Category: 未分類

TOKYO, Aug. 28, 2024—Manabu Horii, a 52-year-old former Olympic speed skatermedalist who had been a Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker, Aug. 28, 2024 resigned for violating the political campaign finance law, cutting himself as a rare honest member of athlete-turned LDP lawmakers that dominate the ruling party.

Horii presented his resignation to the speaker of the House of Representatives after releasing a statement in which he admitted that ‘all (irregularities concerning paying condolence money to voters) are my responsibility,’ in classic athlete spirit.

Public prosecutors had been investigating Horii since early this year and he resigned from the LDP in July, quitting as an independent lawmaker.

If Horii’s admittance of law violation and resignation sounds like sport spirit act, most other athlete-turned LDP lawmakers – that are many – may not be that honest, some of them disregarding athletic spirits of respecting rules and unity with others.

LDP has a long list of lawmakers who came from the sports world. Perhaps the most well-known lawmaker are former prime ministers Yoshiro Mori and Taro Aso. Both had run into irregularities, they they outfoxed investigators and maneuvered to remain in their posts, though Mori has abdicated visible posts while remaining a shadow kingmaker in recent years for his discriminatory comments about women. Aso, who is in his 80s, continues to exercise long and powerful reach in LDP decision-making.

Female athlete-turned LDP members also are active in the party. Seiko Hashimoto, a former Olympic speed skater, worked as minister of the payoff scandal-riddled Tokyo Olympic game.

In Japan, including the political world, athletes-turned politicians command a formidable influence over party and parliamentary jockeying, particularly in the conservative LDP hierarchy where seniority is observed rigidly and links with the underworld are rumored.

It’s partly because athletes-turned LDP members had strong connections with sports-betting, such as horse-racing, motor boat competitions, motorcycle betting, sumo, and baseball. At the grand sumo tournament held six times a year, a giant prime minister’s cup is handed by his deputy to the winner, proof of strong LDP politicians’ connections with the sport.

###

CHINO, Japan, Aug. 23, 2024—Kyoto Kokusai (International) High School Aug. 23, 2024 beat the Kanto Daiichi High School of Tokyo 2-1 in the 10^th inning tie breaker to become the first Korean, and the first international school to win the annual summer National High School Tournament in its 109-year history. Teams that won the much-coveted stardom traditionally becomes nationally famous not only for ball games but also other sports as well as academic activities.

Nearly 4,000 high school ball teams compete in 49 prefectural tournaments to send the winning teams to Koshien Stadium near the second largest city of Osaka every spring and summer. It’s undeniably the most prestigious baseball event for high school ball players, and in fact, many are joining pro ball teams. The most famous player in recent years is Shohei Ohtani, a member of the ball team and graduate of Hanamaki Higashi High School. His team failed to win a prefectural tournament, but he had impressed upon pro ball recruiters, including American teams.

In a flash report, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper of South Korea reported Kyoto Kokusai’s victory as ‘standing at the pinnacle in the (Japan high school ball tournament) dream stage.’ The team’s victory drew roaring celebration calls in and outside the stadium to the tune of the Hangul Korean language school anthem – which also was the first time in the tournament’s 109-year history that a foreign school anthem was played and sung by the winning team.

Kyoto Kokusai was founded in 1947 as a private Korean junior high school financed by Korean residents in Japan. It was recognized as a school by the Kyoto governor in 1958. As the number of Korean students began shrinking in the 1990s, the school swung open its doors to Japanese students in 2004 – wooing them as a baseball school and for trilingual education with Korean, Japanese and English. The school teaches about 140 students, of which Japanese students account for 100 and Korean-Japanese 40. Of the Japanese students, as many as 40 belong to the baseball team. In a 2021 tally, the school had 136 students, of which females were 69 and males 67, and of the males, 59 were ball team members.

How will the ball team victory make changes is at the center of attention in Japan and Korea. Japanese and Korean media generally are applauding the team’s victory as having positive influence over the bilateral relationship. It was top news stories of all major Japanese and Korean newspapers with not a single negative word or sentences seen in the reports. Korean President Yyoon Suk Yeol wrote in his social network site ‘Congratulations.’

###

CHINO, Japan, Aug. 23—No wonder the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown fiasco happened: On Aug. 22, 2024, Tokyo Electric Power Co. engineers blew a much-awaited opportunity to pull out highly radioactive debris from the still-raging hot out-of-control reactor with an infant-like human error, forcing the effort indefinitely up in the air.

TEPCO described the error as a simple procedural mistake to insert a fishing rod-like device into the red-hot reactor container vessel.

The debris pullout experiment was to be the first-ever attempt at enlarging it to eventually decommission one of the Fukushima reactors – though the amount of radioactive debris to be extracted was a ludicrously tiny ‘3 grams’ or about one-tenth of an ounce, out of some 880 tons buried deep in the reactor. Even more laughable and reflecting the low intellectual levels of TEPCO officials was that the removal operation was to take as long as to weeks.

One can imagine the huge cost of the operation, human labor especially, for the work. No wonder more than 20 trillion yen taxpayer money has been sank into the Fukushima cleanup, which experts had said would take 200 years or longer, and even more money.

The folly meant that TEPCO has effectively abandoned the fishing rod method and virtually given up debris cleanup – and reactor decommissioning.

But TEPCO is a company that never learns from past mistakes – like all other government-capitalized, quasi-governmental, and government-sponsored companies. TEPCO is one of those as it is required to seek government-approval for doing everything, from raising power utility rates to restarting nuclear power reactors, most of them being suspended since March 2011.

TEPCO currently is exploring building new nuclear reactors called fast reactors. They are much smaller in size so it can be located in areas closer to major urban areas. The technology is being explored worldwide as a solution to soaring electricity demand without relying on fossil and renewable fuels.

TEPCO can continue its old, dangerous business model thanks to its bureaucracy guardians, especially the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Though not directly, TEPCO and METI maintains a close arms-length relationship enabling in part retiring bureaucrats to serve as advisors and other functions of power industry lobbies.

Nothing changes.

###

CHINO, Japan, Aug. 21—Sacks of rice are disappearing from Japanese retail store shelves as 2023 fall produce distribution dries up amid strong demand from domestic consumers and visitors, sparking concern and panic buying among consumers trying to stock up for natural disasters and and eateries scrambling to secure inventory for business.

Visitors to supermarkets and farmers stores in this city of 55,000 residents Aug. 20 were stunned and expressed worries when they saw empty shelves for 5- and 10-kilogram plastic bags of Japan’s staple cereal that always have been stacked up full.

Signs at many retailers read bluntly: ‘Next arrival is unknown’ and/or ‘One bag per person.’ The store manager of a farmers market Aug. 20 told me, ‘2023 rice (those harvested in the 2023 autumn) which we polished is fully sold. The next installment is August 22, and we don’t know how much we can sell. For the next one (if I miss the purchase), you need to wait for the 2024 produce’ – which is not until late October, he said.

Japan harvested about 6.6 million tons of food-use rice in 2023, while annual consumption is 8 million tons. It has about 1.5 million tons of running stock, meaning there’s enough supply to last until the next harvest if that tonnage is smoothly distributed.

Can consumers be optimistic about 2024 harvest distribution? The jury is out. One thing that has become visible is rice rices are soaring and likely to remain high as the country’s inflation continues to be unabated, running at more than 20 percent per annum to date this year following over than a 30 percent jump in 2023 on a headline inflation basis.

Hoarding by distributors and consumers as well as a pent-up export boom in tandem with increasing over-tourism are suspect behind the tight supply and price rises.

###

CHINO, Japan, Aug. 17, 2024—The upcoming election to choose the next president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the post that automatically gives the person the premiership because of the LDP’s majority of parliament, looks like the recentTokyo governor race in which more than 50 candidates run, fanning chaos, sexism, and numerous things that voters greeted as undesirable and exotic reigned.

If not as many as the Tokyo race, the LDP president race is drawing nearly 10 candidates and presumptive ones toward the Sept. 29 election. The race was kicked off this week after the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, announced that he would no seek a reelection Aug. 14.

The candidates, as has been with the recent Japanese leaders including Kishida, do not map out Japan’s long-term course. Kishida, who inherited the late leader Shinzo Abe’s ambiguous ‘A Beautiful Japan’ dictum, carried with him the ‘New Japan’ banner. During the two leaders’ administration, Japan’s global standing steadily slipped, nearly plunging to the bottom of the 38- member OECD, now well below Singapore and slightly under South Korea.

A common denominating element of the candidates is that all are inheriting Abe’s nationalism and rearmament tilt. Kishida publicly pledged to double Japan’s defense outlays, to over 2 percent of GDP. A former defense minister who is believed to be a key candidate, Shigeru Ishiba, for one, recently visited Taiwan to elucidate Japan’s stance toward China. 

Ishiba, who lost an LDP president election to Abe a decade ago, is a loner among the candidates. Many if not all others can be called the ‘Abe children’ running on the platform of nationalism, pro-U.S. and west. Sanae Takaichi, seen publicly as a viable candidate who had served as an economy and security minister under Abe, espouses amending Japan’s constitution to defend the sovereignty of ‘land, waters, air, and resources’ in open defiance against China, North Korea and Russia.

Other candidates bear similar nationalistic penchant by different degree – while all seem to lack visions about Japan’s long-term directions and relationships with the global society, among them, the economy and finance, technology, monetary policy, global trade, culture, and most importantly, social issues.

That could be deferred, as Kishida entrusted fully, to the Japanese bureaucracy with an antiquated belief that a country’s strength owes to an active bureaucracy. In July, Kishida authorized sharp rises of compensations for bureaucrats – while the private-sector is struggling to do so. Perhaps, it could have been one of few policies that drew applause even though only from one corner of society that raised eyebrows of the public. Whoever inherits Kishida’s post, she/he has to rely excessively on the Japanese bureaucracy for most policies, as he did fully.

###

TOKYO, Aug. 5, 2024—What triggered the Japanese stock market slide that started in late July and rippled throughout the world Aug. 5 was the Japanese prime minister’s ambitions for reelection in the September election of his ruling political party LDP so that he can continue as the Japanese leader, political insiders analyzed Aug. 5.

As his popular support steadily has been slipping since early 2024, Kishida has been discussing with Seiji Kihara, his closest aide who is a senior LDP lawmaker, strategies to turn it around for Kishida in time for the September Liberal Democratic Party race for its president, which automatically carries with it the post of prime minister because of the LDP’s governing power, they said.

Kishida’s poor popular support – less than 30 percent now – reflects consumer frustrations about stubborn inflation and low wages, as well as employers’ struggles to hire workers, as the country’s population ages and shrinks fast. Consumers also are irritated by floods of foreign tourists visiting not only Kyoto and ancient locations but to what had been preserved for Japanese travelers. Many Japanese consumers view incoming tourists as a key factor in helping fan retail price and hotel and service rate inflation.

So Kishida’s aides targeted the weak yen as a major culprit of inflation. They had instructed the then-vice finance minister for international affairs, Masato Kanda, to buoy the yen against the dollar, which had been fluctuating around 150-160 yen. The Kishida cabinet aides allowed Kanda for massive interventions to stem the dollar’s rise, at the same time, revising formulae for calculating Japan’s government budget primacy balance.

The primary balance – tax revenues minus spending – has been in the red for years but the cabinet office in mid-July announced suddenly that it would turn to a surplus in fiscal 2025. That the account turns to a surplus from years of deficit surprised economists and raised their skepticisms but the Kishida cabinet said it was because spending related to COVID-19 such as vaccines no longer was needed and thus resulted in savings.

Kanda, who had been having difficulty persuading the Ministry of Finance Budget Bureau, which sets annual issuance amounts of Japanese government bonds (JGBs), told the budget bureau that since a budget surplus would be achieved next year, there’s little concern about issuing (selling) new JGBs and that only refunding issuance would be needed – even if the central bank, the Bank of Japan, raised interest rates. The budget bureau could not dispute Kanda’s explanation.

Thus, he laid the ground work for the central bank’s July 31 increase of its policy rate to 0.25 percent from 0.1 percent.

The reaction was immediate and far more than what the Kishida had envisioned. On Aug. 1, the Nikkei average fell 2.5 percent, and the next day, it was down 5.8 percent, the slide that gained impetus on Aug. 5 with a near 13 percent rout, a few days after the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s market capitalization topped the 1,000 trillion yen milestone for the first time since the bursting of the bubble economy in 1992. The three consecutive daily fall wiped out more than 200 trillion yen, the amount that would take several years to recoup.

The Japanese rout is reverberating around the world. On Aug. 2, New York tumbled more than 600 points.

‘It’s all politics,’ one investor with heavy exposures to the Japanese stock market told me angrily.

#####

TOKYO, Aug. 5, 2024–What used to be vast farming fields in Tokyo’s border areas with other provinces are quickly converted into lands of man-made structures — housing, storage depots, parking, and others. That’s how Tokyo is drawing national populations from most other provinces, and as the 12 million citizen city is projected to age fast too, urban desertification is becoming a reality.

Problems of water and power supply, sewage, garbage collection, chronic transportation congestion, small housing and work space, and all other conceivable inconveniences — heat domes in summer — that thus far have been miraculously managed are likely to show up gradually, making Tokyo an unlivable place and the land that holds the most precious property value of Japan empty — unless the city transforms man-made structures into green fields and limit population growth.

The site, which is located near the Tokyo border with Saitama and was a wide farming field, will be converted into a residential building complex.

#####

TOKYO, July 24, 2024—Japan’s population is shrinking and aging much faster than the government had forecast, decreasing by a record single year-to-year margin of 0.7 percent or 861,000 as of January 2024 to 121.561 million in the 15^th consecutive year of decline, the Japanese government reported July 24.

The non-Japanese resident population totaled 3.323 million, a record high, rising 11.01% or 329,500 from a year ago.

The aggregate population was down 0.42%, a record margin of decrease, or 531,000 to 124.88 million.

The number of Japanese deceased hit a record high of 1.579 million while newborns totaled 853,000, decreasing for the 16 straight year.

The latest data has underscored that Japan’s population shrinking is progressing much faster than the government long-term forecast of 87 million in 2070 with people over 65 years old accounting for 38.7%. The population aging is progressing much faster than that forecast as many provinces’ ratios already are over 40%.

By region, Tokyo’s population grew by more than 0.5% to13.911 million as its surrounding provinces (excluding Chiba) also registered marginal decreases, together with other major cities including the greater Nagoya area, Osaka and Fukuoka. All other provinces, except Okinawa, suffered much sharper, visible decreases, with Akita in northern Japan registering 1.74% drop on year.

The population contraction is straining tax revenues, threatening the pension, healthcare and social welfare, and causing increasingly serious labor shortages. The government has been taking all conceivable policies over the past four decades but nothing has helped buck the shrinkage.

###