Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:59:45 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/ Japan Addicted! en-us http://japanaddicted.com/images/logo.jpg http://japanaddicted.com/ evil@japanaddicted.com http://japanaddicted.com/Article5084.phtml A man believed to be a sumo wrestler ripped out a cash machine weighing 90kg (200lb) and made off with it on his shoulders, police in Moscow report. The suspect and an accomplice were arrested after being stopped in a BMW with tinted windows which they were driving without number-plates. The machine containing 25,320 roubles ($850, £560) was found in the car. Police say the accomplice tried to take the blame for the robbery, saying he had misled his sumo-wrestler friend. They were alerted to the incident by a saleswoman, who said the suspects had walked into her shop in northern Moscow at 0600 (0300 GMT) and begun ripping out the electronic payment machine without a word. When she tried to protest, one of the suspects allegedly yelled at her: "Be quiet if you know what's good for you!" The frightened woman waited until the two men had left before phoning police, who dispatched two officers to Marshal Fedorenko Street where they blocked the BMW. The man who allegedly carried the cash machine said he was a "professional sumo wrestler". "The second rascal says it is his fault entirely and makes out that he misled his sumo-friend, telling him he was taking away his own machine," Moscow police's press service added. Police said both suspects were from a "neighbouring country" but were registered as living in the Moscow area. Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:59:45 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5083.phtml Japan's Princess Aiko has been off school since early this week after complaining of being bullied, a royal household official has said. The princess, eight, had come home from school in a state of anxiety and saying she had stomach pains, he said. It was found she and other students in her class had been "treated harshly" by boys in another class, he added. Princess Aiko, daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and Princess Masako, attends Gakushuin Primary School in Tokyo. The royal spokesman, Issei Nomura, did not give details of when the princess, who is a granddaughter of Emperor Akihito, was expected to return to lessons. She left early on Tuesday and has not been back since. Mr Nomura said the palace had asked the school to address the matter and had been given permission to publicise the princess's situation, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reports. A school director told reporters the princess had been frightened on Tuesday when a boy had run out of a classroom, which "must have reminded her of the rowdy behaviour of several boys in the past, who may have thrown things and made her uneasy", Kyodo says. Princess Masako has rarely been seen in public for several years as a consequence of a nervous condition attributed to the stress of life in the royal household. Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:05:26 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5082.phtml The Japanese government has approached United States officials with a tentative proposal for resolving a festering dispute over an American air base in Okinawa, the Japanese news media reported on Thursday. The proposal would modify a 2006 deal to relocate the Futenma Marine Corps air station, a busy helicopter base, from a crowded city in southern Okinawa to a less populated area in the island’s north. Under the new proposal, the base would be moved to the same location but would be smaller and have a diminished impact on local residents and the environment, according to the reports in major Japanese newspapers. The reports described the diplomatic contacts as informal, early attempts to sound out whether the plan might be acceptable to the United States, which has irritated many Japanese officials by insisting that the government honor the original agreement. Later Thursday, the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, told reporters that the Japanese defense minister and other officials had met with the American ambassador, John V. Roos, on Tuesday night. Mr. Hatoyama said the officials had explained the options that the Japanese side was considering but the government had not decided on a final plan. The dispute erupted after Mr. Hatoyama took office six months ago with a pledge to revisit the 2006 agreement, signed by his predecessors, the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party. Mr. Hatoyama has pledged to lighten the burden that the American base places on Okinawa — where many of the 50,000 American military personnel in Japan are located — while also maintaining close security ties with the United States. This put the prime minister in the difficult situation of trying to find a plan that could appease both Okinawans and the United States, and in particular the American military. After delaying making a decision late last year, Mr. Hatoyama set a self-imposed deadline of May for resolving the issue. To have a plan in place by then, analysts have said, the prime minister must find a solution that is at least tentatively acceptable to both Washington and Okinawan leaders by April, at the latest. The new proposal would try to do that by addressing a crucial American concern: keeping the helicopters close to the thousands of Marines stationed on Okinawa. The new air station would be built in Camp Schwab, an existing Marine base near the tiny fishing village of Henoko, the site agreed to in the 2006 plan. According to the news reports, the plan would reduce the number of runways to one from two. The single runway could also be smaller, with the government considering two options: one for a runway of 1,640 feet, to be used only by helicopters, or a runway of nearly a mile that could also accommodate some fixed-wing aircraft. The new base would also be built entirely on land, avoiding the use of landfill, which was part of the original plan, the Japanese dailies reported. Environmentalists had criticized the use of landfill, saying it would threaten coral-filled waters that are one of the last habitats of the endangered dugong, a large sea mammal related to the manatee. It is unclear whether the proposal would be acceptable to Washington, or indeed to members of Mr. Hatoyama’s own coalition, particularly the Social Democratic Party, a tiny leftist group that wants the base removed from Japan altogether. Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:04:38 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5081.phtml More than half a million people in Japan were ordered to higher ground on Sunday, as coastal areas across the vast Pacific region braced for lethal tsunami waves. But only small waves appeared, with only Japan reporting some minor damage. Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:43:34 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5080.phtml Japan Airlines (JAL), which entered bankruptcy protection last month, has announced a massive increase in loses. The airline said it lost 177.9bn yen ($1.99bn, £1.3bn) in the last nine months of 2009 - up from a loss of 1.9bn yen a year earlier. JAL is continuing to operate flights while it undergoes major restructuring under court supervision. The company is expected to cut staff, routes and aircraft numbers in an attempt to return to profitability. Reflecting on the company's failure, JAL said it was "deeply apologetic" for the situation that shareholders, creditors and customers now found themselves in. "[We are] working fervently... to draw up an effective corporate revitalisation plan to rebuild the airline, while continuing to provide safe and stable flight operations and services to customers," the airline said in a statement. JAL collapsed earlier this year after racking up $16.5bn in debts. It is one of the most high-profile airlines to fall victim to the global recession, which caused a collapse in passenger numbers and left many airlines facing big losses. Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:31:15 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5079.phtml What does a political party built on power and patronage, with few philosophical or ideological underpinnings, do when it is defeated and driven into the opposition? In the case of Japan’s once formidable Liberal Democratic Party, it implodes like an old Las Vegas hotel being demolished. This has led to hand-wringing in the Japanese press that the nation may be headed toward another period of de facto one-party government, only this time with the ascendant Democratic Party in charge. But optimists here say the Liberal Democrats’ decline may be just the first step toward a much bigger political change: the destruction of the old structures of Japan’s stunted democracy and the rise of new, more ideologically coherent parties in a livelier and more competitive political system. To see how far the Liberal Democrats have fallen, look no further than the party’s cavernous headquarters in central Tokyo. The nine-story building, once the unchallenged seat of political power during much of the Liberal Democrats’ half-century rule of Japan, has fallen eerily quiet and underused since the party’s historic election defeat last summer. The party has become an empty shell of its former self. Thrust into the role of opposition party for the first time since its creation in 1955 (aside from a brief interlude in 1993), and with its number of lawmakers cut in half by last August’s humiliating defeat, the party appears demoralized, devoid of fresh ideas and threatened by defections. Four lawmakers have indeed defected since the election, and speculation is rife that more will follow. The party’s public approval ratings have never bounced back from the high teens, even as last summer’s victor, the Democratic Party, has suffered a series of money scandals. Earlier this month, the party’s own internal newspaper, the weekly Liberal Democrat, even warned that the party had virtually no hope of survival. “We haven’t had experience as an opposition party,” said Sadakazu Tanigaki, the Liberal Democratic Party chief and a former finance minister, who sat in a room filled with the unsmiling portraits of past party leaders. “People are running around wondering, ‘What do we do?’ ” For now, the contrast with the newly incumbent Democrats could not be starker. Despite fund-raising scandals, the Democrats still seem to brim with enthusiasm for their agenda of change, evident in their bustling, overcrowded offices just a block away, on a few floors of a building with a Pentax sign on top. With the Liberal Democrats in such obvious disarray, some now fear Japan faces the prospect of one-party rule by the Democrats. But many analysts and politicians say they do not expect the Democrats’ hegemony to last long either, because they face many of the same weaknesses as the Liberal Democrats. “The Democratic Party has the same problem as the Liberal Democratic Party, in that both are broad tents filled with politicians of all ideological stripes,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a professor of politics at Gakushuin University in Tokyo. “So long as Japan lacks modern political parties, it will lack true political competition.” The Liberal Democrats, Mr. Sasaki and others say, ruled through much of the cold war with a hazily conservative platform built upon the bedrock of a close alliance with the United States, which also became a market for its exports. At the same time, it built up an imposing political machine that redistributed the fruits of Japan’s postwar economic miracle to voters in less developed rural regions. Without that patronage machine, the party risks flying apart. In that, analysts say, it is more like the PRI in Mexico, which has yet to recover from its battering in 2000 after more than 70 uninterrupted years in power, than like political parties in the United States and Europe. “We never found a new direction after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Mr. Tanigaki, the party chief, “and we are regretting that now.” The party’s shortcomings have become painfully apparent since its defeat, as it has failed to offer a clear-cut alternative to the Democrats’ vaguely left-leaning plans to offer more aid to families and become more independent from Washington. Instead, the Liberal Democrats have adopted a short-term strategy of attacking the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, for the funding scandals involving him and the Democrats’ power broker, Ichiro Ozawa. This has brought some support from voters, seen on Sunday when a Liberal Democratic candidate won an election for governor of Nagasaki prefecture. But political analysts and politicians say the approach could backfire if it appeared to lead Japan back into its former political paralysis. Indeed, there is growing frustration among conservatives at the party’s inability to change. This became apparent last September when Mr. Tanigaki, 65, defeated a younger opponent, Taro Kono, 47, to lead the defeated party. Many younger lawmakers saw this as a move by the party’s old guard to squelch Mr. Kono’s promises to rejuvenate the party by such steps as abolishing its entrenched factions. Mr. Kono said the Liberal Democrats’ only hope of victory was to reinvent themselves as a truly conservative party, with a clear agenda of small government and close ties with the United States. But he sounds a very pessimistic note about the party’s future, so long as the old guard holds sway. He said the Liberal Democrats faced their next big test in parliamentary elections in July, when another defeat could prove a death blow. “People don’t want the old Liberal Democratic Party,” Mr. Kono said. “They want us to come back as a new, healthier party.” But even if the Democrats win, they may soon face similar problems of internal divisions over policy, especially if they move beyond their current manifesto and into trickier issues like whether to raise taxes or cut social programs to rein in the budget deficits. When that happens, say analysts and politicians, the party could also break apart, paving the way for the radical reshuffling of parties along ideological lines that would complete the political revolution begun last summer. “After the breakup of the Liberal Democrats, it will be the Democrats’ turn to fight internally and split,” Kotaro Tamura, a Liberal Democratic lawmaker who left in December to join the incumbent Democrats. “That will be a big moment for Japanese democracy.” Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:30:26 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5078.phtml For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels. “It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.” When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home. Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II. Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless. The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight. “In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.” On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.” Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company. Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed. The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says. Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows. Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks. Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance. “Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel. But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month. After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews. At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee. The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts. “It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.” The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas. The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations. These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society. “When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.” The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools. Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month. “I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday. After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.” Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:52:39 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5077.phtml Four American teenagers, all children of U.S. military personnel, have been arrested on charges of attempted murder after a woman was knocked off her motorbike with rope strung across two poles, Japanese police said. The four suspects -- two 15-year-old boys, a 17-year-old girl and an 18-year-old man -- were taken into custody on Saturday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department said. They are accused of causing a severe head injury to a 23-year-old restaurant employee by stringing a rope between poles across a road. U.S. Forces Japan was informed of the August incident in late October, a public information officer said. There was no clear explanation for the delay in the handover of the suspects to police, other than it involved rules between Washington and Tokyo covering U.S. forces and their dependents in Japan. The U.S. military presence and its impact on Japanese residents have been a thorny issue over the years. Most recently, residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa, where the U.S. maintains a large military presence, have blamed American troops for crime and noise. In 2008, a 14-year-old Okinawa girl alleged that a Marine had raped her. The prosecutor released the Marine after the girl decided not to pursue charges. In 1995, a 12-year-old girl was gang-raped by three servicemen. A Japanese court convicted all three men. Both incidents caused a furor in Japan. Then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda called the 2008 incident "unforgivable ... It has happened over and over again in the past and I take it as a grave case." It is unclear what, if any, role the military can take in the case. The 1960 Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Japan gives Japan jurisdiction over "the members of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, and their dependents" in cases of offenses committed in Japan and punishable under Japanese law. Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:35:46 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5076.phtml he Bank of Japan has announced new measures to boost the economy and tackle deflation. After an emergency meeting, the bank said it would inject 10 trillion yen ($114bn; £70bn) into the economy by offering banks cheap short-term loans. It wants to make more money available to encourage banks to increase lending to business and individuals. But analysts suggested it looked more like a political gesture than a real move to support the economy. "This must be government pressure... if they were free from pressure, they wouldn't have done anything, because they've been saying their assessment hasn't changed," said Dariusz Kowalczyk, chief investment strategist at SJS Markets. The Bank of Japan said the move would "firmly support Japan's economic developments toward recovery". The bank also kept interest rates unchanged at 0.1% at the meeting. The government welcomed the bank's stimulus move. It has been concerned about the recent return of deflation. The BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo says the government, which came to power in September, is this week working on an additional budget expected to be worth more than 2.7 trillion yen. In April, the previous government spent 15.4 trillion yen to stimulate the economy, helping it to leave recession in the second quarter of this year. Falling prices Seijiro Takeshita, director at Mizuho International, said the amount of extra liquidity that today's move provided was negligible and that it was all about the "announcement effect". He said the Bank of Japan could be doing more to support the economy - for example making borrowing even cheaper or buying up government bonds. Last month, the Cabinet Office said in a statement that Japan was in a "mild deflationary situation". Jonathan Allum, Japan strategist at KBC Securities, told the BBC that the Bank of Japan's action could be a sign that it is taking falling prices more seriously. It has previously been criticised for not acting fast enough to counter falling prices. "This is the beginning of a process... if they persevere it might be effective but it is a medium to long-term prognosis." Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:03:48 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5075.phtml Twice a week, Japan’s new minister of financial services is forced to hold two back-to-back news conferences: one for the members of Japan’s exclusive press clubs, the second for other journalists. He does so because the press club members refused his proposal to open the conferences to nonmembers. Even though the agency provides the rooms for the meetings, the press club demanded that the minister, Shizuka Kamei, hold the second conference in a different room. Japan’s new government is challenging one of the nation’s most powerful interest groups, the press clubs, a century-old, cartel-like arrangement in which reporters from major news media outlets are stationed inside government offices and enjoy close, constant access to officials. The system has long been criticized as antidemocratic by both foreign and Japanese analysts, who charge that it has produced a relatively spineless press that feels more accountable to its official sources than to the public. In their apparent reluctance to criticize the government, the critics say, the news media fail to serve as an effective check on authority. The assault on the exclusive access the press clubs’ members have long enjoyed is part of the new government’s drive to end the news media’s cozy ties with authorities, and particularly with Tokyo’s powerful central ministries. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party won a landmark election victory in late August over the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, promises a “grand cleanup of postwar governance.” Takaaki Hattori, a professor of media studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, said: “The postwar system was all about mutual back-scratching among insiders, including the big media. The change of government could finally bring real journalism, and real democracy.” But the changes will not come without a fight, as the standoff at the Financial Services Agency shows. “Japan’s news media are closed,” Mr. Kamei complained recently to the outside journalists. “They think they are the only real journalists, but they are wrong.” On a recent morning, the contrast between the two news conferences was stark. At the first, for press club members, about 45 mostly male reporters in suits sat in rows of desks like students at a lecture, raising their hands to ask detailed questions about financial policy. Mr. Kamei, who sat on a podium in front of a blue-gray curtain, gave curt answers and even reprimanded reporters for their coverage. The second was held immediately afterward in Mr. Kamei’s wood-paneled office, where he chatted at length and joked while lounging in a big leather chair. An assistant provided coffee to about 25 Japanese and foreign journalists, including several women and tie-less men, some carrying bicycle helmets. They circled around the minister to ask broad questions on issues from Japan’s aging society to postal reform to his clash with the establishment news media. While the first news conference was held behind closed doors, the second was posted live on a Web site. To show his displeasure with having to hold two meetings, Mr. Kamei sometimes cuts the first news conference short to spend more time at the second. Yasumi Iwakami, a freelance magazine and online writer, said Mr. Kamei had to move cautiously for fear of provoking negative coverage from the major news media, which Mr. Iwakami half-jokingly called the fourth side of postwar Japan’s “iron triangle” of Liberal Democrats, bureaucrats and big corporations. So far, he said, the major news outlets have devoted little or no coverage to the press club fight. “This is Japan’s glasnost,” Mr. Iwakami said, referring to the lifting of censorship under the reform policies of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. During his career, Mr. Iwakami, 50, said he had repeatedly been blocked from entering news conferences by press club journalists. He said the two groups of journalists rarely met at the Financial Services Agency, which holds the back-to-back news conferences on different floors. But during an emergency news conference a few weeks ago that both sides attended, he said the press club journalists ignored the outsiders, refusing to answer their greetings or even look at them. The agency’s press club is based in the nearby Finance Ministry, though it also has its own room of cubicles in the agency. On a recent afternoon, reporters napped on threadbare couches or typed stories at narrow rows of wooden desks while a young female employee of the ministry copied documents for them. Shinji Furuta, a reporter for the daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, who recently held the rotating chief secretary position of the club, said that it was not as closed as it seemed. Even before the change in government, he said, it allowed nonmembers to attend news conferences as observers on a case-by-case basis, and even allowed them to ask questions, something other press clubs still prevent such observers from doing. He also noted that the club had opened up slightly in the past decade by allowing the big American and British financial news agencies to join. But he said the press club wanted to ensure that people posing as journalists did not get in and disrupt proceedings. “What if someone tried to commit suicide or burn themselves to death at a press conference? Who would take responsibility for that?” Mr. Furuta asked. Tetsuo Jimbo, the founder of an online media company, Video News Network, praised the new government’s efforts. But he said most news conferences remained closed to outside journalists like himself. He noted that the Democrats had opened the proceedings at only four ministries and major agencies, and had failed to fulfill a campaign promise to open the prime minister’s news conferences. “The Democrats are fighting vested interests that have been in place since the time of their grandfathers,” Mr. Jimbo said. Still, there is a widespread feeling here that the press clubs must eventually change. Many younger Japanese journalists at major newspapers say they are unhappy with the system. Government officials also said that the old arrangements would be hard to maintain, since Japan finally appeared to be entering an era when power regularly changes hands between political parties. “Opening the press conferences was easier than we thought,” said Motoyuki Yufu, director of public relations at the Financial Services Agency. “At some point, this had to happen.” Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:57:34 -0700 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5074.phtml Not long ago, many Japanese bought so many $100 melons and $1,000 handbags that this was the only country in the world where luxury products were considered mass market. Even through the economic stagnation of Japan’s so-called lost decade, which began in the early 1990s, Japanese consumers sustained that reputation. But this recession has done something that earlier declines could not: turned the Japanese into Wal-Mart shoppers. In seven years operating in Japan, through a subsidiary called Seiyu, Wal-Mart Stores has never turned a profit. But sales have risen every month since November, and this year, the retailer expects to make a profit. That is an understatement. Across the board, discount retailers are reporting increases in revenue — while just about everyone else is experiencing declines, in some cases, by double digits. As a result, the luxury boutiques, once almighty here, are reeling. Sales at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, makers of what has long been Japan’s favorite handbag, plunged 20 percent in the first six months of 2009. In December, as the global economic crisis unfolded, Louis Vuitton canceled plans for what would have been a fancy new Tokyo store. In the 1970s and ’80s, and even as the economy limped through the ’90s, a wide group of consumers spent generously on Louis Vuitton bags and Hermès scarves — even at the expense of holidays, travel and, sometimes, meals and rent. Now, the Japanese luxury market, worth $15 billion to $20 billion, has been among the hardest hit by the global economic crisis, according to a report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Retail analysts, economists and consumers all say that the change could be a permanent one. A new generation of Japanese fashionistas does not even aspire to luxury brands; they are happy to mix and match treasures found in a flurry of secondhand clothing stores that have sprung up across Japan. “I’m not drawn to Louis Vuitton at all,” said Izumi Hiranuma, 19. “People used to feel they needed a Louis Vuitton to fit in,” she said. “But younger girls don’t think like that anymore.” In the new environment, cheap is chic, whatever the product. In supermarket aisles, sales of lowly common vegetables — like bean sprouts, onions and local mushrooms — are up. (Bean sprouts, which sell for as little as 25 cents a bag, are a particularly good substitute for cabbage, which can go for about $4 a head.) And instead of melons, Japanese shoppers are buying cheap bananas, pushing imports up to records. “I’ve cut down on fruit since last year, because of the cost,” said Maki Kudo, 36, a homemaker shopping at a Keikyu supermarket in central Tokyo. “Instead of brands, I now look much more at cost.” Thrift is being expressed even in unlikely measures like umbrella sales, which have spiked as more Japanese opt to brave rainy weather on foot rather than hail a taxi, according to a survey by the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute. In 2008, average household spending fell a record 69,509 yen, or $762, to 3.5 million yen, or $38,475, from a year earlier, and is expected to fall again this year, said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life. Underlying Japan’s accelerating frugality is a “deflationary gap” of 40 trillion yen in the Japanese economy, a situation where total demand falls short of what an economy produces. When this happens, companies cut prices, but since they still do not make money, they have to lay off workers. Fewer workers mean still less demand, creating a vicious circle, and prices fall further. The dismal economy encourages thrift, too. Unemployment is at a record high of 5.7 percent, compared with 9.7 percent in the United States. A troubled government pension system, as well as ballooning government debt, has driven a widespread fear of the future, prompting people to save, not spend. The Democratic Party, which rode a wave of discontent over the economy to electoral victory last month, has pledged to increase household incomes through tax breaks and generous subsidies for families with children. But economists here worry that the deflationary cycle could prove hard to break as competitive price-cutting rages. A heated price war has erupted, for instance, in the already cut-rate category of “imitation” beers, a poor man’s brew made with soy or pea protein instead of barley and hops. In July, Seven & I Holdings Company, which runs the 7-Eleven chain, introduced a new line of imitation beer for $1.35 a can; the same month, the Aeon shopping center brought out its own beer beverage for about $1.09. The Daiei supermarket chain then lowered prices on its beer to less than a dollar. U.G. — the sibling brand of Uniqlo, the global clothing retailer known for its low-cost fleeces and T-shirts — started a jeans war when it introduced pants for 990 yen this year. Aeon soon followed suit with jeans selling for 880 yen. Seiyu, the wholly owned Wal-Mart subsidiary, says it plans to sell similarly priced jeans this year. Of course, for some retailers the circle is more virtuous than vicious. Thrift has propelled Hanjiro, a secondhand clothing store chain popular among young Japanese, to 19 stores, from just one store in 1992. When Hanjiro opened a new store in Saitama, which borders Tokyo, in April, about 1,000 eager young fans lined up for a door-buster 290-yen T-shirt special. Of course, frugality is good for Wal-Mart, which posted better-than-expected second-quarter earnings last month. Japanese consumers are snapping up Seiyu’s $6 bottles of wine — sourced through Wal-Mart’s international network — as well as $86 suits and $87 bicycles. In fact, Seiyu has ignited a price war of its own, with its “bento” lunch-in-a-box of rice and grilled salmon for 298 yen. Abandoning a custom here for supermarkets to make their bento boxes on site, Seiyu cut costs by assembling the lunches at a centralized factory. Seiyu bet that Japan’s frugal consumers would not care about the change, as long as the bentos were cheap. Seiyu was right; the bentos have set off a line of copycat supermarket bentos. “Price is No. 1 in my mind,” said Chie Kawano, an elderly shopper at Seiyu’s Akabane store in northern Tokyo, a bento box in her basket. “I don’t need anything fancy.” Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Business (2 of 28) » Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:26:22 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5073.phtml Fishermen here call it “black gold,” referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars. The cold waters here once yielded such an abundance of bluefin, with such thick layers of tasty rich fat, that this tiny wind-swept seaport became Japan’s answer to California’s Napa Valley or the Brie cheese-producing region of France: a geographic location that is nearly synonymous with one of its nation’s premier foods. So strong is the allure of Oma’s tuna that during the autumn fishing season, tens of thousands of hungry visitors descend on this remote fishing town, located on the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. On a recent Sunday, dozens of tourists, filmed by no fewer than three local television crews, crowded into an old refrigerated warehouse on a pier where Oma’s mayor presided over a ceremony to slice up a 220-pound bluefin into brick-size blocks for sale. “This is a pleasure you can only have a few times in your life,” said Toshiko Maki, 51, a homemaker from suburban Tokyo, as she popped a ruby-red cube of sashimi into her mouth. But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations. Just a decade or two ago, each boat here could routinely catch three or four tuna a day, fishermen say. Now, they say Oma’s entire fleet of 30 to 40 boats is lucky to bring in a combined total of a half-dozen tuna in a day. The problem, they say, is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or China. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks. According to local newspapers, there have been repeated incidents of small fishing boats from Oma and other ports intentionally cutting such trawl lines. “I’m furious at Tokyo’s bureaucrats for failing to protect our tuna,” said Hirofumi Hamahata, 69, the president of the Oma fishermen’s co-op, who has worked as a commercial fisherman since age 15. “They don’t lift a finger against the industrial fishing that just sweeps the ocean clean.” Such flares of temper are rare in normally reserved Japan, and especially in conservative fishing communities like this one. But this is a town fiercely proud not only of its tuna, but also of how it catches them: in two-man open boats, using hand-held lines and live bait like squid. Mr. Hamahata described catching tuna in this traditional way as a battle of wits against a clever predator that he called “the lion of the sea.” After hooking one, the contest becomes a battle of strength: he said it typically took one or two hours to pull a big tuna close enough to the boat that it could be stunned with an electric charge. In one Hemingwayesque battle, Mr. Hamahata said he fought for 12 hours with a huge bluefin that finally broke free. Despite such difficulties, Oma’s fishermen said they preferred their generations-old fishing method because it allowed them to catch just large, adult fish, leaving the smaller young ones to sustain local stocks. Fishing experts say the overfishing is a result of a broader failure by the Tokyo authorities to impose effective limits on catches in its waters. Indeed, Japan, which consumes some 80 percent of the 60,000 tons of top-grade tuna caught worldwide, has lobbied hard against efforts to limit tuna catches, such as are now being proposed by European countries for the Atlantic Ocean. “There are too many entrenched interests whose objective is maximizing profit, not sustainable use,” said Masayuki Komatsu, an expert on the fishing industry at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. In Oma, catching a big tuna has become rare enough — and the market price high enough — to be cause for celebration. On a recent evening, family members rushed to the pier to greet one boat that had caught a 410-pound bluefin, whose tear-shaped body had to be hoisted off the boat’s deck with a forklift. Moving quickly to gut and ice the fish to preserve its value, workers from the fishing co-op presented the footlong dorsal fin as a trophy to the captain’s wife, who said it was the first catch in 10 days. The workers said the fish would fetch more than $10,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market. “Catching a tuna is like winning the lottery,” said another fisherman, 23-year-old Takeshi Izumi, who said his boat had yet to catch a tuna this season. To maximize prices, Oma has registered its name as a trademark that can be used only with tuna brought ashore here. This has made Oma a brand that is gaining recognition even outside Japan. In March, a sushi chef from Hong Kong paid some $50,000 to buy half of a 280-pound Oma bluefin. The prices can be even higher: In 2001, a Japanese buyer paid a record $220,000 for a 444-pound Oma bluefin. One unfortunate side effect, said the town’s mayor, Mitsuharu Kanazawa, was that few of Oma’s 6,200 residents can now afford their own town’s tuna. However, he said the fish have been a boon to the town’s economy, pumping in some $15 million a year from fishing and tuna-related tourism. After a popular 2000 TV drama featured Oma, the town increased tourism by starting a three-day tuna festival every year in mid-October, which now draws 15,000 visitors a day, as well as hordes from the Japanese media, Mr. Kanazawa said. “We Japanese have a weakness for brands,” said Ryuko Nishimura, 43, a homemaker from Kuroishi, a three-hour drive away. “It makes the tuna taste two or three times more delicious.” But with tuna now in danger of perhaps disappearing, the mayor said the town was struggling to find another local product to keep the tourists coming. “We tried kelp and abalone,” Mr. Kanazawa said, “but nothing has the appeal of tuna.” Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:34:19 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5072.phtml Every day, the impeccably dressed “elevator girls” of Tokyo’s Odakyu department store greet customers, ushering them in and out of the cars. During breaks, they practice their greetings and meticulously reapply their makeup. Critics see the women as the embodiment of this country’s productivity problem — squandering of one of the world’s best educated labor forces on banal jobs that do little to make the economy grow. But others, including the Democrats, Japan’s new ruling party, see them as beneficiaries of a more humane capitalism, a capitalism that values employment and stability over growth. Japanese manufacturers taught the world to be competitive — reshaping the landscape in industries like cars and electronics, and introducing a vocabulary of quality and efficiency that became a mantra on business school campuses and shop floors. But productivity growth in Japan’s service sector has slowed in recent years, weighing on the labor productivity of the entire economy, which ranks only 18th among the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and just 70 percent of levels in the United States. With the service industry making up 70 percent of Japan’s economy, and manufacturers battered by the global slowdown, economists say Japan’s ability to emerge from the worst recession since World War II will depend partly on its ability to make its service sector more productive. “Structural reforms have absolutely no popularity in the current climate,” Yorio Ota, a strategist at the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation, said in a recent report. “But what is needed for a true recovery are reforms of the Japanese economy.” But Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the ruling Democratic Party, bases his political philosophy on what he calls “fraternity,” meaning empathy with workers, rather than concern for corporate profits. Hirohisa Fujii, a leading contender for finance minister when Mr. Hatoyama announces his cabinet this week, has criticized even some of the moderate changes made by the departing Liberal Democratic Party. “Market economics is supposed to make a lot of people happy by letting skilled people fully utilize their skills,” Mr. Fujii, an elder statesman and former finance minister, wrote in a newspaper column last year. But recent pro-market changes in Japan “did not make everybody happy,” he said. “ That must be corrected, and we must build a politics led by the people.” Evidence of low productivity in the service sector is everywhere: office workers still pour over paper files; a veritable receiving line of security guards and receptionists greets visitors at building entrances; and Japanese retailers employ twice the average number of workers per outlet as their peers in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. Odakyu does not consider its “elevator girls” a wasteful extravagance. The store says the 14 full-time workers it employs to operate fully automated elevators provide a benefit. “These girls are the first employees our customers see,” said Tatsuo Iwasaki, manager for customer services. “We take training them very seriously.” Mr. Hatoyama is especially critical of changes championed by the former prime minister, the pro-American, free-market Junichiro Koizumi. Among other things, Mr. Koizumi took aim at Japan’s stagnant labor market, lifting a ban on the use of temporary laborers at factories. He hoped to increase flexibility in hiring at Japanese companies, many of which are saddled with more employees-for-life than they need, protected by labor laws and social norms. The inability to fire these redundant workers even in lean times keeps productivity at ailing companies low, while hurting upstarts that could use experienced workers. But critics blamed those changes for a widening income gap between lifetime workers and their poorer “temp” colleagues. The number of temporary workers, with low pay, few benefits and little job security, has surged in the last decade, reaching a third of the work force of 67 million. The plight of temporary workers let go en masse in the fallout from the global financial crisis has prompted a public outcry. “People started to see high levels of economic inequality. The quality of jobs started going down, and there was a growing number of temporary workers,” said Steven K. Vogel, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. “They associated that with Mr. Koizumi’s reforms. From an economic standpoint, it was wrong. But there was a big backlash.” The Democrats’ economic platform centers on consumer relief, including cash allowances for families rearing children and lower gasoline taxes. Economists say such policies could stimulate Japan’s flagging consumer spending and help spur a modest recovery. But with wages in decline, it is unclear how much consumers can be expected to increase spending in the long term. Skip to next paragraph Readers' Comments Share your thoughts. * Post a Comment » * Read All Comments (15) » To generate lasting growth, Japan needs to change old rules and dictates that have guarded a sclerotic establishment with heavy-handed government protection and squashed entrepreneurship with cumbersome barriers, some economists say. A cautionary tale, repeated by market proponents and opponents, is about QB Net, a start-up that took on Japan’s highly regulated barber market 10 years ago. QB Net’s string of super-efficient shops took the market by storm by offering quick haircuts for 1,000 yen, or about $10. Last fiscal year, the company logged sales of 6.73 billion yen, while the rest of the industry slumped. Threatened, a nationwide association for barbershops called for more regulation. Among other things, the association argued that it was unclean for QB Net to offer haircuts to clients without first washing their hair; soon, ordinances were passed across the country requiring all barbershops to install shampooing facilities, an expensive investment that slowed QB’s growth. “It’s not right to be penalized for being successful,” said Kazutaka Iwai, chief executive at QB Net. “We simply came up with a way to be more productive.” Others, however, argue that Japan’s traditional barbershops, though outdated, are worth saving. These tiny salons have consistently employed about 250,000 barbers for three decades, and the shopkeepers are often central figures in a kind of community life that many Japanese fear is being lost. “There are many structural factors that may influence the relationship between productivity and social welfare,” said David J. Brunner, a Japan specialist and research associate at Harvard Business School. “So firms should fire their excess employees and leave them feeling betrayed and worthless, and without income? That certainly would not contribute to economic growth or the general welfare.” Even the Liberal Democrats have spoken out in recent years against the pro-market changes introduced by Mr. Koizumi, one of their own. The most fervently antichange Liberal Democrats — who left the party to form their own after opposing a proposal to privatize the postal service — will join in a coalition government with the new prime minister-elect, Mr. Hatoyama. The Democrats’ other coalition partners are the Social Democrats. “We will fight with all our might to rebuild the livelihoods the public so sorely misses,” the Social Democratic leader, Mizuho Fukushima, said this week. “We will build a politics that values life, and corrects widening inequalities.” Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:11:00 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5071.phtml Japan Airlines said Tuesday that it would cut 6,800 jobs, trim routes and quickly secure emergency funds from an overseas carrier, stepping up restructuring efforts amid mounting losses that threaten to pull the company under. Delta Air Lines, the world’s biggest airline, and American Airlines are battling over a stake in Japan Airlines, which had a loss of ¥99 billion, or $1 billion, in the three months that ended in June. Japan Airlines is also reportedly in talks with Air France-KLM and Korean Air Lines over investments amounting to several hundred million dollars, which would give the successful bidder a minority stake in the carrier. Japan Airlines, the biggest carrier in the country, is struggling to stay afloat despite three government bailouts since 2001. It was hurt by a slump in air travel, the continuing weakness of the Japanese economy and what many analysts see as years of mismanagement. On Tuesday, the president of Japan Airlines, Haruka Nishimatsu, said to reporters that the company would cut 6,800 jobs over three years and carry out a reorganization of its routes, many of which lose money. He said the airline, known as JAL, aimed to conclude talks by mid-October on a tie-up with an overseas carrier, but declined to comment on a likely partner or how much JAL hoped to raise. He did not specify how many routes the airline planned to cut or change. Japan Airlines hopes that a cash infusion from an overseas partner, as well as a drastic turnaround plan, will persuade its creditors to provide fresh capital. The cash could also let the airline upgrade to newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft and turn around money-losing routes by teaming up with a new partner. Meanwhile, JAL’s rivals are looking to expand abroad to tap a lucrative market in international business travel. For Delta, a stake in JAL would add to its trans-Pacific and Asian routes and secure access to coveted berths at the busy Narita International Airport in Tokyo. But Delta is still integrating its $2.6 billion purchase of Northwest and it lost $1.05 billion in the first six months of 2009. A Delta-JAL deal would hurt American, which could see its current code-sharing agreement with JAL canceled. American lacks a hub in Asia and is expected to bid hard to keep its ties with JAL. An investment in Japan Airlines would be a high-stakes deal for any player in an industry exposed to wild swings in profitability. Moreover, equity ties between airlines have been rare, with carriers forging looser alliances like code sharing on flights. An alliance with JAL could be beneficial for U.S. airlines in light of recent talks between the American and Japanese governments on a so-called “open skies” agreement that could open up trans-Pacific routes to greater competition. Only two U.S. passenger airlines — Delta and United Airlines — are permitted to fly between Narita Airport and cities in the United States. Despite the potential advantages for the bidders, analysts say that JAL needs to show it is serious about turning itself around if it is to ink a deal. The company has already forecast a ¥63 billion loss for the current fiscal year, which ends next March. Although it recently secured ¥100 billion in government-backed loans, analysts say the airline needs at least ¥250 billion to get through the year. JAL is mired in negotiations with its eight unions over staff and pay cuts, holding back the company’s restructuring efforts. The company’s holdings, which include a global hotel chain and credit card business, have also drained its resources. Meanwhile, the carrier is losing out to its rival, All Nippon Airways, on domestic routes. “On one hand, it’s not a such an expensive purchase, considering the possible rewards,” said Yasuhiro Matsumoto, an analyst at Shinsei Securities. On the other, “nobody wants to invest in a company in such dire straits.” Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:47:05 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5070.phtml Prisoners on death row in Japan are being driven towards insanity by harsh conditions, according to human rights group Amnesty International. The group is calling for an immediate moratorium on all further executions and for police interrogation reform. A total of 102 prisoners face execution in Japan. Many of them are elderly and have spent decades in near isolation. International human rights standards prohibit the imposition of the death penalty on the mentally ill. In Japan, where criminal trials have a 99% conviction rate, the death penalty has wide public support. But Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen called on the government to immediately halt executions. "Rather than persist with a shameful capital punishment system, the new Japanese government should immediately impose a moratorium on all further executions," she said. Ms Allen called the death-row system a "regime of silence, isolation and sheer non-existence". She said that the Japanese practice of informing prisoners that they would be killed with only a few hours notice was "utterly cruel". Isolation According to the report - which researchers said had been challenging to compile due to the secrecy of the country's justice system - the conditions faced by many death row prisoners are making them mentally ill. Death row prisoners, according to Amnesty, are not allowed to speak to other inmates and are held in isolation. Apart from twice or thrice-weekly exercise sessions, they are not even allowed to move around their cells but must remain seated, the group says. As a result, many are now suffering from mental illnesses and are delusional. According to Japan's code of criminal procedure, if a person condemned to death is in a state of insanity, the execution shall be stayed by the justice minister. But, Amnesty says, executions of inmates who exhibit signs of mental illness - caused by the extreme conditions and the sheer length of their detention - continue. Between January 2006 and January 2009, the group says, 32 men were executed - including 17 who were older than 60. Five of this group were in their seventies, making them among the oldest executed prisoners in the world. Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:54:46 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5069.phtml As the polls opened on Sunday for Japan’s most important election in decades, the question seemed to be not whether the opposition would defeat the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, but by how big a margin. Recent polls show that the main opposition Democratic Party is likely to win well over 300 of the 480 seats being contested, giving it the majority needed to choose the next prime minister. Such a victory, which would be driven by voter discontent with Japan’s long economic and political stagnation, would unseat the incumbent Liberal Democrats for only the second time since 1955. There has even been concern here that the margin of victory could be too big. Some in the media have said a landslide could let the Democrats simply replace the Liberal Democrats as a dominant party, instead of creating the competitive two-party democracy that many had hoped would emerge from this election. With even Liberal Democrats warning of a new “one-party dictatorship,” the Democratic leader, Yukio Hatoyama, has repeatedly promised that his party would avoid the heavy-handed tactics abhorred in Japan’s consensus-driven political culture. “We will not force through anything and everything by sheer force of numbers,” Mr. Hatoyama said in a speech on Wednesday. Still, the tone of conversations on Japan’s talk shows and on the streets is a mixture of thrill and anxiety about the imminent end of more than a half-century of Liberal Democratic rule. It remains unclear if a switch would bring a big change in Japan’s direction, as the two centrist parties are close on most policies. Rather, the nation has been transfixed by the saga of the governing party’s kingpins fighting for their political lives amid the anti-incumbent sentiment. Tabloids have reveled in reporting on former prime ministers and party power brokers in losing battles against largely unknown opposition candidates, many of them charming younger women widely referred to as “assassins” because of their devastating political effect on their opponents. One former prime minister, the gaffe-prone Yoshiro Mori, 72, drew the ire of many when he told voters not to be fooled by the “sexiness” of his opponent, a 33-year-old former temporary worker named Mieko Tanaka. The Liberal Democrats are fighting back by mobilizing their own younger lawmakers, many of them also women, to campaign for older male colleagues. One is Yuko Obuchi, 35, the daughter of a former prime minister, who is the special minister in charge of improving Japan’s low birthrate and is herself more than eight months pregnant. On Friday, she campaigned in a working-class Tokyo neighborhood on behalf of Akihiro Ota, the leader of the New Komei Party, a Buddhist party that backs the Liberal Democrats. Mr. Ota, 63, is in a tight race with a woman representing the Democratic Party, Ai Aoki, a cheerful 44-year-old former kindergarten teacher. Ms. Obuchi stood in front of a crowd of Liberal Democratic supporters and, rubbing her extended belly, began by saying she could give birth at any moment. “I tell my baby not to come out until after Aug. 30, because Mom’s busy till then,” she joked. She then criticized the Democrats’ promise to raise the birthrate by paying families stipends of $270 per month per child. “They tell you sweet nothings,” Ms. Obuchi warned, without offering an alternative plan. Listeners seemed resigned that the party would lose. But they said they wanted to see Ms. Obuchi instead of the unpopular Liberal Democratic leader, Prime Minister Taro Aso, because she gave the party a fresh face. “The party needs to get rid of its old image,” said Hideo Shiba, 68, who owns a small construction company. “She symbolizes the future of the Liberal Democratic Party.” Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:01:20 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5068.phtml Japan’s economy rebounded in the latest quarter for the first time in a year, signaling the possible end of the country’s deepest recession since World War II and brightening prospects for a widespread global recovery. Japan’s economy, the world’s second-largest, has been sluggish for years, but it plunged into recession in the wake of the global financial crisis last year. Exports, its mainstay, at one point fell to half their precrisis levels. But a turnaround in exports and a vast fiscal stimulus program helped produce a modest 0.9 percent economic expansion in the three months that ended June 30, government figures showed on Monday, equivalent to annualized growth of 3.7 percent. The expansion was in line with the 0.9 percent growth forecast that was the average of 10 economists surveyed last week. A 1.2 percent growth in public demand helped offset a 1.3 percent fall in demand from the private sector, the data showed. Overall domestic demand fell 0.7 percent from the previous quarter. “The results were very positive,” said Takuji Aida, senior economist at UBS Securities Japan. “It’s true Japan would not have achieved growth without government stimulus. Still, the data shows that inventory adjustment is all but over, and we can expect growth going forward.” The Japanese economy’s resurgence after four consecutive quarters of contraction — including a historic 14.2 percent fall in annualized terms in the previous quarter — adds to a slowly improving picture of the world economy. Last week, the German and French economies also showed unexpected growth. The Federal Reserve also said last week that the United States, the world’s biggest economy, appeared to be “leveling out.” China, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have reported rebounds as the effects of stimulus efforts across the globe take effect. Recovery in these critical overseas markets whittled down inventories and released some pent-up demand, bolstering Japan’s exports of cars and electronics. Exports grew 6.3 percent from the previous quarter, while imports fell 5.1 percent. At home, new tax breaks and incentives to help sales of energy-efficient cars and household appliances, coupled with lower gas prices and a rebound in share prices, spurred consumer spending. Prime Minister Taro Aso has pledged 25 trillion yen (about $263 billion) in stimulus money to revive the economy, including a cash handout scheme and more public spending on programs like quake-proofing the country’s public schools. Investors have shown recent optimism in Japan’s economy; shares in Tokyo recently rallied to their highest levels since early October. But the Nikkei 225 average dipped 1.5 percent in early trading Monday after the numbers were announced, after weak consumer sentiment data in the United States sent Wall Street lower on Friday. Still, the outlook for Japan remains unclear, and analysts question whether the economy can sustain this recovery after stimulus measures at home and elsewhere run their course. Falling employment and wages are also expected to weigh on consumer spending for some time. Japan’s jobless rate hit a six-year high of 5.4 percent, and wages showed a record drop in June on an annual basis, dragging down consumer spending. Weak demand, coupled with falling oil prices, have put downward pressure on prices here, raising fears of prolonged and damaging deflation. “With the factors driving the current rebound being temporary in nature, a self-sustaining recovery is still not in sight,” Ryutaro Kono, Tokyo-based economist for BNP Paribas, told clients in a report published ahead of Monday’s numbers. The latest growth recoups only a small fraction of the 8.8 percent the Japanese economy has lost since peaking in early 2008, Mr. Kono said. Private capital investment and real estate values also remain weak, economists say. Although production activity has increased with the turnaround in exports, “we have yet to see ‘active production’ backed by capital investment,” Kyohei Morita, chief economist for Japan at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note. Though exports and industrial production are recovering, their levels remain well off their peak, saddling companies with excess capacity and employment, Mr. Morita said. The Bank of Japan struck a similarly cautious note over prospects for a sustained recovery in a recent report. While the bank said the Japanese economy had stopped deteriorating, it warned that employment and wages would stay low for some time, hurting consumer spending. Despite this quarter’s growth, the bank predicts that Japan’s economy will contract 3.4 percent in the year to March 2010. The latest uptick is unlikely to enhance the standing of Mr. Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party ahead of national elections this month, when many expect the party to lose its grip on power for only the second time in over half a century. Voter surveys show that the Democratic Party, Japan’s main opposition party, which vows to put more money in the hands of consumers, is favored to beat the Liberal Democrats in the Aug. 30 balloting. Support has soared for the Democrats and their ambitious election platform, which includes cash allowances to families with children, free tuition and lower gasoline taxes. But some economists warn the Democrats’ plans will add to Japan’s growing debt, which already surpasses 180 percent of its gross domestic product. Others say that Japan needs deeper structural reforms to raise productivity, especially in the face of a shrinking population. An overhaul of the tax and social insurance systems are also priorities for Japan. Unless Japan can maintain robust growth into next year, the country will have suffered another “Lost Decade” of economic growth, after limping through much of the 1990s with little growth, Yutaka Harada, chief economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research, wrote in a recent note. “Ten years after our Lost Decade, we’re finding ourselves in the midst of a second Lost Decade,” Mr. Harada said. Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:52:53 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5067.phtml In a recent YouTube video posted by Japan’s governing party, a smooth talker with an uncanny resemblance to the country’s main opposition leader, woos his date with sweet promises: a life without worries about child care costs or retirement, if only she will marry him. The wide-eyed woman asks how he will pay for such a carefree lifestyle. “Just choose me,” the suitor snaps. “I’ll sort out the details after we’re married.” The not-so-subtle message from the governing Liberal Democratic Party is that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is offering voters much the same kinds of promises. The voters have seemed ready to be wooed. The opposition party is riding a surge in popularity before elections for the lower house of Parliament on Aug. 30. Its platform promises more cash in hand for Japanese struggling through a deep recession: cash allowances to families with children, free tuition and more social security — all without adding to the country’s growing debt. The Liberals have called the plan nonsensical and sure to bankrupt Japan. Instead, they promise to stimulate the economy by investing in strategic industries, like solar power and “green” cars. Growth will then quickly trickle down to the common people, the Liberals say. The opposition “focuses on giving out money with no strategy for economic growth,” Prime Minister Taro Aso said of the Democrats. “We can no longer afford to pass our debt onto our children and grandchildren.” The two parties are, in essence, pushing two versions of how Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, should work: as it has for the last half-century, by propping up its corporations, or by distributing wealth to the people. If voters embrace the Democrats, Japan’s economy could shift from a long reliance on exports for growth, a model that has been largely discredited in the recent collapse of exports in the global downturn. Instead, a Democratic Party victory could result in a redistribution of wealth to ordinary Japanese to spur consumer spending. “We will not pursue a traditional growth model — that is, rely on exports to grow our economy,” Katsuya Okada, secretary general of the Democratic Party of Japan, told reporters on Monday. “First and foremost, we need to improve peoples’ livelihoods.” But the party’s smorgasbord of policies — which include yearly allowances of 312,000 yen ($3,297) per child, free tuition at public high schools and an end to highway tolls and gasoline tax — will not come cheap. The Democrats say the program will cost 7.1 trillion yen to start next April, and an additional 16.8 trillion yen in 2011. That comes to more than 3 percent of Japan’s 510-trillion-yen economy. With its public debt already surpassing 180 percent of gross domestic product, Japan cannot afford such spending. By some measures, its debt-to-G.D.P. ratio is second only to Zimbabwe’s. But the party’s proposals have proved attractive. The Kumano family in central Tokyo, for instance, would receive 624,000 yen ($6,593) in child benefits a year for its two boys, now 8 and 9, until they are about 16. The father, Eiichi Kumano, who runs a child care business, says the money would be a relief. “The boys are getting older, and we have to start thinking about college,” Mr. Kumano said. “In the short term, we’re thankful for the cash. But I do worry about how the government will pay for all this in the long run.” The Democrats say they intend to finance their program by eliminating the governing party’s wasteful public spending, a legacy of decades of pork-barrel politics. “We intend to rebuild the entire budget from scratch,” said Masaharu Nakagawa, the Democrats’ shadow finance minister. “We will eliminate all that’s wasteful.” Economists agree that the opposition party would have a freer hand in uprooting vested interests and writing a more efficient budget. The party has, until now, been virtually ignored by corporate Japan. In 2007, Keidanren, the country’s main business federation, contributed almost 2.9 billion yen to the governing Liberals, and just 80 million yen to the Democrats. “A growth strategy that focuses on ordinary citizens could be better than current policy, which is constrained by longstanding business interests,” said Ryutaro Kono, chief economist for Japan at BNP Paribas. The opposition is also exploring raising money by eliminating generous tax breaks and subsidies that have long supported weak Japanese companies at the expense of the wider economy. About two-thirds of Japanese companies, and half of large companies, do not pay corporate taxes because of obscure tax subsides for research, investment incentives or because they lose money, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By changing corporate tax policies and tapping idle government funds, the opposition party hopes to avoid raising Japan’s 5 percent consumption tax. The Liberals insist it will soon be necessary to raise that tax to meet government expenditures. Businesses say the Democrats’ proposals would hobble Japanese companies in international competition. Executives are already stepping up the pressure on the opposition to ease its tough stance on corporations, which includes much tighter emissions goals for greenhouse gases. “The economy will stall, or even worse — backslide,” Tetsuya Nomura, president of the construction company Shimizu Corporation and the leader of the industry’s main lobbying group, told reporters. “None of us can put food on the table,” he said. Some analysts question the ability of the opposition party, which has never been in office, to navigate Japan’s complex economy. Formed a decade ago, the party is a mix of lawmakers from a spectrum of political views, including socialists and free-market advocates. Its agenda is likely to face fierce resistance from Japan’s powerful bureaucrats, whom the Democrats have vilified as keepers of the status quo. Economists note that neither party has a viable plan for long-term growth. With the elections for Parliament’s more powerful lower chamber looming, neither side has addressed some of the more painful changes that Japan must make to build a more productive economy, including bringing more competition to domestic industries, revising rigid labor laws and increasing efficiency in financial markets. Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:32:56 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5066.phtml SHOPPERS who stop into Toyota dealerships here and across Japan generally have just one thing on their minds: buying a Prius. After years of indifference toward hybrids — in part because many gas-only models that got excellent mileage were already available in showrooms — drivers in Japan are lining up for the Prius, the Honda Insight and other models powered by gasoline and electricity. The enthusiasm for hybrids is also a result of new models arriving in showrooms. Toyota introduced the third-generation Prius in May; in June, it was the best-selling car in Japan, elbowing aside the Insight, which in March became the first hybrid to hold the top sales spot. Honda has been selling about 10,000 Insights a month, twice as many as had been expected in the company’s internal forecasts. There has been a five-month waiting list for the Prius in Japan, similar to the situation in California last year when gas prices swept past $4 a gallon. “Ordinarily, small cars don’t have much status, but people don’t care about changing from a bigger vehicle to a smaller vehicle if it’s a Prius these days,” said Toshiyuki Yokoyama, the general manager at Kanagawa Toyota Motor Sales, which runs about 50 dealerships in and around Yokohama. “Suddenly, everyone wants the car as soon as possible.” Japanese consumers are only now embracing hybrids because, as in Europe, there have been plenty of cheaper fuel-efficient alternatives. But the sales of new, reasonably priced models have jumped in the past year or so because of government subsidies and a blizzard of media coverage that has fueled Japan’s fad-conscious consumers. The question is whether the recent surge in sales of “eco cars,” as the Japanese call hybrids and alternative-fuel vehicles, is a lasting trend or one pumped up by short-term subsidies and high gasoline prices. In the United States, where Japanese automakers had trouble keeping up with demand for hybrids in 2008, sales have slowed (along with the rest of the market). Toyota suspended work on a factory in Mississippi devoted to building the Prius. Japanese are eager consumers of trendy products — everything from the latest handbags to video games — and sales often fall as fast as they rise. Automakers in Japan say, however, that sales of hybrids will remain strong even if government subsidies of up to $4,000 are phased out. Though down from the peaks reached in 2008, gas prices are still relatively high, and in a weak economy consumers are looking to spend less on gasoline. From an early age, Japanese are taught to be more efficient because their country has few natural resources. To reduce the use of air-conditioners, businessmen a few years ago were encouraged to do without neckties. Appliance companies eagerly promote waterless washing machines. But it is price that matters most, which is why Toyota and Honda used less costly technology to cut the cost of their hybrids below three million yen, or $30,000, the rough benchmark for a luxury car in Japan. Price was definitely an issue for Eiji Suga, a storekeeper in Kawagoe, a city one hour from Tokyo, who reserved a white Prius in April. Mr. Suga’s 13-year old Honda Accord, which has 43,000 miles on it, had very little resale value. But because of the car’s age, he qualified for a 250,000 yen (about $2,500) government subsidy if he scrapped the car and bought a more fuel-efficient replacement. He will receive another 150,000 yen in tax breaks for buying an eco car. The price of the new Prius was about 300,000 yen lower than its predecessor, too. “Together with the tax breaks and other government benefits, it was easy to choose,” said Mr. Suga, who added that seven of his friends in the neighborhood were also buying the new Prius. Nissan and Mitsubishi have also announced plans to leapfrog hybrids with new electric vehicles. But the durability of the hybrids on the market may make it hard for automakers in Japan to persuade consumers to buy electric cars. Tadashi Ishida, a retired electronics company executive, bought his Prius in 2006 to replace a Toyota Mark II, taking advantage of a 190,000 yen government rebate. Mr. Ishida, who lives in Yokohama, has been particularly impressed with the car’s fuel economy. He uses just a quarter-tank of gas to get to his family’s summer house about 75 miles away, about half of what it took to get there in the Mark II. He said that hybrids were no passing fad. “Average Japanese people do not consider the hybrid car a status symbol,” Mr. Ishida said. “Our Prius just fits our needs in terms of fuel consumption, daily family use and easy driving.” Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:30:46 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5065.phtml Given the magnitude of Japan's recession, it should perhaps come as little surprise that the fantasy-obsessed animation industry has gotten a hard dose of reality. Yasuo Yamaguchi, executive director of the Association of Japanese Animators, said the industry has been rocked by the country's deepest recession since World War II. "The spread of free Internet downloading is having a deadly effect," he said. Japanese animation is roughly a $2 billion a year industry. Revenues peaked in 2006 but have since fallen off, as lower advertising revenues lead to fewer new programs. Yamaguchi said the animation industry is important to Japan's economy and that the government should be helping it through these tough times with subsidies. Unlike some big screen animated features from the United States that rely almost completely on computer animation, in Japan, almost all features are drawn by hand -- a labor-intensive craft practiced by thousands of young artists each year. For the last six years, Nobuki Mitani, has been working as an "in-between" animator -- filling in the cells between "key" animations. It is one of the lowest paid positions in the animation hierarchy. Many of these entry-level jobs have been outsourced to the Philippines and South Korea in recent years. Mitani, 27, said the hours are long, and the pay is low -- about $800 a month. "Every day I work about 10 to 12 hours," he said. "Often, we work on Saturday, and if it's busy, we work Sunday, too." In Tokyo, the world's most expensive city, that means living in cramped conditions. Mitani lives in a tiny one-room apartment with no air conditioning. In summer, the room is sweltering. "I try not to drink water," he said, "to control the sweating." He has a shared sink at the end of the hall where he can wash his hands and face, but to bathe he has to go to a public bath. At the Tokyo Animation Institute, the classrooms are filled with students honing the craft, faces close to their sheets of paper, the only sound a hum from the electric pencil sharpener. The school's director, Yosuke Shimizu, said he knows many of his graduates will quit their first jobs after just months. "Within half a year, some will take freelance jobs, some will take a key drawing job, and some will become sketch directors. Those who are good enough never complain about how hard the job is," he said. At Toei Animation Studios, conditions are better for the animators than in smaller studios. Toei has produced countless successes over the years, including the "Dragonball" series and the ongoing favorite "One Piece." But even here animation is an intense, demanding job. Naotoshi Shida has been working at Toei for 25 years. He said it takes much more than just a love of drawing to succeed. "If someone is thinking of doing this just because they love drawing, that's called a hobby. They'd better think of doing something else." Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:15:17 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5064.phtml The women who pour drinks in Japan’s sleek gentlemen’s clubs were once shunned because their duties were considered immodest: lavishing adoring (albeit nonsexual) attention on men for a hefty fee. But with that line of work, called hostessing, among the most lucrative jobs available to women and with the country neck-deep in a recession, hostess positions are increasingly coveted, and hostesses themselves are gaining respectability and even acclaim. Japan’s worst recession since World War II is changing mores. “More women from a diversity of backgrounds are looking for hostess work,” said Kentaro Miura, who helps manage seven clubs in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo’s glittering red-light district. “There is less resistance to becoming a hostess. In fact, it’s seen as a glamorous job.” But behind this trend is a less-than-glamorous reality. Employment opportunities for young women, especially those with no college education, are often limited to low-paying, dead-end jobs or temp positions. Even before the economic downturn, almost 70 percent of women ages 20 to 24 worked jobs with few benefits and little job security, according to a government labor survey. The situation has worsened in the recession. For that reason, a growing number of Japanese women seem to believe that work as a hostess, which can easily pay $100,000 a year, and as much as $300,000 for the biggest stars, makes economic sense. Even part-time hostesses and those at the low end of the pay scale earn at least $20 an hour, almost twice the rate of most temp positions. In a 2009 survey of 1,154 high school girls, by the Culture Studies Institute in Tokyo, hostessing ranked No. 12 out of the 40 most popular professions, ahead of public servant (18) and nurse (22). “It’s only when you’re young that you can earn money just by drinking with men,” said Mari Hamada, 17. Many of the cabaret clubs, or kyabakura, are swank establishments of dark wood and plush cushions, where waiters in bow ties and hostesses in evening gowns flit about guests sipping fantastically expensive wine. Some hostesses work to pay their way through college or toward a vocational degree, or to save up to start their own businesses. Hostessing does not involve prostitution, though religious and women’s groups point out that hostesses can be pressured into having sex with clients, and that hostessing can be an entry point into Japan’s sprawling underground sex industry. Hostesses say that those are rare occurrences, and that exhaustion from a life of partying is a more common hazard in their profession. Young women are drawn nonetheless to Cinderella stories like that of Eri Momoka, a single mother who became a hostess and worked her way out of penury to start a TV career and her own line of clothing and accessories. “I often get fan mail from young girls in elementary school who say they want to be like me,” said Ms. Momoka, 27, interviewed in her trademark seven-inch heels. “To a little girl, a hostess is like a modern-day princess.” Even one member of the Japanese Parliament, Kazumi Ota, was a hostess. That revelation once would have ignited a huge scandal, but it has not. She will run for re-election on the leading opposition party ticket, the Democratic Party of Japan, in the national election next month, and the ticket is expected to unseat the ruling party. It is unclear how many hostesses work in Japan. In Tokyo alone, about 13,000 establishments offer late-night entertainment by hostesses (and some male hosts), including members-only clubs frequented by politicians and company executives, as well as cheaper cabaret clubs. Hostesses tend to drinks, offer attentive conversation and accompany men on dates off premises, but do not generally have sex for money. (Men who seek that can go to prostitutes, though prostitution is illegal.) Hostesses are often ranked according to popularity among clients, with the No. 1 of each club assuming the status of a star. Mineri Hayashi has made it to the top of her club, Celux, six years after coming to Tokyo from northern Japan. One recent evening, she readied herself for an elaborate birthday event her club was throwing in her honor. Outside the club, bigger-than-life posters of Ms. Hayashi adorned the street. At the club, a dozen men put up balloons and lined up Champagne bottles. The club’s clientele is diverse, including workaday salarymen, business owners and other men unwinding after work. Celux hopes to make more than $60,000 on Ms. Hayashi’s birthday party, which will be attended by scores of regulars. “Life has been fun, and I want to keep on having fun,” Ms. Hayashi said, placing a tiara in her hair. She talks of plans to retire next year and travel abroad. Her 17-year-old sister, who also wants to be a hostess, may succeed her. Ms. Hayashi is supportive. “I just want her to be happy,” she said. Popular culture is also fueling hostessing’s popularity. TV sitcoms are starting to depict cabaret hostesses as women building successful careers. Hostesses are also writing best-selling books, be they on money management or the art of conversation. A magazine that features hostess fashion has become wildly popular with women outside the trade, who mimic the heavily made-up eyes and big, coiffed hair. But Serina Hoshino, 24, another Tokyo hostess, is exhausted from the late nights and heavy drinking. Slumped in her chair at the M.A.C. hair salon, she talked about endless after-hours dates with clients. Stumbling back home at dawn, she sleeps the rest of the day. On her days off, she hardly leaves her apartment. Her reward is about $16,000 a month, almost 10 times the salary of most women her age. “It’s nice to be independent, but it’s very stressful,” Ms. Hoshino said, speaking through a cloud of hair spray and cigarette smoke. In recent months, clubs have also started to feel the squeeze of the bad economy. Hostess wages are starting to fall to as little as $16 an hour. Still, that rate remains above many daytime jobs here. So, the young women keep coming. The Kabuki-cho district is lined with dark-suited scouts recruiting women. One club recruiter said some women turn up to interviews with their mothers in tow, which never would have happened when the job was less respectable. “Women are being laid off from daytime jobs and so look for work with us,” said Hana Nakagawa, who runs a placement agency for higher-end clubs in Tokyo. She gets about 40 inquiries a week from women looking for hostess jobs, twice as many as before the downturn. Atsushi Miura, an expert on the issue, says hostessing will be popular among Japanese women as long as other well-paying jobs are scarce. “Some people still say hostesses are wasting their life away,” he said. “But rather than criticizing them, Japan should create more jobs for young women.” Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:57:12 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5063.phtml The slide in Japan's exports slowed in June in a sign government stimulus spending around the world may be propping up demand. But they were still 35.7% lower than the same month a year earlier. Japan, dependent on exports for growth, has been suffering its steepest recession since World War II. It is a sign of just how badly Japan's economy has been battered that a drop in exports of more than one-third is hailed as perhaps a positive sign. But the decline in June, of 35.7% compared the same month a year before, is better than May, when exports were down by more than 40%. With imports also lower, Japan made a trade surplus of $5.4bn (£3.3bn). Japanese companies have benefited particularly from government stimulus spending in China. Japan's economy shrank at an annualized pace of 14.2% in the first quarter of the year, the worst performance on record. The Bank of Japan recently said conditions had stopped getting worse. But any improvement is mostly being felt by bigger manufacturers. Smaller companies are still struggling and unemployment is expected to continue to rise. Sun, 26 Jul 2009 07:02:10 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5062.phtml Giant jellyfish descend on the Sea of Japan, causing untold devastation to coastal villages and leaving a trail of destruction and human misery behind. Sounds like a great sci-fi flick. But it's not. It's real and a nightmare for Japanese fishermen. The massive sea creatures, called Nomura's jellyfish, can grow 6 feet (1.83 meters) in diameter and weigh more than 450 pounds (204 kilos). Scientists think they originate in the Yellow Sea and in Chinese waters. For the third year since 2005, ocean currents are transporting them into the Sea of Japan. Monty Williams, a marine biologist at Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said the jellyfish grow to an enormous size as they are transported by ocean currents. He said they stay together in packs and as they drift northward, they get caught in fishermen's nets. The giant jellyfish are one of about 200 species of coastal jellyfish or large jellyfish that exist around the world. But Nomura's stands out because of its enormous size. "The sheer size of them, individually, makes them fairly spectacular," Williams said. Spectacular, perhaps, to scientists, but perilous to villagers along the Japanese coast who have seen the destructive habits of these colossal creatures in the past. They had giant-jellyfish invasions in 2005 and 2007, and because they've recently been spotted in the Sea of Japan, they're bracing for another, potentially harmful wave this summer. The jellyfish destroy fishermen's nets, getting trapped in them, tearing holes and ruining catches. Fishermen often use expensive mazelike nets that stretch for hundreds of kilometers. When swarms of giant jellyfish tear them, the result is devastating. "Communities of fishermen and these fishing villages own these nets," Williams said. "When these nets get wiped out, it actually has this economic devastation for an entire community." The good news is that previous attacks have prompted Japan to put in place a warning system for fishermen. While they still risk losing a big catch, they can, at least, save their pricey nets from the invasion of the giant jellyfish. It's not clear why waves of Nomura's jellyfish have made it to the Sea of Japan in recent years. Some have speculated that overfishing, pollution or rising ocean temperatures may have depleted the kinds of fish that prey on Nomura's jellyfish in the polyp stage. However, no one is certain, Williams said. Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:51:08 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5061.phtml With his graying hair and his corporate-standard dark blue suit, which he dutifully wears in Tokyo’s sweltering summer heat, Saburo Toyoda appears an unlikely proponent of change. But since losing his lifetime job seven years ago, and going through several other jobs that paid less than half his former salary, Mr. Toyoda, a 54-year-old salesman, says he is fed up with Japan’s long malaise. Like many Japanese, he now wants what amounts to a revolution in this politically risk-averse nation: the ousting of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for more than a half-century. “Things have gotten so bad that you have to ask, ‘Can’t someone else do a better job?’ ” said Mr. Toyoda, one of thousands of middle-aged salarymen who have struggled to adapt to a harsh new era of job insecurity and declining living standards. “It is time for new ideas, and new faces.” Japan has seen a broad upwelling of such frustration in recent years, and particularly since the beginning of the financial crisis last fall, which brought the unfamiliar sight here of mass layoffs and the unemployed tossed onto the streets. Now, the growing disillusion here seems to have reached a critical but long-elusive threshold: when Japanese voters go to the polls on Aug. 30 to vote in parliamentary elections, they appear almost certain to oust the Liberal Democrats from power for only the second time since 1955. “Voters are finally being pushed into action because their livelihoods are starting to crumble,” said Masaru Kaneko, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo. “Until now, Japanese were politically apathetic because they could still live comfortably despite the weak economy.” With the Liberal Democrats looking unresponsive or downright incompetent, more voters now seem willing to give Japan’s untested opposition a shot at finding a way out of the nation’s stubborn economic morass. A poll published Wednesday by Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, showed 30 percent of 1,047 respondents backing the opposition Democratic Party, versus 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. No information on the margin of error was available. The Liberal Democratic Party has struggled before, such as when voters gave it a second chance under reformist Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in the early 2000s. But Mr. Koizumi’s efforts to shrink government are now seen as having worsened growing social inequalities without reviving growth, and a string of short-lived subsequent governments took the party back to its old pork barrel ways. “There is a feeling now that Japan is at a dead end and has to change,” said Kazuhisa Kawakami, a political scientist who is vice president of Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. “The Liberal Democratic Party has shown itself to be tired and spent out.” Behind this brewing voter revolt is a grim new pessimism that has gripped this former industrial juggernaut. Japan’s economic situation has grown increasingly severe in recent years: the nation’s per capita gross domestic product — a measure of economic prosperity — declined from third highest in the world in 1991 to 18th last year, according to the World Bank. Average household income has also fallen from its peak in 1994 to a 19-year low of 5.56 million yen, or about $58,000, in 2007, the Labor Ministry said. A public opinion survey released Thursday by the government-financed Institute of Statistical Mathematics showed that 57 percent of 3,302 respondents said they expected their lives to get worse, with only 11 percent saying they would get better — almost the mirror opposite of replies to the same survey 30 years ago. But it was the current global slowdown, threatening the livelihoods of Japanese young and old, that seemed to push people past the breaking point. Japan’s export-dependent economy fell more precipitously than those of other developed countries, contracting at an annualized rate of 15.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, its steepest decline on record. This has brought widespread pain and dislocation, as companies have laid off about 216,000 temporary and short-term workers since October, according to the Labor Ministry. The sight of hundreds of these newly jobless temporary workers protesting in central Tokyo early this year shocked a country unused to mass layoffs, and raised fears of growing social inequalities. Anxieties are particularly acute about the future for Japan’s youth. In May, the unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24, not including students, rose to 9 percent, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry, far higher than the 5.2 percent rate for all age groups. And this in a nation that for decades prided itself on having virtually no unemployment. A national media storm was stirred up earlier this year when companies hurt by the downturn began rescinding job offers made to university seniors, the first time that had happened to any significant degree since the bursting of the real estate bubble in the late 1980s. That left thousands of students to graduate in April without jobs waiting for them — a career-threatening predicament in a country where large companies limit most of their hiring to university seniors. One was Shiho, a 23-year-old resident of the western city of Kobe who asked that her family name not be used for fear of embarrassment. Last year as a senior in business management, she said, she got a job offer to be a white-collar worker at a large construction company. She said she even went to a training seminar at the company in December, only to have the offer withdrawn in January. In a desperate scramble to find work before graduating in March, the end of the Japanese academic year, she took the only job she could find, as a uniformed receptionist at a golf course. She said she felt so ashamed that she stopped talking to many of her friends, and ignored their cellphone messages, until she found out that they had also settled for jobs they did not like. “I feel betrayed,” she said. “I studied for university entrance exams, went to a good university, did everything I was supposed to do, and then this happens.” She and other young Japanese talk in gloomy terms about the prospects for both their own careers and their nation overall. Many express fear of becoming another “lost generation” of youth like those in the late 1990s, condemned for years to part-time or short-term jobs, or forced to live off their parents. Shiho said she and her friends believed that it was time for a change in Japan, though she admitted that young Japanese tended not to vote. But if she does vote, she said, it will not be for the Liberal Democrats, whom her parents supported. “If the Democratic Party is ready to try something new, then let’s give them a chance,” she said. Older Japanese like Mr. Toyoda, the laid-off salaryman, also profess a feeling of betrayal, in their case at losing lifetime job guarantees that were once the norm here. Mr. Toyoda says his problems began in 2002, when he lost his lifetime job at a large electronics company. He said he had held four jobs as a salesman since, and was dismissed last month by his most recent employer. Mr. Toyoda said he no longer went out drinking after work or traveled for vacation, instead saving the money to pay for his two sons’ university tuitions. Some of his sons’ classmates have had to drop out of college because their fathers were recently laid off. He said he believed that Japan had no future under the Liberal Democrats, who had turned his country into a nation without hope. “I feel a sense of suffocation,” he said. “I can work. I want to work. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore.” Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:44:36 -0600 http://japanaddicted.com/Article5060.phtml Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso will dissolve the lower house of parliament this month and call for general elections in August, the government said Monday. Hours later, the main opposition party said it, along with three others, submitted a no-confidence motion against Aso and his Cabinet. The lower house of the Diet will be dissolved the week of July 21; elections for new lawmakers will be held on August 30, said Jun Matsumoto, the chief Cabinet spokesman. The beleaguered prime minister has faced increasing pressure from within his party, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to step down as his approval rating plummets amid Japan's worsening economy. On Sunday, the LDP suffered a huge defeat in local elections, when it lost its majority in the Tokyo assembly to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its coalition partner. While the race for the Tokyo assembly does not affect the Diet, it was the fifth successive local election loss for the LDP -- and a further sign that Aso's party is losing the confidence of the populace. The LDP holds the majority in the lower house, but not the upper house. Sunday's defeat convinced some in the LDP that they must oust Aso as party leader before national elections that were scheduled for October, according to analysts. With Monday's announcement, Aso has moved up the elections by two months. Aso, an outspoken politician and a former foreign minister, became prime minister in September. The last two prime ministers, both from his party, resigned after less than a year in office. Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:20:47 -0600