Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, June 12, 2021—It’s been a mystery for the Japanese why PM Suga doesn’t open more national COVID-19 vaccination centers at locations more accessible for the elderly than the current two locations, one in Tokyo and the other in Osaka. On June 12, 2021, The Prospect learned the reason.
A Prospect reporter, who is in his 70s, June 12, 2021 lined up at the Tokyo vaccination site, located in a slightly inconvenient area off the Otemachi business district of Tokyo for his first Merdona vaccine shot.
The site, according to the Japanese government’s websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, which administers the innoculation operation there, is managed by the MOD. The reporter walked through the passageways that vaccination people were supposed to go through expecting to see muscular Japan Self-Defense Force personnel in combat fatigue and their beautiful female counterparts.
He was wrong. Most of the personnel working at the site were apparently civilians, so the reporter asked where they were from, and some of them replied that they were sent from Pasona Corp., Japan’s top temp and contract worker dispatch agency – whose CEO Yasuyuki Nambu is widely known as Suga’s chum and its key advisor, Heizo Takenaka, is also notorious as the superior to Suga when Takenaka was serving as a minister at one time.
So, even though the Japanese media said that the site was managed by the MOD, the placw was in reality run by Pasona. Opening the site as well as the Osaka site probably was an idea floated by Nambu. Both locations have so far proved unpopular for its location and other reasons, but it doesn’t matter for Nambu since the operation of the two sites were auctioned off to Pasona in a non-competitive government procurement bidding.
Proposals to open more large government vaccination sites to date are ignored by the Suga cabinet because that would require holding open, competitive bidding, and would end up drawing bidders more competirtive than Nambu’s Pasona, according to a person familiar with government procurement and bidding.

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TOKYO, June 12, 2021—Just as anticipated: Major Japanese media entities June 12 reported that the G7 Cornwall summit has expressed support to Japan for holding the Tokyo Olympics – when in fact, only the host country U.K.’s Boris Johnson’s spokesperson was quoted by Reuters as saying as the only one news source.
Reuters’ dispatch from Carbis Bay, England, said:
‘CARBIS BAY, England–British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday (June 11, 2021 gave the Tokyo Olympics a show of public support at a meeting with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga and welcomed efforts to ensure the Games can take place safely.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which were postponed last year due to the global spread of the coronavirus, is scheduled to start on July 23.
At a meeting with Suga on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in the British seaside resort of Carbis Bay, Johnson agreed to work together on a range of issues from trade and technology to defense and climate.
“The prime minister expressed his support for the Tokyo Olympics, and welcomed Japanese efforts to ensure the Games can take place safely,” a Downing Street spokesperson said after the meeting.
The Japanese government and Olympic organizers have said the Games will go ahead – barring “Armageddon”, as one International Olympic Committee (IOC) member put it.
Tokyo 2020 would be “grateful” if G7 countries could support the Summer Games going ahead as planned, Tokyo 2020 organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said on Friday.
“It is Japan’s expectation that the other members of the G7 countries share the idea of Japan,” said Tomoyuki Yoshida, press secretary at Japan’s Foreign Ministry. “It is quite encouraging for us for the G7 countries to support the efforts of Japan on this occasion as well.” 
There was no meat in the article such as whether the alleged support was expressed on behalf of the UK or the G7, or its details at all.
Yomiuri, the largest circulation daily, splashed that the prime minister made a plea to other G7 leaders to send ‘powerful’ athletes to the games, treating Suga’s talks with other leaders were highly successful.
The Asahi Shimbun, the second largest national daily, reported in its English edition the full Reuters aritcle.
Japan’s Jiji Press wire service quoted deputy cabinet secretary Naoki Okada, accompanying PM Suga, was quoted as saying: ‘As I saw (the exchanges between the G7 leaders and Suga, the leaders) expressed support for the Tokyo games ‘with a smile’.’
NHK, the national broadcasting station, reported as its top news story that G7 leaders pledged support for the games, while covering hardly other more important global issues, including climate change, China’s expansionism, Russian hacking and espionage activities, restoring G7 unity and numerous other vital issues.
Save Reuters, which is selling ad space to the Japanese government (https://www.reuters.com/brandfeature/japan-in-the-new-decade) on its website, there has been no other non-Japanese media entity that reported about the G7 summit’s Olympic topic.
The way the Japanese media cover the G7 summit giving unusually heavy wegith to the Olympics suggests that they are now being almost forced to report that holding the games is a done deal. After the games are over in late August (or in September?), the media is set to be subject to greater government scrutiny and supervision, endangering the sustainability of Japan’s nascent democracy.

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TOKYO, June 9, 2021—When the dust settled after Japan Hosted this summer’s Tokyo Olympics (still a big If), the world media should find Japan a country devoid of the freedom of press that already had been threatened over the past decade of former PM Shinzo Abe’s reign.
On June 8 (Tuesday), Seiko Hashimoto, the Tokyo Olympic/Paralympic Committee chair, told reporters that all foreign media representatives shall be banned from visiting locations that were registered and approved by the committee in advance during the 14 days after their arrival in Japan. Media reps, she said, shall be ‘controlled’ by smart phone GPS functions, as well as that their places of stay shall be restricted to 150 hotels assigned to them by the committee alone.
In email exchanges over the past week between the committee and the Foreign Press in Japan (FPIJ), a grouping bundling Japan-based reporters, photographers, video crews from the foreign media based on Japan, the committee demanded that all FPIJ member names listed and all of them are encouraged to be vaccinated and other details.
’full names*, nationality and media affiliation.
– Staff must be *accredited with the IOC *(not Tokyo 2020).
– Staff must be *resident in Japan* (native or expat).
– Staff should be *willing to receive* a Covid-19 vaccination.’
Bottom-line: Media reps are likely to be limited or denied access to interviewing athletes and others, as well as covering Olympic events in and outside Game venues, such as those that criticize the Japanese government and hosts, plus covering demonstrations against the games and scenes of ordinary Japanese folks’ views.
If the games can be held and completed as envisioned by the current PM, Suga, it can instill confidence in the Japanese politicians and bureaucracy for further media control. Japanese media, which are sponsors of the Olympics, have been reporting the games in a Shakespearean, torn-apart tone. Understandably. When the games are over, however, they will de decouple from the government and the national event, and so should find themselves dwarfed by the next sheet of media gagging and thus criticizing the government, bureaucracy and pro-government businesses a much harder act to follow.
The media should become like the eve of Tojo declaring war against the United States: reporting only what are fed them by the government.

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TOKYO, May 10, 2021—Behind on most fronts: Japan’s aggregate number of electric vehicle charging stations in fiscal 2020, ended in March 2021, decreased approximately1,087 or 3.3 percent year-on-year to 29,214 locations, Zenrin Co., Ltd., Japan’s top mapping company was quoted by the Japanese media May 10.
The drop was the first time since the company began registering EV charging stations on its mapping apps in 2010. A enrin spokeswoman confirmed the numbers but did not expand on the data, including reasons for the decrease and the outlook over the coming years.
Much of the decrease owed to the pullout of quick charging stations in the hospitality industry hit head-on by the Covid-19 pandemic and infrequent EV visits to charging stations. EVs account for less than 1 percent of Japan’s new car sales, only a few EV models are sold.
Among problems drivers raise about EV charging stations is that a station typically can accommodate only one EV at a time, so other EVs visiting it will be forced to wait in the queue. EVs also are priced much higher than gas-powered vehicles and government subsidies for purchase are less generous than in other countries, drivers say.
Yet, it remains unknown whether EV charging stations will continue decreasing, with the finding coming weeks after prime minister Yoshihide Suga’s April 22 announcement to slash greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by 46 percent, compared with 2013, to drive Japan carbon neutral by 2050 by proactively promoting EVs.
The number of gas stations was slightly less than 29,600 as of July 2020, down 1.44 percent, according to the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The number has been shrinking steadily over years in line with improving vehicle fuel efficiency and shortening vehicle ridership, or traveling mileage.

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TOKYO, May 10, 2021—As The Prospect reported earlier, NTT group and otrher Japanese telecom carriers are limiting network traffic to preempt system-wide disruptions that may be triggered by sudden gluts of Covid-19 vaccine appoiment calls municipalities begin accepting from May 10.
Many Japanese municipalities (about 100 in Tokyo and the same number in the greater Osaka area) May 10 began joining a small band of their peers that already had been taking vaccine calls on landline phones and on-line. Last week, greater Tokyo telecom networks were partially disrupted by the first wave of phone calls on landlines, mobile networks, and internet access. Emergency numbrs, including ambulance and fire (119) and police (110) are assigned separate telecom switches, so they are intact, but hospitals, schools, and other essential establishments, as well as non-essential entities would face the possibility of no connections for extended times.
As written in The Prospect last week, the networks’ traffic processing capacity has been reduced significantly in recent years as the country shifts mobil network protocols to one centered around 5G, the work that began physically only recently. Overlapping with this shift, the NTT group carriers, which serves ‘the last mile’ of its rival carriers including KDDI and Softbank Yahoo BB, since 2017 has been revising its old copper metal landline works to high-speed optical fiber networks for both telephone and internet traffic for businesses and homes. The story goes further: NTT’s mobile unit, NTT DoCoMo and its mobile competitors are currently in the midst of pouring capital and resources into developing 5G radio signal band technology to toss the current LTE network technology. In lay persons’ parlance, it amounts to driving a Formula-1 racing car instead of a Cadillac.
All those changes are being orchestrated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications bureaucracy. The Japanese telecom network’s vulnerability, which came to light in the March 11, 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and the latest telecom inconvenience, is uncommon in developed countries. Why this has gripped the world’s third largest economy is a long story, yet it can be traced to a policy of developing home-grown technology in vital industrial areas including telecom and defense. In the 1980s-1990s, foreign telecoms made a stab at the Japanese telecom industry but all were repelled by invisible regulatory barriers, leaving only Japanese capitalized telecoms operating. The surviving telecoms have been happily doing business collaborating (conniving) with the telecom ministry’s bureaucracy.
The public was forced to pay the price of this locked telecom policy by being denied easy access to Covid vaccine appointment phone numbers, complicated and expensive landline telephone, mobile, and internet systems.

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TOKYO, May 7, 2021—Having worked as a journalist for several major world news entities, I have experienced many serious telecommunications disconnections, some as long as a week, disabling transmitting important stories and data to headquarters and regional hub bureaus. This experience makes me speculating that serious telecom disruptions might be lurking about in the Japanese network systems as a whole. Hope is that my concern is overblown and the problems that I have experienced in cross-border and local Japanese connections would go away.
What I have experienced is a sudden and frequent loss of connections on my mobile phone, busy signals I hear when calling to counterparties on both mobile and landline phones, very slow internet speed even perusing plain-vanila items, definitely not heavy pdf files.
This annoying condition in Tokyo, I noticed, started about two days ago. NTT East’s landlines were mobbed by swarms of calls frantically trying to secure Covid-19 vaccine appointments starting from May 6. That much I knew. But the number of attempted calls to local municipal offices must have not been in the hundreds of thousands, supposedly small enough calls NTT East’s switches can handle, as they did during the March 11, 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and several ensuing days.
So I have come to speculate that NTT East might be crimping on its telecom pipes. As of May 6, the disruption problem (or getting busy signals when calling to other numbers) was limited to landline. But on May 7, while the landline telephone service seemed to have been stable (don’t knopw for sure), the NTT East’s internet connection was wobbly, to say the least,
freezing frequently and forcing me to reload and so on. In the meanwhile, my iPhone that uses the NTT DoCoMo signals lost connections almost every minute this afternoon.
My journalist gut instict is that people who could not get to what they wanted to see on the internet through wi-fi connections (which are serviced ultimately by the NTT East landlines now matter what carriers you use), igrated to using DoCoMo radio signals, forcing the mobile telecom to automatically cut off connections when its signal capacity nears full.
If/when this condition continues over the coming days, it’s possible that the problem would spill over more widely, out of Tokyo to surrounding areas as NTT telecom switches automatically rout calls and internet traffic when Tokyo capacity is up to the neck.
Something close to that happened in March 2011, and NTT DoCoMo and other carriers asked people to curb using smart phones.
This time, since the NTT group is likely to have reduce telecom band capacity – probably substantially – to save costs, Tokyo’s disruption could ripple to other areas like tsunami and electricity blackout.

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TOKYO, May 6, 2021—Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. landlines serving greater Tokyo May 6 were totally disabled as they were apparentluy swamped and disrupted by giant waves of calls to municipal offices from people scrambling to secure Covid-19 vaccination appointments.
NTT East (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone East Corp.), a former telecom monopoly serving the greater Tokyo area, is limiting landline arrival calls May 6 morning, according to Japanese media reports, attributing the telecom’s measure to Covid-19 vaccination appointment calls began May 6 morning at some of Tokyo’s municipalities. On NTT East’s phone repair service number, 113, a recorded voice meassege said the telecom was busy handling incoming calls.
During the March 11, 2011 great earthquake-tsunami disaster, mobile phone lines were disrupted for days but landline phone calls from individual home, office and pay phones remained alive and usseable.
It is the reason why the government is requiring telephone companies to keep pay phone booths every 500 meters or so in Tokyo and other big cities, and 1,000 meters in smaller urban areas. In exchange, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is authorizing the telecoms to collect ‘Universal Service’ fees from telephone users, including mobile phone users.
Recently, though, the ministry began deliberating the telecoms’ request to reduce the number of pay phones by widening the distances between public pay phones installed. Speculation is rife that the telecoms, with the nod of pro-telecom prime minister Suga, already have significantly reduced landline phone capacities – a potential reason for the current inconvenience.

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TOKYO, May 5, 2021—It’s been a wonder for many smart people (like you) why they haven’t even received notice for COVID-19 vaccinations for months despite PM Suga’s assurances about prompt rollout while some municipalities proudly announced that they had commenced vaccinations, no matter how small the jabbing populations.
The Prospect has conducted a random (very) survey of municipalities and residents whjether they have received vaccine supplies or notice or nothing about vaccinations. We have learned that as the prime minister claimed, many if not all regions of Japan had received vaccine supplies if Pfizer-BionTech to date), albeit tiny parcels, say, for 500 to 1,000 people. The city announced that it had accepted
Take Hachioji City west of Tokyo, population 580,000, ¼ of it over 65 years old. The national media extensively reported about the city’s vaccination campaign that started April 5 for less than 2,000 seniors as Japan’s frontrunner along Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward. On May 2, the city announced that it had acceted nearly 43,000 Pfizer-BionTech vaccine applications, out of some 75,000 seniors over the age of 75.
Many other municipalities are merely posting on their websites the copies of what the national government announced earlier – which claimed as ‘expecting’ that vaccinations would commenced shortly by order of age, illness, etc. The city of Hiroshima, population of 1.43 million, is doing likewise and its citizens have not been informed by any communication means about vaccination schedules, according to local people contacted by telephone by The Prospect May 5.
The Bunkyo Ward in Tokyo, population 217,000, one of the smallest of Tokyo’s 23 wards, had also completed its first round of vaccination appointmentsfor the ward’s senior residents on April 30, according to its website. A ward resident told The Prospect that he was told the second appointment taking would be held on May 14. Several other Tokyo wards also disclosed the same schedule as Bunkyo.
There were other Tokyo wards that, like Hiroshima, only methodically posted what the central government announced earlier. The landscape seems to look the same in rural areas, like Nagano in central Japan.
Why the difference between municipalities that have made vaccination annoucements proactively amnd those that seemed to copy and paste what the Suga government posted on its websites?
The Prospect’s survey could not determine whether vaccines were distributed discriminatingly in favor of Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party, yet was generally able to confirm that those that support LDP or where LDP lawmakers captured national assembly seas in the last elections or LDP politicians dominate local assemblies, made forthcoming vaccination announcements, including schedules, than municipalities where LDP representation is weak – or lost seats like Hiroshima and Nagano.
Hachioji elected Koichi Hagiuda, the current education minister, and is the LDP’s stronghold. Bunkyo elected an LDP member to the Diet (parliament) and Edogawa, where LDP is strog, also did the same. Those municipalities aggressively made vaccination announcements, probably in anticipation of priority vaccine distributions from the national government, or they already are given priorities.
Nagano, where the LDP lost a by-election miserably in April, has not made (or could not because of PM Suga’s cold shouldering) any announcement on scheduling and vailability on its west site despite the fact that some of its regions’ now are ‘Level 5’ pandemic crises, the most dqangerous category. Same goes for Nerima Ward of Tokyo, the electorate of Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, who has registered ambitions to challenge Suga repeatedly.
This is how Trump politics have rippled into japan months afer his departure.

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TOKYO, April 14, 2021—That the inept Yoshihide Suga government April 13 formerly decided to discharge contaminated Fukushima nuclear power water into the sea approximately from 2023 was largely anticipated as storage capacity was nearing the limit. The decision amounts to a destiny for a country punctuated by the collapse of its technology despite the fact there was more than 10 years for advancing research and development to remove nuclear fuels from the leaky reactors. And it is ironic proof that the CEO of Toshiba Corp., the company that had built the Fukushima reactors, is poised to be ousted soon.
Scientists estimate that the contaminated water release would have to be continued for at least 30 years – most likely much longer and until the nuclear fuels are extracted from the reactors that melted down. The government claims that it would dilute the water to levels safe enough so as not to pollute sea water and marine fauna and flora BUT the chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Kato, failed to use the words ‘science’ or ‘scientific’ in emphasizing that the discharge of tritium, a deadly carcinogenic, would be safely harnessed.
That the Japanese government has been giving a cold bath to scientific R&D to combat the Fukushima meltdown is underscored in part by the fact that it turned its head to request from Kinki University of Osaka for its research to decontaminate tritium from the Fukushima reactors.
Since the 2011 earthquake and meltdown accident, Toshiba, the architect of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors and known as the pioneer of the world’s first robots as far back as 150 years ago, has tried numerous technologies to extract the red-hot and highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods. But all Japanese technologies have failed and engineers now are trying to pull out the rods with other countries’ technologies. This is another ironic development. Until slightly more than 10 years ago, Japan was revered as the bastion of robots, such as factory assembly line industrial robots.
Not anymore. At student robot contests held every year in Japan, something called Robocon, Japanese student teams are outsmarted by Asian teams in recent years. Little wonder why Toshiba and other big companies cannot develop technology to control the Fukushima nuclear contaminated water.

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Tokyo, April 7, 2021—Olympic games historially have been used as a powerful tool for delivering messages about causes and pleas but never as strongly as now, three months before the Tokyo Olympic Games scheduled to start from late July in the midst of the global surge of Covid-19 virus viriants.
This week, North Korea weaponized its position regarding its participation in the Tokyo Olympic Games as a retaliation against Japan’s sanctions on Pyongyang. Japanese and South Korean news wires April 6 quoted the North Korean Athletic Ministry as announcing that Pyongyang won’t participate in the Tokyo games to protect its athletes from Covid-19 infections.
Narrowly focused, it’s a message that Japan’s Covid-19 policy is insufficient – only 0.6 percent of the Japanese population of 126 million have been inoculated – and that, while it is insisting zero infections in the country, Pyongyang is telling China and the United States to send vaccines that it badly needs to preempt mass infections.
Pyongyang’s announncement also is directed at the world’s emerging countries to jon its boycott to force Japan to abandon holding the games, the move, which would contribiute to its global recogonition if succssful.
Probably incensed by North Korea, the United States, increasingly angry about China’s attitudes internationally, April 6 suggested that it could boycott the Beijing Winter Olympic Games: State Department spokesperson Ned Price was quoted by U.S. media as saying, ‘A coordinated approach will not only be in our interest but also in the interest of our allies and partners. The message was aimed at China’s human rights abuse of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Meanwhile in Japan, the prime minister, Yoshi Suga, is instructing the Japan Olympic Committee and the Sports minister, Seiko Hashimoto, to continue holding the Tokyo Olympic torch relay no matter how badly the Covid-19 pandemic spreads in cities where the torch is scheduled to pass. It’s hardly a surprise that Suga is railroading the relay with threats and intimidation to governors and mayors alongthe relay route since his political life hangs on a successful Tokyo game. More than 80 percent of Japanese are opposed to the games.

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