New Abe Cabinet - National Security Focus

 

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new Cabinet began work Thursday on the twin goals of boosting the economy and developing legislation to strengthen national security.

“We are determined to give continuous top priority to the economy and to implement economic policies more boldly and speedily,” Abe told a meeting of Keidanren, the nation’s main business lobby.

“We will carefully carry out our measures step by step, based on the revitalization of the Japanese economy and other basic policies indicated by the prime minister,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference.

“The top priority for the new Cabinet is to promote ‘Abenomics’ so citizens feel an economic recovery,” said Natsuo Yamaguchi, who leads Komeito, the junior coalition partner of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party.

The Cabinet is set to adopt a ¥3.5 trillion stimulus package Saturday to support the economy, which slipped into recession after contracting for two consecutive quarters after the April 1 consumption tax hike.

Abe formed the new Cabinet on Wednesday, reappointing all previous ministers but replacing the individual at the helm of the defense ministry. Gen Nakatani became Defense Minister.

“We will steadily develop national security legislation,” Nakatani told Self-Defense Force officers Thursday. The envisioned changes would reflect the Abe Cabinet’s earlier decision to reinterpret the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise collective self-defense, or defend allies under armed attack even if Japan itself is not.

“I want us to be united in protecting the people’s lives and Japan’s territory, airspace and waters,” said Nakatani, who is expected to play a central role in gaining Diet approval of security-related bills next year.

Late Wednesday, Abe instructed Nakatani to create a legal framework to enable Japan to respond swiftly to security threats.

“Minister Nakatani has the experience and expertise after working for years in the field of security, and he is also familiar with SDF operations,” Abe told a televised news conference on Wednesday.

A powerful figure in the LDP, well-versed in defense and security policy, 57-year-old Nakatani played an integral part in the ruling parties’ talks on security before the government said in July that it would reinterpret the Constitution.

The government is expected to submit a slew of bills to the Diet next year to effect the change. Nakatani, who doubles as security legislation minister, is expected to face tough questioning from the opposition. He will also need secure support for the remodeling of security arrangements from a wary public.

At the Defense Ministry on Wednesday night, Nakatani expressed willingness to enact a law allowing the SDF to be deployed overseas.

“We need to define, in principle, what we can do in overseas operations,” he told a press conference. He noted that Japan has only one such law, covering United Nations peacekeeping operations.

His portfolio also includes accelerating work on a revised U.S.-Japan defense cooperation agreement, and pushing ahead with the controversial relocation of a key U.S. military base within Okinawa Prefecture. The defense guidelines have not been revised since 1997, and an earlier deadline this year for the new text has been pushed back to the first half of 2015.

Why Nanjing Matters

 

Denying the Nanjing Massacre violates Japan's post-war commitment, tramples the dignity of the victims and hurts their families' feelings, according to Motokazu Nogawa, a lecturer of Nihon University.

Nogawa, a researcher on historical revisionism issue of Japanese right-wing forces, said Japanese nationalist right-wing groups always deny the Nanjing Massacre, citing Nagoya mayor Takashi Kawamura who claimed that the Nanjing Massacre was entirely fabricated.

"In fact, their real purpose is to get dominance in the political field rather than the academic field," Nogawa said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on the eve of China's first National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims on Dec. 13, which also marks the 77th anniversary of the mass-slaughter.

On Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured the then Chinese capital Nanjing, killing some 300,000 unarmed people within six weeks.

According to Nogawa, Japanese right wingers use all kinds of communication tools to deny the Nanjing Massacre. On the contrary, few impartial stories about the massacre could be heard from Japanese media. "This kind of imbalance makes it difficult for the public to have access to historical facts," he said.

"The Nanjing Massacre trampled the victims' dignity and hurt their families' feelings deeply. However, a majority of media organizations focus on interpretation that the incident is simply 'a block against Sino-Japanese relations' or 'a controversial topic between right and left wing forces'."

"Meanwhile, some intellectuals in Japan know the historical facts, but choose to keep silent. Most of them have a good knowledge about Western countries' firm attitude toward the massacre of the Jewish population, when it comes to the Nanjing Massacre, however, they are excessively tight-lipped," Nogawa said.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, established for war crimes and other wartime atrocities after World War II, ruled the Nanjing Massacre was among war crimes.

To Nogawa, recognizing the verdict constitutes the premise of Japan's return to the international community in the post-war era and the signing of the China-Japan Joint Statement.

In the statement signed in 1972, the Japanese government expressed its "deep introspection" on Japan's responsibility for the enormous losses sustained by the Chinese people as the result of the war and expressed its stance to strictly follow the " Potsdam Proclamation".

So, Nogawa said, on China's side, denying the Nanjing Massacre not only means denial of Japan's war crimes, but also goes against Japan's commitment to the international community.

He also suggested that the Chinese side emphasize to Japanese citizens "Japan's recognition of the Nanjing Massacre is a symbol of reconciliation in bilateral relations."

Regional prosperity cannot be achieved without peaceful co- existence and full awareness of the past, Nogawa said, adding "I hope nationals of the two countries to remember those Chinese people who have suffered from the war and honor the victims of the massacre."

Zhu Chao

Shinataro Ishihara Calls It Quits After Election Drubbing

 

When nationalist, right-wing Shintaro Ishihara announced his retirement from politics yesterday, it marked the end of a remarkable career that dates back to the 1960s and one which will be mourned by conservative-minded Japanese.  More recently as governor of Tokyo and Diet member and head of his own nationalist and anti-Chinese political party.

Left-wingers, however, will be delighted that a man who never pulled his political punches and was unafraid of displaying his dislike for China will be exiting the political stage. Their reasoning is that it will be difficult - if not impossible - for nationalist groups to find a replacement.

At 82, the outspoken Ishihara was acting as supreme adviser to the nationalist Party for Future Generations in the run-up to Sunday's general election but stated during the campaign that he would retire from politics if he was unsuccessful in the poll.

At a press conference in Tokyo he blamed the party's name for its election drubbing, when its previous tally of 19 seats was reduced to just two.

"The naming required some explanation for people to understand. It was problematic as a name for a political party."

He had insisted before the vote that he be placed last of the nine candidates on the party's list for the Tokyo block in the proportional representation section, effectively signalling that his days in politics were numbered.

"It's the end of an era," Yoichi Shimada, a professor of international relations at Fukui Prefectural University, told the South China Morning Post.

"The Party for Future Generations was the natural and reliable political ally of the Liberal Democratic Party and it is a shame that they did not do better in these elections. I feel these two would have worked together on revising the constitution and on promoting a correct understanding of history."

Ishihara's legacy will be his dislike of communism, his confrontational approach and his refusal to be anything other than direct - a sharp contrast to many Japanese politicians.

"Almost every Japanese politician, including those in the LDP, are afraid of antagonising and upsetting China, but Ishihara was always completely calm when he criticised the Chinese Communist Party," said Shimada. "And that made him a rare animal here.

"I also feel that a younger generation of politicians has been quite impressed by seeing him debating and in how he stood up to China and I think that a few of them may try to mimic that style and won't be afraid of criticising the government in Beijing."

But Shimada said it would be a mistake to say that Ishihara dislikes Chinese people. On the contrary, he has close links with many key political figures in Taiwan. His issue was with the Communist Party, its ideology and, most recently, its claims on Japanese territory, Shimada said.

Ishihara won early fame for being awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for his novel Season of the Sun before he graduated from Hitotsubashi University. He was active in the Japanese film and theatre scene, was a close friend of nationalist author Yukio Mishima and was a member of the National Diet for more than 25 years before initially stepping down in 1995.

His nationalistic views attracted attention overseas after he published The Japan That Can Say No at the peak of the nation's economic might in 1989.

Ishihara was back less than four years after leaving the Diet, and was elected governor of Tokyo on four occasions.

It was while governor that he most offended China with his plan to purchase the Senkaku Islands, which China insists are its territory and should be known as the Diaoyu Islands.

Both Taiwan and China protested and diplomatic ties between Japan and its two neighbours began to deteriorate dramatically. In the end, the Japanese government stepped in to buy the islands for the nation, but ties between Beijing and Tokyo plummeted to new lows.

Not that Ishihara would care; he is, after all, the governor who called for Japan to develop and deploy nuclear weapons in order to defend itself against China. He has also repeatedly stated that the rape of Nanking was fiction created by Chinese communists.

One thing that critics and supporters do agree on is that the Diet will be lacking a little character when Ishihara bids farewell.

But that won't stop him continuing to speak his mind.  "Although I am not sure when I will die, I will say what I want to say and do what I want to do until then," he said.

South China Morning Post

Japan's Election Makes No Difference

 

Frank Rizzo

Regardless of which party would have sealed a majority, the reality is the fact it would not matter in terms of of Japan's operation.

In 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) gave the ruling LDP a thrashing.  The outcome was that even though opposition Yukio Hatoyama replaced the LDP's Taro Aso as Prime Minister the change made absolutely no difference to how Japan operated politically, diplomatically, or financially.  What occurred is that those in power, the bureaucrats who hold their position for life which were likely inherited from family, simply brought government operation to a halt.

Many in the pension offices across Japan took up to 90 days to approve new pensions where before it took only 7 to 10 days.  Bureaucrats in government ministries had projects cut or delayed.  The Infrastructure Ministry intentionally held up bridge construction across Japan for over two years from 2009 to 2011.  Both of these actions had their desired effect - make the DPJ look bad and undermine DPJ leadreship. 

It worked, and the Tohoku Disaster in 2011 was seen as blessing for the LDP.  LDP supporting bureaucrats held up emergency aid and funding for almost 6 months to victims of the disaster.  This created rage among the victims who put the blame on Prime Minister Naoto Kan and later his replacement, Noda.  This backlash brought the LDP back to power in elections in December 2012.

This is the reason that Sunday's election would make no difference.  The bureaucrats who actually run the government would sabotage any victory by an opposition party.

Japan is owned and run by conservative bureaucrats who speak no language other than Japanese and know nothing about the world outside Japan.  These men can be found in the ministries. They form the unelected government of Japan. These are the unelected and unappointed who, for instance, sit on the Education Ministry and preside over an English education system that produces graduates who place LAST in the world on the TOEFL IBT speaking section. 

These are the same men who brought you Fukushima Dai-ichi, Monju and Tokaimura. These are the men who have turned Japan from one of the world's most beautiful countries into one of its ugliest, through the tools of concrete, dams, retaining walls and tetrapods.

The ministers' partners in crime are the large corporations tied to the large banks (zaibutsu) that insist on hiring graduates in mass hiring ceremonies, rather than adopting flexible hiring practices like those of major companies elsewhere in the world. 

The result is an educational system geared entirely to getting hired straight out of a good school by a large company. For the vast majority of students who fail at this goal, they are ruined by the process. All of their spirit and creativity is beaten out of them (the same, of course, can be said of those who succeed in getting hired by the big companies, but at least they get lifetime employment). The educational system is designed to serve the needs of large companies, not the people of the country. Look at the passive, risk-averse, uncreative graduates of Japan's educational system. What good will they do the country? What good will they do themselves?

It really doesn't matter. Nothing can change this. In a short time, Korean, China, Singapore and Hong Kong will eat Japan for lunch and spit out the bones. Japan has created the perfect perpetual motion machine: a system which produces passive slaves who are trained not to rock the boat. It works until it is too old to work, or gets taken over or bought by a more dynamic and healthy culture. 

That's all there is to it.

Japan is right now in full-spectrum collapse, with an aging population, radioactive food, an unelected government, vast national debt etc, and the author of an article on Japan's biggest problems honestly believes that poor bicycle manners and hungry wild boar merit inclusion in the list of Japan's top 10 problems. That, right there, tells you how badly they have been done in by their government and their educational system.

Sunday's results make no difference no matter which party would have won.

4 Month Old Suffocated By Mother In Sendai

 

Police in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, said Wednesday they have arrested a 31-year-old woman for suffocating her 4-month-old daughter to death.

According to police, Yumi Suzuki used a blanket to stop her daughter Ayaka from crying at her home sometime between 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

TBS reported that Suzuki called police herself and said she had killed her daughter because she wouldn’t stop crying.

Police said no external injuries were found on the infant’s body.  Suzuki’s husband was away at work at the time of the incident. 

The Myth Of Japan's Free Press And Democracy

 Kenichi Asano

In examining the media situation and political governance in Japan, let me first introduce my experience as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. For 22 years, I worked as a news reporter for Kyodo News, Japan's representative wire service.

I also covered the Cambodian conflict and democratization process in Thailand. I have been an independent journalist for eight years, having also taken a position as professor of mass communications at Doshisha University since April 1994.

I have a special interest in media ethics, mainly how the news media should cover crimes and criminal victims, as well as suspects, defendants, and convicts. I often compare media-accountability systems in various countries. I also try to monitor the "independence" of journalists from the political centers of local and national power that they cover.

WHY JAPAN IS SO UNDEMOCRATIC

Let me now turn to why Japan is one of the most underdeveloped states when it comes to healthy journalism and democracy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Firstly, according to opinion polls last year, more than 55 percent of the Japanese public reportedly support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet, even after he twice worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine near Tokyo, a Shinto shrine where Class-A war criminals from World War II (including Japan's then-prime minister Hideki Tojo) are enshrined as gods. 

Yasukuni Shrine was the center of state-sponsored Shintoism during the years of Japan's invasion of the Asia-Pacific region since 1895, when Japan annexed Taiwan by military force. To make a comparison, that would be like the current German president paying an official visit to Adolf Hitler's graveyard on the day that Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces.

Moreover, Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo-infamous for repeatedly denying Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing Massacre, Korean sex slaves, and Allied POW torture still ranks as the most popular politician in Japanese public opinion polls. It is safe to say that on the political spectrum, Ishihara is far right.

Most Japanese citizens, to this day, refuse to admit that Japan ever invaded any Asia-Pacific countries. Japanese people even go so far as to emphasize that Japanese military occupation in the region has helped these countries.  The reason is government controlled education and government control of media.  All schools and media outlets are given government subsidies and these are cut when media goes against government mandated narrative.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito was acquitted of wartime atrocities at the close of World War II, and since then, most Japanese people have closed the book on taking any responsibility for their government's own past crimes against humanity. From that time up to the present day, Japan's ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been dominated by ultra-right politicians and bureaucrats.

Herbert P. Bix's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan shows in painstaking detail the many ways that the former Emperor led Japan's military wartime regime, and how he was later protected by Occupation forces after the war. The book, which has been out in English since 2000, was finally translated into Japanese mid-2002, the language that would expose it to its most important audience. Japanese publishers had been reluctant to publish Bix's book in fear that they will become targets of right-wing violence. Kodansha, leading publishing firm in Tokyo, published its translation. Most Japanese newspapers criticized the book in their book reviews. What makes Bix's book so threatening is the high quality of his scholarship, revealing the truth of the matter with indisputable facts. Mr. Minoru Kitamura, one of several Japanese historians seeking to prove that the Nanjing Massacre in China never happened, has written a new book called "The Massacre Myth." Kitamura accused Mr. Harold Timperley, correspondent to China for the then-Manchester Guardian newspaper of Britain, of "creating" the story of the massacre.

Kitamura stresses that Timperley, author of the widely read book "The Japanese Terror in China," was an agent of the Chinese Kuomintang, the nationalist party then in government. Mr. John Gittings, a Guardian correspondent to Shanghai, wrote an article about it titled "Japanese Rewrite Guardian History: Nanjing Massacre Reports Were False, Revisionists Claim" on October 4, 2002.

Gittings, by analyzing Guardian archives in London, found out that the reason for the misquoting of the numbers of massacred people was due to Timperley's references to the Yangtze River delta being omitted at the time by Japanese diplomats in China. I too firmly believe that the number of victims of the massacre committed by Japan is still not clear, simply because the Japanese government has burnt or otherwise nullified evidence of its crimes all over the world.

More recently North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has admitted that his country kidnapped Japanese citizens-and that at least four were still alive. "It is regretful and I want to frankly apologize," Kim said to Japanese Prime Abe, as the two leaders held talks in Pyongyang during their first face-to-face meeting last year.

Eight Japanese nationals, who were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, are confirmed as being dead. Mr. Kim reportedly said that those responsible for the kidnappings had been "sternly punished." Six out of 11 people, whom Tokyo has long claimed were abducted, were confirmed to have died in North Korea.

In a joint statement that followed the meeting between the two nations' leaders, North Korea said it would abandon compensation from Japan's 35-year imperial invasion of the Korean Peninsula. In turn, it demanded Japanese official development aid and expected private investment from Japan. Pyongyang has long held complete compensation from Japan's colonialism as a pre-condition for talks over normalizing relations between the two countries. But suddenly, North Korea let Japan's responsibility for wartime atrocities just fade away.

In this sense, the Japan-North Korea joint statement is worse than the 1965 so-called "peace treaty" between Japan and the military government of South Korea. Mr. Kim of North Korea now badly seems to need Japanese economic help as well as diplomatic support, at a time when he is under intense pressure from the United States. North Korea can no longer afford to make so many demands.

Revisionists and ultra-rightists in Japan have acquired renewed political power following North Korea's admission that it abducted Japanese citizens several decades ago. The Japanese media, and most Japanese citizens, are behaving as if they are innocent victims of some brand of devilish "outlaw state." It seems to me that they have all conveniently forgotten what their own Japanese Imperial Army had done to the people of several Asia-Pacific countries since 1895. 

In August the Asahi Newspaper was forced by Abe's regime to retract stories on the Korean sex slaves and the Nanking massacre or have their reporters expelled from the Japanese Press Club.  Reporters must be members in order to gain access to all Tokyo officials.

In these instances, as with many other past issues, the major Japanese newspapers, magazines, and TV networks again showed their bad side: carrying out their reporting via the phenomenon known as "pack journalism."

In "pack journalism," the employees of news organizations throng to a single news source like a pack of animals, pursue the story almost as one herd, and report mass amounts of information that end up in stories nearly identical to one another. This is exactly the term the New York Times once used to describe Japanese news reporters, when the corrupt president of the Toyoda Shoji company was stabbed to death by a mobster in 1985, right in front of the reporters.

Mr. Kim Sok-pom, a Korean writer born in Japan, severely criticized the Japanese nation and its media recently during an October 26 citizen's group meeting on monitoring the media coverage of the North Korea abduction cases.

Kim stated publicly: "The mass media in Japan have been reporting the abduction cases without mentioning what Japan has done to Koreans. This kind of reporting by the Japanese mass media, which incites anti-Korean sentiment among the Japanese public, is a kind of violence against Koreans born in Japan. Japan has neglected to commemorate the massacre of Koreans born in Japan during the massive earthquake in the Kanto area [of Japan] on September 1, 1923, as well as all kinds of atrocities during Japanese colonial rule. Is there any country like Japan in the world?"

Kim Sok-pom added that "Japan is suffering from amnesia." He further accused the Kim Jong-il government of an "act of treachery and shameful diplomatic policy" when it recently gave up its right of any future claims to Japan's cruel occupation of the past.

Japanese revisionists have made great strides in erasing any written references to ianfu-former "sex slaves" of the Japanese Imperial Army-and the Nanjing Massacre in China from Japanese school textbooks. Very few Japanese citizens today know about Japanese modern history in any real depth.

Secondly, Japan is still under the military occupation of the United States of America. Following Japan's unconditional surrender to the U.S.-led Allied forces on August 15, 1945, and the subsequent end of World War II, Japan was placed under U.S. military control. The American military forces have never left Japan since then. More than 40,000 U.S. troops remain based in Japan today, as we speak. This is ostensibly to protect Japan from "enemies" like North Korea-and yet no U.S. military bases in the area, outside of those in South Korea, are facing imminent war with North Korea.

The Japanese news media and citizens are now criticizing North Korea's nuclear weapons plan. However, the Japanese have also totally forgotten that there are functioning nuclear reactors all over Japan, not to mention large numbers of nuclear weapons located on U.S. military bases in Japan.

Yet the Japanese government has confidently claimed that Japan's nuclear program will never be used for weapons and that U.S. armed forces are restricted under the antinuclear policies of the Japanese constitution from bringing nuclear weapons into Japan.

And this propaganda seems to be working well. One would be hard-pressed to find any large demonstrations against U.S. bases in Japan by Japanese students or Japanese workers. One can find an active anti-U.S. base movement only in the southern island of Okinawa, where most of the beautiful beaches are essentially occupied by the U.S. military. Extremely weak trade unions and university student bodies in our country make it very easy for the ruling class to control people. The Japanese, I would say, have politically changed very little since 1868, when the shogun-ruled Edo period ended and the Western-leaning Meiji period began.

Thirdly, the Japanese people have never experienced any real social revolutions in their history, unlike nations in many other parts of the world that have fought hard to acquire democracy at the cost of enormous numbers of their own citizens.

JAPAN'S LAP DOG PRESS

I would like to assert one good reason why Japanese democracy is not yet matured, despite Japans enjoyment of a high technological standard of living: the problem known as "lap dog journalism."

The press in Japan is not as free and open as that of any nation in the world, including the U.S. and European countries. Freedom of the press in Japan is only passively protected by the constitution that Japan adopted after World War II. Any kind of censorship is forbidden, but the LDP does threaten media outlets with lawsuits of libel and the new state secrets law could add charges of treason. For this reason self-censorship runs rampant. Those who work in Japanese media circles do not use their constitutional right to carry out investigative reporting. The Japanese press, as a whole, lacks any skepticism toward authority.

Lack of diversity and variety is the cause of such weak journalism. There is only one local newspaper in most of the local prefectures of Japan. Major TV networks are owned by prominent newspaper companies, which enjoy high business profits. Japan has the highest number of newspaper readers per capita of any country in the world.

And still, ironically, journalists and the general public alike in our country do not realize that Japan's freedom of expression was a "gift" bestowed upon us by the Allied forces at the cost of 23 million victims throughout the Asia-Pacific region during World War II. Major newspapers throughout Japan since the 1950s have acted as if their highest duty were to help enforce the continuing rule of the LDP.

A healthy, tense atmosphere between news sources and journalists is indispensable for solid journalism to flourish.

In Japan, news sources try to curry favor with journalists only so they can obtain favorable coverage of the organizations they belong to. But this is not right. Journalists should be independent of any news source if they are to effectively carry out their duty of working for the citizens' right to know.

According to a survey taken in Japan in the late 1980s, 90 percent of news stories in the Japanese press originate from government officials and Big Business. This is because the majority of mainstream news reporters get their "facts" through a system known as the "kisha clubs," or press club system imposed on media outlets from above. Under this system, the n - H media serve merely as mouthpieces for those in power. The number of commentators and academics who appear daily on major television networks in Japan are overwhelmingly scholars whose work is patronized by the government.

A lack of objective, balanced reporting principles is another problem. The Japanese media as a whole pay little or no attention to clarifying news sources and attribution of those sources.

You may be surprised to know that very few professional journalists in Japan have ever studied journalism before entering their profession. Only a few universities-out of about 400 universities in all of Japan even have a journalism department. A professional journalist is only regarded to be such when he or she becomes gainfully employed by any of the news organizations.

Generally speaking, Japan's concept of democracy is just like one that Professor Noam Chomsky of the United States defines as "an alternative conception of democracy." That is, under this conception, citizens must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I could see with my own eyes how the people of Thailand fought against the regime of General Sutchinda in May 1992 in seeking democratic reforms, and how the people and journalists of Indonesia waged a courageous struggle to oust General Suharto in the 1990s. Likewise, the people of the Philippines fought against the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and contributed to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from their country.

Journalists in those Asian nations were always to be found in public demonstrations, alongside laborers, students and activists of nongovernmental organizations.

If Japan is ever to attain the status of a truly democratic state in the modern world, then it is precisely this type of free and open journalism that Japanese journalists will need to vigorously practice and defend.

Kenichi Asano is a Professor of Communication Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

State Secrets Law Greeted By Protests

 

Waving banners and beating drums, hundreds of Japanese took to the streets of Tokyo to protest a strict new state-secrets law taking effect on Wednesday that critics charge will help conceal government misdeeds and limit press freedom.

The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says the law, which was passed a year ago amid protests, is essential to convince allies led by the United States to share intelligence with Japan.

Critics counter that whistleblowing on government misdeeds will be chilled. Reporters Without Borders has called the law “an unprecedented threat to freedom of information”.

“This law will restrict the peoples’ right to know,” said Tomoki Hiyama, one of about 800 people braving frigid winds to gather in the shadow of the Diet on Tuesday. “It’s full of ambiguity and will take us back to the ‘public peace and order’ controls of World War Two.”

The law mandates prison terms of up to 10 years for public servants or others leaking state secrets, while journalists and others who encourage such leaks could be imprisoned for five years. Kyodo news agency said that some 460,000 documents would be affected immediately.

“The law says that the act of leaking itself is bad no matter what the circumstances,” said Yukiko Miki at Clearinghouse Japan, a non-profit organization that promotes information disclosure.

Two watchdog groups are to oversee implementation of the law, one directed by the prime minister. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government would implement the law while assuring “the public’s right to know isn’t infringed”.

Critics say Abe’s government failed to keep a pledge to win public understanding of the law by not fully explaining how it will be implemented. The Cabinet Office solicited public comment for a month from late July until late August - during prime summer vacation time.

The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association sent a letter of concern to Justice Minister Yoko Kamikawa on Monday, saying: “It cannot be said that all our concerns have been alleviated.”

The uncertainty about what the government will deem a secret was already having a repressive effect, Miki said. Her office has received calls from bloggers worried about whether they should delete posts to avoid prosecution.

“This is really too much,” said Hisako Ueno, 60, a retired teacher at a Saturday protest. “It seems to allow Abe to do virtually anything by saying ‘it’s for the good of the country’ without anybody knowing what they are actually doing.” 

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2014.

LDP's Taro Aso: People Who Don't Give Birth Problematic

Finance Minister Taro Aso (LDP)

 

After telling Japan’s growing ranks of elderly they should “hurry up and die”, Finance Minister Taro Aso has turned his well-worn gaffe gun on “people who don’t give birth”.

The former prime minister, whose mouth has a habit of running away with him, said pensioners were not to blame for the spiralling social welfare costs of a rapidly ageing society.

“There are many people who are creating the image that (the increasing number of) elderly people is bad, but more problematic is people who don’t give birth,” Aso said in a speech in Sapporo, local media reported Monday.

 

The comments came as Aso was stumping ahead of a general election on Sunday.

Japan has a birth rate—the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime—of around 1.4, far below replacement level. This gives it an inverted age pyramid and a falling tax base.

A dearth of childcare, financial insecurity and gloom about the future have all been blamed for the lack of children in Japan.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly pledged he will boost women’s participation in the labor market and make structural changes that will mean they are not forced to make a choice between having a career or having a family.

Aso, who is also Abe’s deputy, has form in offending various sections of the electorate, although criticism of his gaffes tends to run like water off a duck’s back.

Over the weekend, he reportedly also said businesses that do not make money are either “unlucky or incompetent”.

In July last year, he said Tokyo could learn from Nazi Germany when it comes to constitutional reform.

Six months earlier, he said the elderly should be allowed to “hurry up and die” instead of costing the government money for end-of-life medical care. 

© 2014 AFP

Truth About the Trans Pacific Partnership

Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor Workers On False Contracts

 

The number of workers at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant on false contracts has increased in the last year, the station operator said, highlighting murky labor conditions at the site despite a pledge to improve the work environment.

The survey results released by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) last week showed that around 30% of plant workers polled said that they were paid by a different company from the contractor that normally directs them at the work site, which is illegal under Japan’s labor laws.

A Reuters report in October found widespread confusion among plant workers at the Fukushima facility over their employment contracts and their promised hazard pay increase.

Many workers asked TEPCO in the survey forms whether they were supposed to receive an equivalent of about 18,000 yen a day in hazard pay, the company said, adding that it did not mean each worker would necessarily see a pay increase of that amount.

TEPCO said last November it would double the allocation for hazard pay to workers at Fukushima.

The company’s latest survey showed that more than 70% of workers did receive some explanation about a pay rise in the past year, while some 1,400 workers out of 2,400 that responded to the question said they did receive an increase in pay. Workers were not asked to detail their pay rise or when they received it.

The Japanese government and TEPCO vowed last year to improve working conditions at the plant, where sub-contractors supply the bulk of workers conducting a cleanup after the nuclear disaster.

TEPCO said a questionnaire sent to thousands of workers at the plant indicated 30% of them were on false contracts, an increase of 10 percentage points since it carried out a similar survey in 2013.

The utility survey covered 6,567 contract workers at the station north of Tokyo and about 70% of them responded.

It did not question its own employees, who form a small part of the huge workforce on the clean up that is expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. 

Reuters

Sri Lankan Man Dies In Immigration Custody

 

A Sri Lankan detainee died after collapsing at a detention center in Tokyo, an official said on Tuesday, the latest in a string of similar cases that critics say illustrates a shameful attitude toward immigrants.

The body of Nickeles Fernando, 57, was found in his cell at the immigration detention center in Shinagawa Ward on Nov 22, hours after he had complained of chest pains and begged for a doctor to be called, campaigners said.

He had been at the center since Nov 17.

His death came two days after a government probe into two deaths at another immigration center found there was inadequate medical care.

A rights group called Provisional Release Association in Japan (PRAJ) said Fernando was ignored by guards when he asked for medical help.

“He had begun to complain about severe chest pain at about 7 a.m. on Nov 22, but instead of calling a doctor, immigration officials moved him from a shared cell into a single one,” PRAJ member Hiromitsu Masuda told AFP. 

After checking on Fernando several times during the morning and finding him in the same position, a Sri Lankan interpreter went into the cell at around 1 p.m., said fellow PRAJ member Mitsuru Miyasako.

“At that time his body was already cold and had no pulse,” he said. “The interpreter called immigration officials, then for the first time they began to do something. 

“If it had been a Japanese person complaining of pain in his chest, this would never have happened.”

A spokeswoman at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau told AFP a detainee was moved to solitary for observation after feeling unwell.

“At about 1 p.m., he stopped moving and didn’t respond to our calls, so we called an ambulance while giving him cardiac massage,” she said, adding he was confirmed dead two hours later.

She denied any unnecessary delay in summoning medical help.

A spokeswoman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police told AFP an autopsy had been carried out, but refused to reveal its findings. She did not give a clear reason for her refusal.

Two days before Fernando’s death, the justice ministry admitted another immigration center at Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture, “did not have enough medical” facilities and failed to provide 24-hour access to in-house doctors.

That came after it investigated the March deaths of an Iranian man in his 30s who choked on food and a Cameroonian man in his 40s who was found unconscious in his cell.

In October last year, a Rohingya asylum-seeker collapsed and died at the Tokyo center after staff failed to call for a medic, allegedly because the doctor was having lunch.

“Medical care in Japan’s immigration system has long been a problem, but little improvement has been made,” said labour union official Toru Sekimoto, who advises another rights group for immigrants and refugees.

“That’s partly because Japanese society as a whole is indifferent to the issue.

“It would cause a social uproar if the same thing happened at a care home for elderly people in Japan,” he said.

Japan tightly restricts the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers it accepts.

According to Justice Ministry figures for 2013, 3,260 people applied for asylum, many from Turkey, Nepal and Myanmar, as well as from countries in South Asia and Africa. 

Japan accepted six refugees during the year, down from 18 in the previous year. 

© 2014 AFP

A Sri Lankan detainee died after collapsing at a detention center in Tokyo, an official said on Tuesday, the latest in a string of similar cases that critics say illustrates a shameful attitude toward immigrants.
The body of Nickeles Fernando, 57, was found in his cell at the immigration detention center in Shinagawa Ward on Nov 22, hours after he had complained of chest pains and begged for a doctor to be called, campaigners said.
He had been at the center since Nov 17.
His death came two days after a government probe into two deaths at another immigration center found there was inadequate medical care.
A rights group called Provisional Release Association in Japan (PRAJ) said Fernando was ignored by guards when he asked for medical help.
“He had begun to complain about severe chest pain at about 7 a.m. on Nov 22, but instead of calling a doctor, immigration officials moved him from a shared cell into a single one,” PRAJ member Hiromitsu Masuda told AFP.
After checking on Fernando several times during the morning and finding him in the same position, a Sri Lankan interpreter went into the cell at around 1 p.m., said fellow PRAJ member Mitsuru Miyasako.
“At that time his body was already cold and had no pulse,” he said. “The interpreter called immigration officials, then for the first time they began to do something.
“If it had been a Japanese person complaining of pain in his chest, this would never have happened.”
A spokeswoman at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau told AFP a detainee was moved to solitary for observation after feeling unwell.
“At about 1 p.m., he stopped moving and didn’t respond to our calls, so we called an ambulance while giving him cardiac massage,” she said, adding he was confirmed dead two hours later.
She denied any unnecessary delay in summoning medical help.
A spokeswoman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police told AFP an autopsy had been carried out, but refused to reveal its findings. She did not give a clear reason for her refusal.
Two days before Fernando’s death, the justice ministry admitted another immigration center at Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture, “did not have enough medical” facilities and failed to provide 24-hour access to in-house doctors.
That came after it investigated the March deaths of an Iranian man in his 30s who choked on food and a Cameroonian man in his 40s who was found unconscious in his cell.
In October last year, a Rohingya asylum-seeker collapsed and died at the Tokyo center after staff failed to call for a medic, allegedly because the doctor was having lunch.
“Medical care in Japan’s immigration system has long been a problem, but little improvement has been made,” said labour union official Toru Sekimoto, who advises another rights group for immigrants and refugees.
“That’s partly because Japanese society as a whole is indifferent to the issue.
“It would cause a social uproar if the same thing happened at a care home for elderly people in Japan,” he said.
Japan tightly restricts the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers it accepts.
According to Justice Ministry figures for 2013, 3,260 people applied for asylum, many from Turkey, Nepal and Myanmar, as well as from countries in South Asia and Africa.
Japan accepted six refugees during the year, down from 18 in the previous year.

© 2014 AFP

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