Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, May 11, 2022—Japan’s mini-Trump, Shinzo Abe, May 10 did it again for his aspirations to return to the Prime Minister’s seat.
The former prime minister who quit his post last year amid investigations for his financial irregularities told a May 10 meeting: ‘The Bank of Japan holds more than half of 1,000 trillion yen ($10 trillion government debt). BOJ is a government subsidiary, so when (the debt) comes due, it can roll over by borrowing again. So don’t worry about the debt.’
While Abe was the prime minister, Japanese government debts swelled to nearly 1,000 trillion yen under his ‘Abenomicks,’ and recently, it topped the level for the first time ever, making Japan the most indebted government in the world.
His remarks are the execution of the modern monetary theory – which means the government can borrow, or print money, as much as it needs instead of tax revenue constraints.
Abe wants to make a stab at regaining the PM seat by scoring his Liberal Democratic Party victory
in this summer House of Councilors election while booting the current PM Fumio Kishida in a political horse-trading game. If that happens, while not likely at this time, the Japanese government would pressure BOJ buy more Japanese government bonds from the Ministry of Finance while being forced to keep short-term interest rates effectively zero, the policy that the BOJ under its governor Haruhiko Kuroda, a former MoF bureaucrat, maintains in conniving with and paying respects to the MoF’s treasury department.

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TOKYO, April 22, 2022—One after another, the Japanese media are fanning public discussions for nuclear weapons armament, which had been virtually banned until several years ago. The latest article, published April 22 in Kodansha publishing company’s Gendai Business on-line magazine, argued misleadingly that the fact that the United States has not sent troops to Ukraine was out of fear that Russia might use nuclear weapons.

Since late last year, the daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has been reporting about the Japan-U.S. fast reactor nuclear power joint research, clearly to also pave the way for detoxing the Japanese public’s aversions to anything to do with nuclear, particularly nuclear weapons. (see recent Prospect articles.)

Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan security treaty provides that either side shall help each other when a party’s peace and safety is endangered.

(Article 5: ‘Each Party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.’)

The article’s author, Yukihiro Hasegawa, a pro-establishment writer formerly with the Tokyo Shimbun, questioned whether the United States would come to the rescue of Japan if Okinawa and/or Senkaku Island that Japan claims its sovereignty is invaded by China.

‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised a strong doubt about it,’ Hasegawa wrote. ‘The United States is sending weapons to Ukraine but it has not sent troops. Why? It is because Russia has nuclear weapons. (Washington) is afraid of starting a nuclear war with Russia.’

Russia, which has been unilaterally occupying Japan’s two northern islands and North Korea also should share the same view that the United States would not act for Japan in the event of China’s invasion of Japan, he said. Taiwan and South Korea are exposed to the same threat of China and Russia, he said.

It’s the reason why Japan needs to change its anti-nuclear weapons policy, Hasegawa said, quoting former prime minister Shinzo Abe as recommending as a starter ‘nuclear weapons sharing’ with the United States. Ultimately, Japan should develop its own nuclear weapons, he said, fully underscoring the thinking of Abe and other Japanese right-wing legislators and supporters.

More pro-nuclear weapons articles and opinions are set to splash the Japanese media, along with calls for restarting nuclear power reactors. The increasing pro-nuclear media coverage is boosting the right-wing lawmaker morale. On April 22, more than 100 lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead, including WWII criminals, are entombed.

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Suzugamori, Tokyo, April 16, 2022—Japan has numerous places where unimaginable and horrific cruelty has been committed and victims disgraced, the condition that must have shocked the late Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela whose country had treated its imprisoned African citizens ‘like animals.’ The former Suzugamori Execution Place, which performed at least 100,000 executions over 220 years between 1651 and 1871, is one of many Japanese prisons that have treated people less than like animals.

One that was brought to the place to be incinerated, hands tied with course ropes in the back and wearing only a layer of kimono even in the middle of winter, was bounded and hoisted onto a single steel pillar and the arms tied onto a horizontal beam as if to be crucified. The wardens would place firewood under the victim’s feet and start the fire,keeping a slow burn so that the victim would feel maximum pains and suffer the most. The fire was kept going a long time so the one being executed may be suffocated to death by the smoke billowing from the body, according to a local person in Suzugamori. When the victim died, he/she would be placed on the ground and beheaded on the beheading stone, then the wardens would wash the head with salt water in the beheading well and display the head on the shelf to be seen by passers-by.

Suzugamori Execution Place is located right on the side of the busy former Tokaido Highway that linked the western city of Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). It was clearly the Tokugawa Shogunate’s intention to show every frame of public executions to most severely disgrace the victim, scare the public and demonstrate that the feudal government authority shall not be challenged at all.

Another execution method deployed at the place was lancing the victim’s body on the cross (which had nothing to do with Christianity). The warden would stab the chest as many as 20 times to scrape out the organs one by one so that, like the person to be incinerated, the pain and suffering would be the sharpest. He/she also would be beheaded, washed with salt water in the beheading well and the head would be displaced on the shelf for days. The place was located barely 100 yards from Tokyo Bay.

Suzugamori was one of two Edo execution places. The other was in Kozukahara (now Senju). Execution records were either disposed of or Tokugawa did not tally. But together, the two places were said to have executed at least 100,000 people each. Among them, were the 16-year-old girl Yaoya (green grocer) Oshichi, who tried to light fire to her house for having been refused to meet her loved one, Shonosuke, in early 1683. Though the house escaped fire, Oshichi was arrested and incinerated to death at Suzugamori on March 29, 1683. Legion has it that her cries when being burned were heard miles and miles away.

During the Edo period under Tokugawa’s reigns, ‘Okami’ (authority) was absolute and now matter how petty a crime, or no matter whether suspects could not be found, ‘suspects’ were always arrested, tired and punished. As many as 40 percent of the executed were innocent but were leveled false charges to maintain the Okami authority. There was no procedure as appeals for innocence and grievances for lighter sentence. Occasionally, there were self-sacrificing persons that volunteered to be lanced or burned as sacrifices to save families and communities – like Kasuke Tada of Azumino, Nagano.

The 1950s and 60s South Africa administered under apartheid treated the indigenous black people as substandard citizens below the whites. Its prisons for the blacks were beyond eyes can watch, Mandela wrote in his biography, the ‘long Walk To Freedom’ in 1994. The Edo period Japanese prison system was far worse and the contemporary system is not too much different from the olden days: A Sri Lankan woman who was detained and had been locked in a detention center died in 2021 for the detention facility’s refusal to give her proper medical treatment despite her repeated pleas. (See my article)

‘…no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,’ Mr. Mandela wrote. ‘A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones — and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.’ Read the top part of this tory for confirmation of why Japan is below South African jails.

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TOKYO, April 1, 2022—On April Fool’s Day of 2022, I took a Covid-19 PCR test, a program that the city of Tokyo is offering for its citizens, for the first time. It was not a job that I thought can be done in quarter of an hour as I had been told before: Time-consuming, eye-straining and full of unnecessary required entries that are accepted only from the smart phone. In a nutshell, the program is a highly complicated, expensive structure constructed in multi-layer administrative form for unknown reasons.
Tokyo’s free Covid testing requires making a reservation so I booked my appointment on-line with a neighborhood drug store of the Welcia drug store chain March 30. So in the April 1 afternoon, I visited the store and identified myself for the appointment. I was the only soul taking the virus infection test.
The pharmacist first asked me to fill a simple two-page form, which looked like a document that would be stored in-house at Welcia. When that’s done, he brought a small cardboard box containing a test kit and labels, telling me to open it carefully. He then handed me a 4-page instruction that was written in tiny letters that must be illegible for seniors and told me to zap a QR code printed on the front.
The test application form appeared on my smart phone. It instructed entering my email address, my name, gender, date of birth, nationality, residential district, occupation, telephone number. Next page was registration form that demanded entry of totally irrelevant information as compulsory such as whether my work was virtual or in-person; work outdoors or indoor; Covid vaccination times; whether diagnosed as positive and how recently. It then asked for information about home doctors and clinics I visit, then sign on-line for proof of accuracy of the entered information by again writing my name, address, and other personal data. And then, ‘to verify the authenticity of the specimen’, it again demanded the entry of all the same personal data I entered first. After this cumbersome, privacy-intrusive entry is done, the instructed told me to put my saliva into the container, wrap it in a plastic bag, then into the kit box and finally slap the necessary labels and hand it over to the pharmacist.
The Tokyo government entrusted the whole test program to a company called Corona Examination Center Co.’s KinoMedic Clinic Kawasaki, the unit of Kinoshita Group, whose core business is housing construction. Corona Examination Center has 7 locations in Japan, covering all key regions of the country.
I became curious as to why a housing company had got into the medical diagnosis business. My web search revealed that the group’s founder is Naoya Kinoshita, 56, and after employment at a property company and Rohm semiconductor manufacture for several years, he bought Kinoshita Komuten (no relation to him), which was in bankruptcy chapter with $1 billion liabilities in 2004 and became its CEO. Not soon afterwards, he launched a film making company, and later nursing homes, and numerous other businesses. Kinoshita also is chairman of World Victory Road, which promotes wrestling and other fighting sports.
What’s not available by my short research is his political and government connections to win Covid testing contracts from not only Tokyo but also from many other municipalities.

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TOKYO, March 28, 2022—A serious insidious bureaucratization disease is spreading so fast across Japan that it might be impossible to halt until its implosion. Businesses that had resisted bureaucracy pressure are capitulating and accepting what are demanded by ministries and agencies and politicians.
Save a few exceptions, ex-bureaucrats for businesses work as ‘advisors’, ‘consultants’, ‘mediators’ between business and government as most have no hands-on experience. They would be asked to play the roles of ‘human shields’ to repel government investigators and tax authorities. They rarely speak out at board meetings.
An example of bureaucracy’s growing influence: A second-tier Japanese telecom, Internet Initiative Japan Inc., announced March 25, 2022 that it was promoting a former bureaucrat as an executive vice president. There’s nothing unethical or illegal about IIJ’s appointment of Yasuhiko Taniwaki, 61, even though he was forced to quit in March 2021 as a senior bureaucrat responsible for telecom administration for receiving during his incumbency grafts from the former national carrier NTT and a separate company where former prime minister Yoshihide Suga’s son works. Taniwaki was picked by IIJ in January 2022 as an advisor and his appointment is expected to be approved at a shareholder meeting in June, a company spokesperson Kuniko Arai confirmed to The Prospect March 28.
Taniwaki is the second bureaucrat to be installed on the IIJ board. IIJ CEO Eijiro Katsu, 71, a former vice finance minister and known for his high-handed attitude and who also had been implicated in a scandal, has been serving in his post since 2013 while the founder Koichi Suzuki stepped aside as chairman.
Katsu was asked to join IIJ probably by the NTT group, a former state telecom that had acquired the largest shares of IIJ when it was in distress. NTT continues to be under powerful influence of the government that holds 35 percent of common shares.
Japanese companies’ recruitment of former bureaucrats has been an integral practice of Corporate Japan dating back for centuries to the period after the country’s first civil war before the born of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 17th century. During Japan’s boom years of the 1980s, businesses challenged the practice of compulsory acceptance of retiring bureaucrats (known as ‘Amakudari (decent from heaven)) and the law was enacted to maintain ‘a cooling period’ between bureaucrats’ retirement and employment in the private sector.
It was hardly a surprise that bureaucracy outsmarted and circumvented the law by sending retired bureaucrats to ‘park’ at government-funded think-tanks for 6 months. In recent years, bureaucracy has been casting thicker shadows over the private sector that has been behaving like a rudder-less ship and in need of someone capable of planning – which is bureaucrats’ forte. Businesses are now hiring more bureaucrats than before, though simple comparison is impossible to do.
Example 2: Toyota Motor Corp. traditionally has been keeping a seat for a retired bureaucrat from the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry on its board. Ikuro Sugawara, a former METI official, is retained for the seat as the sole ex-bureaucrat. But it allocates more seats for ex-bureaucrats, Haruhiko Kato, a former head of the Ministry of Finance Tax Bureau and the National Tax Agency who is said to be close to IIJ’s Katsu, as an auditor. Hiroshi Ozu, a former prosecutor-general, is another Toyota auditor.
Nobuyoshi Kodaira, a former Toyota board member, currently serves as chairman of the Toyota Foundation, a nonprofit. The Institute for International Economics, a separate Toyota entity, is headed by a former Foreign Ministry official, Keiichi Katakami. It has two deputies, one a former METI official and the other, a newly created seat, from the Ministry of Finance.
Bureaucrats were accustomed to be welcomed by businesses like senior samurai serving their domain lords during the Edo period, chauffeur-driven cars, gorgeous dinners and after-meal night clubs by businesses. Because of more inquisitive public eyes, contemporary government officials have become less visible and so too are businesses. But the old practice is not dead as seen in Taniwaki’s scandal, which was only a few years ago.

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TOKYO, March 24, 2022—A group of three elderly people were standing quietly with placards that read ‘No War’ on the sidewalk across the busy street from the Russian Embassy in Tokyo in an early spring weather on March 17, 2020. They were far outnumbered by policemen and police cars. That was it. There were no other people protesting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine in front of the embassy during that day’s midmorning as pedestrians hurried to their destinations gawking at or tightly holding their smart phones as if the embassy does not exist or they don’t know what’s happening 8,200 kilometers northwest of Japan.
At the Ukraine Embassy in Tokyo about two kilos from the Russian embassy, bouques of flowers and letters of condolensces were laid at the front door. There were no people in sight and when I pressed the door button,, a young lady opened the door and told me that the embassy staff were too busy to talk, asking that I make an appointment via their e-mail address. As we talked, an old couple showed up to drop donations to the embassy’s mailbox.
The Diet (Japanese parliament) area was even more quiet and as Japan being a sunset country politically, diplomatically and economically, visiting there is recent years always has been psychologically depressing. And it was especially so because there was no trace of Japanese citizens in the front game or back or sides of the building: Only cops and Diet security guards looking visibly bored standing here and there and everywhere and police cars and buses plus who looked like parliamentarians’ secretaries and Diet employees walking briskly to their destinations.
Street demonstrations against Russia and supporting Ukraine were hold in Tokyo’s Shibuya and Shinjuku districts over the past one month. The Shibuya rally drew some 4,000 people, according to Japanese news reports, and the Shinjuku demonstration a few dozens. Less than 2,000 Ukrainians live in Japan.
As a whole, Japan remains forlornly quiet.

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TOKYO, March 7, 2022–Two highly visible corporate irregularities surfaced in Japan on March 4 raising speculation among Japanese government watchers as to the reasons and objectives. Analyzed, they follow the historical pattern: The Japanese authority act in forthcoming — or aggressive — manner at times of crises, as being the current situation over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Tokyo regional public prosecutors office arrested four board members and senior executives of the SMBC Nikko Securities Co. for manipulating five publicly listed stock issues, probably including those of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, in bloc offer transactions in late 2019 with large shareholders of those issues, officials of the office were quoted by the Japanese media. The four executives were charged for violation of the Financial Products Transaction Law.

On March 4, Hino Motors Corp., the unit of Toyota Motor Corp., announced that the company falsely filed emission and fuel efficiency data to the Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport. It said some vehicle models failed to clear MLIT environmental and mileage standards, affecting 113,000 vehicles. On March 7, in a highly unusual move, MLIT officers raided Hino Motor offices without prior notice to the company.

The two alleged irregularities — or, looking from the opposite side, the authority’s active use of force — came in the midst of Russia’s escalating invasion of Ukraine. During the first few weeks after the March 11, 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, Japanese authorities acted aggressively toward the private sector. At that time, police became aggressive enforcers of law asking people about their IDs, travels, and other movements.

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TOKYO, March 1, 2022—Former Japanese prime minister, who publicly admits as a political hawk to join the nuclear arms club, Feb. 27 went a step forward in moving domestic debate on the topic proposing that Japan explore ‘nuclear sharing’ to enable the United States to freely locate nuclear weapons in Japan. His remarks were timed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and president Putin’s hints at deploying nuclear arms. Whether he discussed it with the United States could not be confirmed.
In a Sunday, Feb. 27 morning Fuji TV talk show, Abe said; ‘It should not be thought as taboo to debate the reality how the world peace is maintained (by nuclear weapons), even though Japan is a nuclear non-proliferation treaty signatory and (is restrained by) the three non-nuclear principles (not possessing nuclear weapons, not producing, not allowing from third parties)’ Abe rationalized his thinking in favor of nuclear sharing with the United States.
The current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, categorically at a parliamentary session Feb. 28 dismissed Abe’s comments as violating the three principles and Japan won’t consider it. But now that the topic is out in the public, it’s likely to be taken up in the media and elsewhere.
Nuclear sharing is a concept in NATO’s policy of nuclear deterrence, involving member countries that do not have nuclear weapons of their own to enable NATO to use the weapons. Those countries’ military can be engaged in delivering nuclear weapons in the event of their use.
Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey have bilateral nuclear sharing arrangements with the United States. France and the U.K., which have nuclear arms, are not involved in nuclear sharing with other NATO members. Together, NATO is understood to store several dozens of U.S. nuclear weapons in bunker storages. Sharing with Turkey is believed to have curtailed to nearly nil because of strained U.S.-Turkey relationships.
Abe and his hawkish politicians and right-wing business cronies have been increasing Japan’s rearmament rhetorics in recent years in lockstep with China’s global theater ascension and, in sharp contrast, Japan’s steady descent. Abe has not been as explicit as Feb. 27, limiting his nuclear ambitions to nuclear energy through the Japanese bureaucracy. (More in: Feb. 13, 2022 Prospect article)

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TOKYO, Feb. 28, 2022—It’s not limited to garment, toys and industrial products: China is looming as the global supplier of active phrmaceutical ingredients (API), its share probably rising to record levels in line with its aggressive exports of COVID-19 vaccines. Japan, which relies on foreign products for almost everything, is a case in point: Of 8.5 trillion yen ($74 billion) worth of prescription drug production in 2020, imported API represented 5.9 trillion yen, or about 7/10th. Of the total, China and Korea accounted for 2/10th of generic pharmaceuticals, and China represented about half of total generics, followed by Italy and India.
The Japanese Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare in March 2021 identified 506 APIs as priority materials for stable stockpiling and supply, a policy sparked by acute shortages of some APIs the previous few years, and earlier in June 2020, it unleashed a program of domestic manufacturing of some APIs for which Japan’s dependence on foreign products are unusually high.
Is the program yielding results? Don’t count on it too much, warns Takuya Shinohara, a healthcare analyst with NLI Research Institute, an arm of Nippon Life Insurance Co., in an interview with The Prospect.
‘There aren’t too many products and technologies that Japan can excel over other countries,’ Shinohara said. ‘I doubt if the pharmaceutical industry stands out as an exception’ to many Japanese sunsetting technology and product trends. Over the past two decades, MHLW and the industry sought to develop blockbuster biopharmaceuticals. The result to date is essentially nil. ‘It’s not easy to move away from China as production and supply base,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s China, based on the China Manufacturing 2025 initiative, is strategically pursuing biopharma and advanced medical device R$D. Partly as a result, China has become a world-class supplier of API, pain killers, vitamins, antibiotics, antipyretics and other common drugs.
The U.S. reliance on Chinese pharmaceuticals is still not as high as Japan’s, according to the U.S.-China Business Council report, putting the China API share at 7 percent directly coming from that country in 2019 and 12 percent indictly via third countries. But the Chinese antibiotics API accounted for 36 percent of the U.S. antibiotics market, the same share as of the EU. More recent data and reports were not available as of this writing.

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TOKYO, Feb. 25, 2022—A 70’sh man, who moved to Hokkaido, has had his first bitter taste of Japanese bureaucracy when he walked in to the local police station to change his American driver’s license to Japanese, the application that in most other countries is processed immediately.
He and his wife moved to Hakodate from California, where they lived the past 50 years, late last year, intending to live the rest of their lives car-free.
Weeks later, they realized that they needed a car for shopping and other errands in a hilly city where roads get trencharous with snow and ice in winter. So they approached the local police to change their California driver’s licenses.
What they had anticipated to be a plain document submission to the police and other authorities turned out to be a long and frustrating bureaucratic maze: When they showed up at the local police station in January thinking that by presenting their California driver’s licenses, Japanese licenses will be issued, they were told to take physical behind-the-wheel motor vehicle driving aptitude practices a minimum of twice at police-designated driving schools. It costs $400 for each of them. They also were told to present to police documents, issued by the Japan Automobile Federation, which is comparable to AAA, that their California driver’s licenses are bona fide and valid for no less than six months. The cost is $30 for each.
Driving schools typically hire retired police officers as ‘advisor,’ ‘deputy head master,’ and other senior positions.
The elderly couple have been struggling through this bureaucratic maze over more than a month and still do not have their Japanese driver’s licenses. ‘I heard that the Japanese bureaucracy is very outdated but what we are experiencing is beyond our expectations,’ the husband told The Prospect speaking that his name not be disclosed.
Intentionally making public services complicated and costly is not limited to this incident and in fact, it is ubiquitous almost across Japanese public sector administration. The most recent example is COVID-19 vaccination. In many countries, residents walk up to hospitals and any other vaccination points without carrying vaccine vouchers and after having been jabbed, they are issued shot certificates. Japan mails vaccine vouchers to residents, without which they won’t receive shots. Japan residents who want to carry government-issued electronic vaccine certification need to first register in the ‘My Number’ taxpayer/social service numbering system, or else, they are denied forcing them to carry stamped certificates of two shots and a booster that is written in Japanese alone. If they need an English certificate, many local governments ask them to pay fees.

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