Author: Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, July 2, 2019—A fleet of harpoon-installed ships July 1 were gearing for weeks-long hunting voyages at Shimonoseki and Taichi in western Japan, homes to Japan’s once-thriving commercial whaling and, also, key electorates of prime minister Shinzo Abe and Toshihiro Nikai, the secretary-general of Abe’s ruling party.

It’s no coincidence that Abe had instructed his government to resume commercial whaling for the first time since 1988 after the International Whaling Commission banned it in 1986 to protect whale populations and species. Even though Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party commands a comfortable popular support exceeding 50 percent, even a small setback in the July 21 House of Councilors election below the previous race can be deemed Abe’s loss raising pressure for him to step down. Ditto with Nikai as the duo are increasingly seen as detriments to appointing young LDP members to visible posts.

Abe’s thinking is this:whaling resumption would help fishermen, many of them pro-LDP, suffering depleting catches caused by climate change, increasing Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese fishing in traditional fishing waters where Japanese fishermen had almost exclusively operated, and reduced fishing quotas set in negotiations with Russia in northern waters. They’s vote for LDP, particularly Shimonoseki and Taichi and other Wakayama prefecture voters.

At a July 1 news conference, deputy cabinet secretary Yasutoshi Nishimura, said that Japan would ensure that its whaling will be scientifically managed so as not to adversely affect whale populations and that Tokyo would explain its policy to other countries. He also said, ‘Our hope is that our whaling operations will become commercially viable promptly so that Japan’s ‘whaling culture’ can be passed on to the next generation,’ according to the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper’s website July 2.

The Fisheries Agency of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries July 1 released a statement that emphasized that commercial whaling will be performed within Japan’s sovereign waters and its whaling vessels won’t operate in the Arctic and Antarctic seas for both commercial and research purposes. (http://www.jfa.maff.go.jp/j/press/kokusai/190701.html – in Japanese) It said scientific ground that Japan deploys for commercial whaling is based on the method developed by the IWC and that according to this method, Japan’s huting would not exceed 1/100th of resources.

The agency’s statement said Japan had set quotas to catch 50 Minke whales, 150 Bryde whales, and 25 eagle whales between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2019. The three species are smaller – no larger than 18 meters – than humpback whales. The Mink population in the Northwest Pacific is 20,513; Bryde 34,473 in the North Pacific; and 34,718, also in the North Pacific, according to the statement. It said Iceland caught 217 Minke in 2018; Norway 1,278 Minke; and the United States 51 Arctic whales.

Ships from Shimonoseki are a fleet of one mother ship and three harpoon ships. Five other ships are permitted to operate from other ports – Abashiri and Kushiro in Hokkaido, Hachinohe in Aomori, Ishinomaki in Miyagi, Minami Boso in Chiba, and Taichi in Wakayama.

On the retail market level, the question is whether Japanese consumers save generations over 70 years old consume whale meat on a regular basis. Seventy some olds were fed whale meat as school lunch because other meat varieties were beyond budget reach. Now, beef, pork, and chicken are affordable for both school lunches and homes and prices are far more reasonable than whale meat, which is priced far higher than other meats. In 2018, Japan’s per capital whale meat consumption was about 30 grams, or once ounce.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, June 30, 2019—If an old Chinese proverb, “It is no use crying over spilt milk,’ is applied Trump’s claim that China is stealing U.S. intellectual properties came much too late and sanction threats are futile in the long run. Because ‘Stream runs only from high to low levels,’ as a Japanese saying goes, as the United States, Japan and other rich countries already have given China advanced technologies and patents enabling Beijing to plan sending manned spacecraft to the Mars.

There’s no doubt that China has been copying and counterfeiting American and other foreign products and technologies: Toys, hand tools (not quite yet power tools), kitchen ware, solar power panels, telecom protocols… And of course PCs and smart phones that China has become global manufacturing leaders. The Chinese now are gearing to launch 5G telecom and motor vehicles to the world market from the early 2020s.

How the Chinese have become the global manufacturing platform for wide arrays of industrial and consumer products in just over a decade that other countries toiled for stardom for decades? Unlike Japan, which hobbled out of World War II rubbles in 1945 and struggled literally ‘manually’ for global positions for their electronics and autos for several decades, China had lucked out with the help of computer and information technology that exploded with the global Internet use in the 1990s.

China’s global reach simultaneously was accelerated by its accession to the WTO in 2001. Having been denied formal access to the world market until then, Chinese manufacturers produced at full throttle what were asked them by foreign businesses thirsty for cheap Chinese labor and in a matter of a few years, the country became the second largest trade economy in 2014.

WTO accession meant a lot more for China: Its researchers and students entered U.S. and foreign universities, research labs, companies and so on, enabling China as a whole to acquire foreign technologies and intellectual properties with ease, as William J. Holstein writes in his new book ‘The New Art of War.’

Sure, the United States has been naive about the Chinese penetration, blind-sided by its quarterly earnings performances. U.S. government entities and businesses should have been more careful about trade and tech secret protection. Had they taken more proactive precautions two decades ago before China’s WTO accession, China might not have been as technology-savvy as now – but it is now and it is took late to cry over spilt milk. But even with extra precautions, China eventually should acquire same levels of IP know-how as other countries because ‘the water cascades from high to low grounds.’

That was what happened to Japan from as far back as the 1970s, when Nippon Steel Corp., then the world’s largest steel mill, agreed to help build it in 1977 as part of Japan’s wartime compensation at Chinese premier Den Xiaoping’s request. Banking on the legally transferred steelmaking technology it has now become a much larger mill than Nippon Steel to be one of the largest in the world.

In the 2000s, China began modernizing its railway network by tapping Japanese and German high-speed train technology inviting Japan Rail in 2003 to offer details but ultimately calling the offer off only making off the JR technologies. China also invited German Rail but Germany was known to have begged off for fear of IP theft. China built the high speed rail system and has not only become the world’s longest network but also began exporting the infrastructure technology and also become the world’s leader.

Solar power panels once was Japan’s dominant technology with Sharp Corp. (now owned by Taiwan’s Foxcom) standing out as the world leader through the early 2000s. Chinese engineers and researchers had frequented Japan for PV technology, including Sharp, and succeeding at making off the know-how, they started manufacturing their proprietary PV panels and in a matter of a few years, became the world’s largest commanding more than 85 percent of global PV demand.

U.S. companies are no innocent as Chinese about exploiting other countries’ IPs: Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs had visited the late Sony CEO Akio Morita to learn about designs, technologies, management and many other corporate issues back in the 1980s, so, while Apple had counterfeited Sony designs and technology might be debatable, the basic concept has similarities. And now, American companies are using Emoji as standard tools of email exchanges, the Japanese technology developed centuries ago.

Retracing history, Japanese businesses were trying to learn how to make automobile engines, transmissions, and other parts by disassembling the components after importing GM and For cars in the 1940s. The next result is that those efforts helped elevate Japan as a top auto manufacturing country.

So IPs – patents, designs, production methods, and so on – are like water streaming downward and only downward from high ground.

Toshio Aritake

Chino, Nagano, Japan, May 3, 2019—Perhaps I’d been too naive: For decades, the United States, I was told and believed and respected when young, has championed itself s a nation of rules of law. That principle has served as the model of nation-states for many countries, including India, a former British colony that has become a rules-based democracy, and Japan, a former imperial, military country that adopted the present pacifist constitution after losing World War II.
Donald Trump is discarding that lofty American principle, replacing it with MAGA (make America great again), which amounts to enriching the trump empire in disguise of the white supremacy. Washington Post recently reported that since his inauguration, Trump lied more than 10,000 times and the lying pace was accelerating. Yet, he’s spared reprimand or other forms of penalties by Congress and judiciary and the public because the executive branch and even court are occupied by his cronies, Justice William Barr, for example.
That Trump is a man without care and love for others can be underscored by the fact that he is one of very few American presidents that do not keep a dog let lone a cat.
That the leader of a powerful country can cheat and lie reverberates across the world: Chinese leader Xi Jin-ping continues to expand in the South China Sea building what was a short airstrip, not into an airport-size runway. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, ignoring public opinion, continues his military buildup and gears for raising the sales tax, now at 8 percent, to 10 percent in October despite the country’s anemic economic growth. Other leaders of countries big and small are likewise emulating Trump ad lying in pursuit of their aspirations.
This is serious for Planet Earth and climate change regimes because many countries seem to be thinking like Trump and mind their own business alone. Global trade also is exposed to MAGA-like me-ism.

–Toshio Aritake

Chino, Nagano, Japan, May 3, 2019—Human jobs are eroding and effective wages are decreasing as widening disparities are developing among workers thanks to the encroachment of digitalization and globalization and aging. The OECD, the rich nations’ economic think-tank, said April 29 in its 2019 employment outlook. Those growing threats can be fought with adult education, employment protections and collective bargaining, it theorized. But will it happen? Carpenters, scaffolding assemblers, construction workers, loggers and manual laborers can be coopted to engage in collective bargaining or higher education? Many are in those trades because they do not want to be actively partake in the digital economy and/or prefer hands-on, tangible work.
Over the past 20 years, manufacturing jobs decreased by 20 percent while service jobs rose 27 percent, OECD said. Stefano Scarpetta, OECD’s director for employment, labor and social affairs, told reporters in Tokyo April 29 that Japan, for example, would see 15 percent of jobs could be automated but many more will change. Worldwide, the share of high-skilled jobs has increased by 10 percent over the last two decades but many adults lack the skills needed for the new jobs that require ICT skills, he said. That’s why adult learning skills, a.k.a, ICT skills, are necessary, he said.
And give adult learning policy directions to those workers and employers, such as ‘fostering a mind-set for learning among firms and individuals’ and tackling barriers to training, OECD said.
As jobs are being sucked into so-called platform work, Uber, Ubereats, and so on, albeit a still limited work pattern, OECD says some kind of social protection systems are vital to sustain the growing pace of job hopping and work-style and variety shifts for workers that are growing to be in independent forms of employment, an idea that evolving worker society can welcome.
The report covers other important and interesting subjects, among them labor market regulations, that are worth stock-taking for both workers and employers, and in short, many of the OECD recommendations are commendable.
But one big issue OECD has left out is that jobs related to basic human habitation – building homes,
plumbing and electric wiring for homes and offices, assembling scaffolding for those structures, managing cattle ranches and fish farms, and so on, cannot be replaced with robotics and AI in the foreseeable future, say, the next half a century.
Interestingly, jobs in those areas not covered by OECD are becoming more important than ever as the populations engaged in them are shrinking rapidly yet cannot be replaced. I know a 70-year-old welder who builds structures for high-rise structures, like the new WTC in NYC. He wants to retire but is being asked by companies that he works for as an independent contractor to continue working. He gets paid $2,000 for 5 hours or so of work. Not bad!

Toshio Aritake

Tokyo, April 18, 2019—On Planet Earth where the rich gets richer and the big gets bigger by ravaging the ecosystem, workers increasingly are working like ants by sacrificing their well-being even though they are supposedly protected against overwork and low pays. Freelance, or independent contractors, are among those scraping by with ultra-low wages earned for assignments given them through sprouting cloud-sourcing businesses that the Shinzo Abe government is espousing as a new work-life style. Now is the time for Japan to establish worker safety nets for independent contractors.
On April 12, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’ released to its study commission to work out key points on work style reform of like-occupations (Koyo ruiji no hatarakikata ni kakaru ronnten seiri to nikansuru kenntoukai. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_01811.html) a report that showed that as many as 1.7 million workers in Japan are cloud-sourcing business-relying independent contract workers (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11911500/000501194.pdf). It was believed to be the first such data released by the Japanese government. Of the 1.7 million of them, 1.3 million positioned their work as key income sources while 400,000 considered their cloud-sourced work as side jobs. Japan’s total work population is 66.5 million, of which independent contractors and self-employed account for 6.5 million, thus the 1.7 million number is a formidable workforce.
The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper on April 14 quoted in a feature article a female worker allegedly in her 50s saying that when she had registered on-line for work with an intermediary, the company asked her a work to compile an outline of a television drama in 1,000 Japanese characters for posting onto a website – for 0.7 yen per word of Japanese. That meant she earned 700 yen ($6.00) for work that kept her at PC for 3-1/2 hours, or less than 200 yen an hour. But that was not the end of her sacrifice: the intermediary raked in 140 yen out of that 700 yen, the newspaper reported. Worse, she could not get paid the 560 yen (700 yen minus 140 yen) since the sum was below the 3,000 yen threshold for the company to pay to an independent contractor.
The work-style reform is one of Abe’s ‘3 arrow’ policies: flexible monetary policy by the Bank of Japan, timely fiscal mobilization, and policy to stimulate private-sector growth. The labor reform, the Abe cabinet claims, is beneficial for diversifying work-styles. On the contrary, this policy clearly is burdening workers, causing a plethora of problems between intermediaries that give assignments and workers such as late, or no payments, unilateral pay reductions, the newspaper reported.
Editing, translating, and like-kind jobs are being threatened by AI-driven computers, so the long downward-spiraling of white collar worker pays is not surprising. A 69-year-old former Japanese national reporter for a European news agency quit his full-time work as a translator for a Tokyo Olympic Game promo company. The reason: he was told that his hourly pay would go down to 1,200 yen ($11.00) from 1,600 yen, effective April 1, 2019, the beginning of a new Japanese fiscal year.
The newspaper quoted labor lawyer Yoshihito Kawaakami as saying that Japan has entered an era in which even unskilled workers can succeed at work, but the society should not tolerate unjust compensations and offer basic worker safety nets.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO—As The Prospect has been reporting, the Japanese bureaucracy intervention is getting out of control: Now, the Japanese trade ministry is telling eight large and mid-size convenience store CEOs to submit programs to cope with spiraling labor shortages as the industry leader, Seven and I Holdings Co., Ltd., is being challenged by its franchisees to operate less than twenty-four-seven.
On April 4, the company, which operates 7-11 convenient stores, announced the appointment of its new CEO, Fumihiko Nagamatsu, presumably to deflect franchisee criticisms about the 24-7 store opening and other what they viewed as high-handed policies. At the same earnings report news conference the same day, Nagamasa failed to promise ending the 24-7 policy drawing franchisee ires and revealing numerous cracks in the company’s management policy, among them extraordinary high franchisee fees.
Nagamasa’s uncompromising attitude sparked national debate about 24-7 operations of not only convenience stores but other industries reeling with worsening labor shortages, the effect of the country’s rapid population aging and contraction. That had drawn bureaucrats’ attention that are always looking about for opportunities to expand bureaucracy reaches, and they urged the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Hiroshige Seko, to tell convenience store companies to draw up ‘action plans’ on 24-7 store opening policy. A METI official said the action plan submission is ‘voluntary’ and that the government plans to advise stores to deploy IoT and AI technologies to cope with labor shortages.
On April 5, METI called a meeting of eight convenience store company CEOs, in which Seko said that METI’s research underscored growing disenchantment about convenience store business of franchisee owners about long store hours and other contract terms. As many as 61 percent of franchisees complained about manpower shortages and 39 percent were dissatisfied with their contracts with convenience store companies, according to the METI official, who said the results were worse than the previous research done in 2014.
In mid-March, approximately 100 franchisee owners of 7-11 Japan and Familymart convenient store companies were given by the governmental labor mediation board a ruling in their disfavor that they were not ‘workers’ and thus did not qualify labor law protection. But the fact they those franchisees grouped together had bearings beyond what they sought but given: Their pleas revealed the harsh realities of being a franchise owner, especially about manpower.
It’s the field that the bureaucracy is happy to intervene as part of the ‘work-style reform’ espoused by the prime minister Shinzo Abe cabinet. From April 1, 2019, nearly 10 labor-related laws were or scheduled to be amended on such vital human resources issues as employment, occupational hazard, labor contract, workplace safety and sanitation, pollution and the environment.
Since the amendments are new and ministry and agency ordinances that detail nitty-gritty Dos and Don’ts details have yet to be proclaimed in full, what will come about next is difficult to tell but once thing for sure i9s that the bureaucracy tentacles to the private sector will become longer.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, March 29, 2019—Honda Motor Co. has joined an IoT, autonomous-driving venture of the Toyota Motor Corp.-Softbank Corp. group, MONET, moving a step away from being the only remaining stand-alone Japanese automaker, MONET Technologies Inc. announced March 28. Honda in October 2018 pledged to acquire an equity stake in General Motors Corp.’s Cruise autonomous-driving tech unit, in which Softbank has a major stake. Both developments show how desperate the No. 3 Japanese automaker is becoming in next-gen motor vehicle R&D, apparently deciding that it no longer can keep going solo.
MONET’s March 29 announcement said that in addition to Honda, Hino Motors Corp., a Toyota unit, also would join the group, which already was scheduled to embrace 88 companies operating in Japan.
MONET’s initial paid-up capital is 2 billion yen, coughed up 50.25 percent by Softbank and 49.75 percent by Toyota. It will be increased to 10 billion yen, the company’s website said. As part of the capital increase, Honda and Hino will acquire 9.9 percent equity of MONET.
Honda has been enjoying steady sales growth thanks to demand in China and other Asian markets but its sales to income has been eroding, giving its management a growing sense of alarm as the company’s automotive R&D inventory is running low though its corporate image is burnished with its success of the Honda Jet commuter jet.
Toyota-Honda-Hino IoT, autonomous driving alliance would mean that contemporary automobiles are set to become commodities even further save super-expensive name brands. Most are likely to be powered by batteries, not by gas engines, in the next few years with driving dependent on auto-piloting on freeways and other major arteries for long driving. Boring? Yes but that’s where cars are destined to.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, March 20, 2019—An apparent tripping of the bureaucrats advising Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party has sparked loud opposition from within the party, forcing it to postpone submitting legislation to the present Diet (parliament) to make it illegal to download literally anything on-line. (see Feb. 14, 2019 article.)

The embarrassing incident for Abe, who increasingly speaks and acts like Donald Trump as he vies for another term as LDP chief and continue as prime minister even longer than 6 years he served, occurred as an open standoff between members of the LDP committee on education and intellectual properties and the party’s general affairs committee on March 13.

If the bill was submitted as it was, plain vanilla copying – or downloading – by individuals of internet content, even if they are not copyrighted, such as videos, magazines, photos and academic papers, was set to become illegal.

Miwa Okajima, an official of the Ministry of Education, Cultural Affairs and Sports, March 20 told The Prospect that it was ‘regrettable’ that the bill submission to the Diet fell through. She said the ministry now has no clear schedule as to whether/when it would re-submit the bill to the next Diet session expected to be convened this fall.

Okajima agreed that the bill’s language was ‘too complicated and confusing’ to understand, in other words, it was written in such heavy bureaucrat language that LDP lawmakers had difficulty understanding how to read it.

For the Abe cabinet, withdrawing a bill was a rare case as his LDP majority has been bulldozing just about any bills and policies with total disregard of opposition parties. The latest incident seems to show cracks in the LDP unity and a potential for revolt against his increasingly autocratic attitudes.

The bill was said to have been drafted on behalf of the comic book industry that has been appealing to Abe to ban pirate downloading comics on-line.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, March 5, 2019—Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman/CEO of the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance, March 5 was released from the Tokyo detention center on one billion yen bail ($9 million), yet his case and the fate of the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance are likely to drag on for long.
The Tokyo district court upheld the the release request filed by his defense team led by his new lawyer Junichiro Hironaka, who filed it on March 4. The Tokyo Regional Public Prosecutors Office released Ghosn on three conditions – Ghosn cannot live in a location other than one designated by the office, cannot leave Japan, and that he be under surveillance so as not to tamper with evidence and flee from the residential location.
The defense team of the law offices of Hironaka, Hiroshi Kawatsu, and Takashi Takano on Feb. 28 filed a request with the Tokyo Public Prosecutors Office to release Ghosn who has been detained at the facility since his arrest in November 19, 2018, Hironaka said, and described the case as ‘peculiar’ in that that Ghosn’s alleged most transactions took place more than 10 years ago – and that Nissan executives had been aware of the transactions.
Ghosn was charged for violating the Securities and Exchange Law and later theFinancial Products Transaction Law.. Ghosn allegedly instructed Nissan Motor staff to file false information in the company’s securities reports for the purpose of underreporting his annual income; had the company to foot securities swap transaction losses he incurred in his personal investments; and transferr Nissan money to a Saudi Arabian dealer in violation of the Corporate Law.
‘For what purpose did Nissan reported (whistle-blew) this case to the prosecutors? This is a very peculiar case,’ the lawyer said. ‘Common sense tells me that his case does not warrant to be treated as a criminal case.’
Hironaka said his defense team applied for Ghosn’s bail by proposing that Ghosn be monitored by surveillance cameras and cannot contact with outside people so that he cannot tamper with evidence. The prosecutors were against Ghosn’s release, he said. It was the third time since his arrest that bail application was filed.
Hironaka said the Ghosn case would take a long time and be cumbersome, and it would have significance both ‘historically and societally.’ The defense team, he said, is taking stock of Nissan as a company and ‘the link between Nissan and the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.’
Hironaka said detention period used to be much shorter in the past but over years, it has been stretched to hundreds of days amounting to ‘hostage justice,’ in contract to other countries’ trends of short detention. He said detention periods are being extended because the prosecutors are not confident enough about evidence they have.
As Hironaka said, one reason why detention period has become so long as to draw overseas eyebrows is the problems inside the Japanese bureaucracy, including the public prosecutors office. During more than six years of the Shinzo Abe government, the Japanese bureaucracy has become far more invasive than before. Among those that stand out are the public prosecutors office, police, and the National Tax Agency. Economic and financial bureaucracies cooperate and collude with them.
Nippon Keidanren, the congregation of aged CEOs who tremble at seeing Japanese industry encroached by foreign and young Japanese dotcom entrepreneurs, side with Abe and the bureaucracy that tout new nationalism centering around Abe’s beautiful Japan, or recovery Japan,’ and with it plot Constitution amendments to give legitimacy to the Self-Defense Force.
Therefore, the search and arrest troika of the prosecutors, police, and taxmen are motivated for more aggressive probe of what they view as unfair. Hirofumi Horie, who founded the Livedoor IoT company raking in hundreds of billions of yen in the 1990s and arrested and detained before released on 600 million yen bail, warned about the prolific prosecutor swoops in a web television program in December, saying the Ghosn arrest was ‘100 percent’ for the prosecutors’ interest to preserve their (waning) authority.’
The lead figure at the prosecutors office is Hiroshi Morimoto, chief investigator of the Tokyo Regional Public Prosecutors Office.
On Sept. 11, 2017, Morimoto told reporters at his first news conference as the head investigator that he would focus on cases viewed by the public as ‘submerged under water and looking unfair.’
Morimoto also said he wants to use the plea bargaining system, which was introduced in Japan in June 2018, and that he would zero in on bribery and corporate crime cases, Japan’s national broadcasting station, NHK, reported at the time.
Morimoto worked as the honcho of the prosecutors’ investigations of the Olympus camera company’s loss fabrication case in 2013. He detained Nobumasa Yokoo, a consulting company CEO that advised Olympus for close to 1,000 days, and other alleged defendants for months. Yokoo and other persons initially charged and detained later presented evidence of their innocence to the Tokyo district court but the presiding judge, Masaharu Ashizawa, refuse to hear them and instead upheld the prosecutors’ demand for guilty verdict even though the charges were for minor violations in 2017. Yokoo and other defendants appealed the case to the Supreme court eventually but the highest court refused to hear, underscoring the collusive nature of court and prosecutors.
Morimoto is known to be the very person who advocated the plea bargaining system to Japan. Morimoto, who is known to be aspiring to become the prosecutor general, apparently has jumped on Nissan’s whistle-blowing on Ghosn for high scores to make up for other recent ditched cases, including the dango tea-partying case of the world’s first linear train track construction involving large Japanese general contractors. He cannot fail on the Ghosn case for his promotion, and also because the trade and industry ministry and Keidanren geezer CEOs want to make sure that Nissan remains headquartered in Japan and much of its production.

Toshio Aritake

TOKYO, March 1, 2019—The Japan Fair Trade Commission, the country’s compact antitrust agency April 27 commenced surveys on app store and on-line mall businesses of the four U.S. internet giants and other so-called internet platformers for the first time, JFTC announced earlier this week. The survey is believed to be coopted by a similar action by the European Union earlier. The survey’s on-line questionnaire does not seem to contain new items.
The survey is aimed at analyzing whether the so-called GAFA – Google (Alphabet), Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.com, plus local Japanese internet-based operators such as Yahoo Japan and Rakuten, that are called platformers – are pressuring smaller firms that use the big ones in violation of the Anti-monopoly Law, a JFTC official said.
One part of the survey that drew The Prospect’s attention was clearly directed at Amazon, which is scheduled to start on May 1 a reward point incentive program to consumers for merchandise sold on its site, in a follow-up of Rakuten and Yahoo Japan that already are offering 1 percent credit points to consumers for merchandise and service purchases. If Amazon is found to be forcing vendors to cough up the cost of those points, say one of every point given to consumers, it would be deemed a violation of the law.
On March 27, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani was quoted by a Japanese newspaper reporting from Barcelona, Spain as expressing concerns that the JFTC survey and its possible legislative actions might have serious adverse impact on on-line business models. ‘I ask (the JFTC) not to arbitrarily send psychological pressure to vendors,’ he said.
Rakuten and Yahoo Japan released comments that said they would cooperate with JFTC.
Yahoo Japan collects 2.5 points from vendors of merchandise sales and gives 1 point to consumers since 2016.
The JFTC survey is expected to prove a no-brainer for GAFA and other on-line platformers since sales incentive giveback point incentive programs have been around for years accepted as a given by both vendors and consumers. Then, why is the agency doing it? Simply, the commission has very little to do to administer the antitrust law and its capacity is limited by its small size and capabilities.

–Toshio Aritake