only country on earth with one language, one culture, one civilization, and homogenous people.

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TOKYO, July 4, 2022—Some people in Japan are grinning with hope about the 2-day telecommunications disruption fiasco of au/KDDI, the country’s second largest carrier, as the impact of the worst communication outage continues to reverberate on individual phones and corporate telecom systems July 4.

They are the ones whose predecessors suffered bitterly under the American occupation force’s order to dissolve Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDD) Co. and saw its business transferred to the former Japan Post and Telecommunications Ministry in 1947. The business in 1953 was moved from the ministry to KDD/Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co., but in 1979-1980, bouts of bribery scandals involving the company’s payoff to Japan Post bureaucrats surfaced, resulting in arrest of company executives and bureaucrats. In part because of the scandals, KDD was put under joint management of Toyota Motor Corp. and the Japan Post mutual aid association, the ministry’s governmental pension. In 2000, stakeholders of the telecom reorganized into KDDI. Kyocera Corp. holds 14.54 percent; and Toyota 13.75 percent. 

Management changes, however, did not alter KDDI’s corporate culture of ‘respecting’ the bureaucracy and handle customers like government officials do, alias, treat them with bureaucracy’s pompous attitude and avoid responsibility. At a July 3 midday news conference, CEO Makoto Takahashi spoke about the outage as if it was a rival telecom’s problem, hardly registering sympathy for users.

It’s a corporate culture that blends smoothly with the bureaucracy, so it was not a coincidence that government officials have lost little time in saying that KDDI needs to be put under 24/7 government watch to prevent the recurrence. ‘It’s a timely opportunity’ for bureaucrats, especially for those at the newly-founded Digital Agency that Japanese media taunted as struggling to find work.

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