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 Topic: NationalThe new items published under this topic are as follows.
Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 - 02:23 PM
National
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Japanese authorities admitted Tuesday they'd lost track of a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo's oldest, days after police searched the home of the city's official oldest man - only to find his long-dead, mummified body.
Officials launched a search this week for Fusa Furuya, born in July 1897 and listed as Tokyo's oldest citizen, after it emerged her whereabouts are unknown.
Several other celebrated centenarians are also unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping and follow-up in a country that prides itself in its number of long-lived citizens but also frets about an unraveling of traditional family ties.
Officials updating their records ahead of a holiday next month honoring the elderly found that Furuya does not live at the address where she is registered, said Hiroshi Sugimoto, an official in Tokyo's Suginami ward.
Furuya's 79-year-old daughter, whose name was not disclosed, told officials she was not aware of her mother's registration at that address and said she thought her mother was with her younger brother, with whom she has lost touch. But that address just outside Tokyo turned out to be a vacant lot.
Police are also interviewing the brother and another daughter, but still have not been able to locate Furuya.
The disappearance follows last week's grisly discovery - also by officials updating the most-elderly list - that the man listed as Tokyo's oldest male, who would have been 111 years old, had actually been dead for some 30 years and his decayed body was still in his home.
Police are investigating the family of Sogen Kato for alleged abandonment and swindling his pension money. Kato is believed to have died about 32 years ago, when his family said he retreated to his bedroom, wanting to be a living Buddha.
Officials said they had not personally contacted Furuya or Kato for decades.
Authorities are also looking for a 106-year-old man who is missing in Nagoya, central Japan, Kyodo News agency reported. The Asahi newspaper said three more centenarians were unaccounted for in Tokyo.
The missing elderly people could cast doubt on the exact number of centenarians in Japan, a figure that has been rising for decades.
Officially, Japan has 40,399 people aged 100 or older, including 4,800 in Tokyo, according to an annual health ministry report last year marking the Sept. 21 holiday for the elderly.
Each centenarian receives a letter and a gift from a local government office - usually by mail. Officials in fewer than half of the country's 47 prefectures (states) routinely keep track of centenarians in person, Kyodo calculated.
Health and Welfare Minister Akira Nagatsuma urged officials to find a better way to monitor the elderly.
"Many people have doubts whether the government properly keeps track of senior citizens' whereabouts," he said. "It is important for public offices to check up on them - where and how they are - and follow through all the way."
But local officials say it is hard to keep track because families are often reluctant to receive official visits.
Many also send their elderly relatives to nursing homes without doing the proper paperwork.
"It's shocking that even relatives don't know if their parents are alive or dead," Chiba University professor Yoshinori Hiroi, an expert on public welfare, told public broadcaster NHK. "These cases were typical examples of thinning relationship among families and neighbors in Japan today."
The rapidly graying population has also fueled concerns about Japan's overburdened public pension and medical care system.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 02:33 PM
National
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Japanese business confidence has hit its highest level in two years, a central bank survey suggests.
The closely watched Tankan survey of more than 11,000 manufacturers found that optimists about Japan's economy outweighed pessimists for the first time since June 2008.
Firms predicted rising profits and increased investment.
It comes as the world's second-largest economy battles to recover from its worst slump in decades.
The survey rose for a fifth consecutive quarter to one point in June from minus 14 in March, beating analyst forecast.
Tackling debt
However, the outlook for the Japanese economy remains uncertain.
Last month, Japan's new prime minister said the country was at "risk of collapse" under its huge debts.
Naoto Kan, in his first major speech since taking over, said Japan needed a financial restructuring to avert a Greece-style crisis.
Japan's central bank has announced a scheme to offer 3 trillion yen (£22bn; $33bn) in low interest loans in an effort to spur economic growth.
And it has set targets to rein in its national debt, the biggest in the industrialised world.
However, the government has given no specific ideas of how it will reach its long-term goal of balancing its budget.
Strong demand from Asia has meant that, so far at least, demand for Japanese exports has been recovering, despite weakness in other markets such as Europe and the US.
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Posted by: Timmy on Friday, May 21, 2010 - 12:05 AM
National
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Major Japanese newspapers reported on Thursday that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has decided to reverse himself and accept nearly all of Washington’s demands that he honor an existing agreement to relocate an American air base on Okinawa, in an attempt to end a damaging dispute that had sown confusion and mistrust between the longtime allies.
According to the reports, Mr. Hatoyama will soon announce a new plan that will largely adhere to a 2006 agreement to move the busy United States Marine Air Station Futenma to a less populated part of Okinawa — rather than move it off the island entirely, as he had pledged during last summer’s campaign. The reports said the biggest departure from the previous accord would be a vague call to move some Marine training exercises off Okinawa, in what appears to be a largely symbolic gesture to lighten the island’s military burden.
The reports did not identify the source, but their similarity and simultaneous appearance in most major newspapers seemed to indicate that the information was leaked by government officials, as is common here. The prime minister’s office would not comment, and Mr. Hatoyama would tell reporters only that he was “in the final stages” of putting together a plan, which he had promised to announce by the end of the month.
Since his Democratic Party’s historic election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democrats, Mr. Hatoyama has suffered politically at least in part because of a perception that he is indecisive and has mishandled relations with the United States. If the reports are accurate, he could be further punished in opinion polls, where his approval ratings have lately sunk below 25 percent.
Political experts said that it appeared that Mr. Hatoyama had decided that sustaining the short-term political damage of acceding to Washington’s demands was the best way to stem the long-term decline in his approval ratings. “This has been a reality check for Prime Minister Hatoyama,” said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor of American diplomacy at the University of Tokyo. “He has belatedly realized how dire the situation has become.”
Thursday’s reports come a day before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is to visit Tokyo on a visit expected to focus on North Korea but that is also likely to include discussions of the base.
Resolving the dispute would also clear the way for the two countries to implement a broader, $26 billion agreement to move 8,000 Marines and their dependents off Okinawa to Guam. The Obama administration had warned that Futenma standoff threatened the broader deal, which was negotiated after a 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl by three American servicemen.
While the reports seem to point to a victory by the Obama administration, diplomatic analysts have warned it could prove damaging to the countries’ relations. Washington’s insistence on the original agreement appeared to many Japanese to be an attempt to bully their inexperienced new government, and many here supported Mr. Hatoyama’s call for ending Japan’s dependence on the United States and building closer ties with China.
The reported plan would almost certainly spark outrage on Okinawa, where the base’s thudding grey helicopters have become symbol of an onerous American military presence. Some 90,000 Okinawans rallied last month to demand the base’s removal from their island, which is home to nearly half of the 50,000 United States military personnel in Japan.
According to the reports, the new plan would follow the 2006 agreement by moving the air base from its current site in the middle of the city of Ginowan to Camp Schwab, an existing Marine base in northern Okinawa. As in the original agreement, the plan would call for building a pair of runways that will extend into the ocean on landfill.
The use of landfill would also amount to a personal setback for Mr. Hatoyama, who had criticized the 2006 plan as environmentally damaging. The prime minister had reportedly been trying to reduce the runways’ impact by raising them above the water on pillars, but Japanese newspapers said Washington rejected that idea as too vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
Analysts said this would make the reported plan an even tougher sell on Okinawa, where there has been wide opposition to the use of landfill because it would destroy coastal habitat of the endangered dugong, a sea mammal related to the manatee.
“Convincing local public opinion in Okinawa to agree to a deal will be a long, punishing process,” said Hiroshi Nakanishi, a professor of international politics at Kyoto University.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 06:03 AM
National
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Japanese authorities imposed a temporary ban on beef exports on Tuesday after finding suspected cases of foot-and-mouth disease in cows on a single farm in southern Japan. The agriculture minister, Hirotaka Akamatsu, told reporters that mouth ulcers, a symptom of the disease, were detected in three cows from the farm in southern Miyazaki prefecture, an area known for its prized beef. The ban affects Japan’s relatively tiny exports — worth about $40 million last year — of mainly gourmet beef to countries like China and the United States. The agriculture ministry said it would also kill all 16 cows on the farm. The disease, which is not fatal to humans, was last detected in Japan 10 years ago.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 05:50 AM
National
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Japan — Satomi Sato, a 51-year-old widow, knew she had it tough, raising a teenage daughter on the less than $17,000 a year she earned from two jobs. Still, she was surprised last autumn when the government announced for the first time an official poverty line — and she was below it.
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Read full article: 'Japan Tries to Face Up to Growing Poverty Problem' (6820 bytes more)
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Posted by: Timmy on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 - 12:37 PM
National
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The Japanese government pushed a record ¥92.3 trillion budget through Parliament on Wednesday aimed at kick-starting growth in the long-stagnant economy — another round of spending that will add to Tokyo’s already burgeoning public debt.
In a striking reversal of the privatization efforts of previous administrations, the government also said Wednesday that it would retain a significant stake in the country’s mammoth postal banking system, keeping a tight grip over a financial conglomerate that has been blamed for many of the inefficiencies and distortions in the world’s second-largest economy.
The record budget, worth $1 trillion, for the fiscal year starting in April will pay for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s ambitious stimulus agenda, including cash handouts to households with young children, free tuition at public high schools and income support for farmers.
Mr. Hatoyama, who heads the Democratic Party, is looking to bolster both Japan’s deflation-stoked economy and his slumping popularity ahead of important elections due this summer.
“Creating a virtuous circle in which a growth strategy spurs employment and demand will help combat deflation,” Mr. Hatoyama said.
Recent data shows the Japanese economy is slowly emerging from its worst recession since World War II, as a global recovery sets off a rebound in exports, production and employment.
But some economists worry about runaway government spending in Japan, which is already saddled with a public debt twice the size of its economy — the worst ratio among industrialized countries. The government says it would issue a record ¥44 trillion in bonds to finance next year’s budget and cover for a sharp shortfall in tax revenue.
In January, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut its outlook for Japan’s sovereign rating, saying that Mr. Hatoyama appeared to have no plan to start containing the country’s spiraling debt.
Japan’s fiscal largesse has long been supported by Japan Post, the country’s biggest customer of Japanese government bonds. A de-facto government guarantee on deposits made at the postal bank have attracted huge funds: about ¥300 trillion, or more than the annual gross domestic output of France.
Those funds, in turn, made their way to pork-barrel public works projects across the country, like dams on virtually every major river in Japan and mountainous roads to nowhere.
In an attempt to remedy the unhealthy flow of finances, the former reformist prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, started a privatization drive. Under a plan spearheaded by Mr. Koizumi, Japan Post’s financial units were to be freed from government control by 2017, a centerpiece of structural changes designed to forge a more market-oriented economy in Japan.
Though Mr. Koizumi’s plans appeared to enjoy public support at the time, disastrous terms in office by his successors — and painful recession in the wake of the global economic crisis — have largely discredited his privatization agenda.
In August, Mr. Hatoyama cast Mr. Koizumi’s Liberal Democrats from power in a landmark election that ended a half-century of almost uninterrupted rule in Japan. The new administration soon began a review of the postal privatization process.
A draft postal bill announced by the government on Wednesday said that the state would hold onto more than one-third of its shares in Japan Post — a stake that would give it the right to veto any changes to the company’s management.
The government also said it would double the limit on postal savings deposits to ¥20 million per customer from ¥10 million — a move that could suck even more funds from the Japanese economy. The move has also raised concerns that the massive state-affiliated entity could crowd out business at private banks.
“Reversing postal privatization means grave distortions will remain in the Japanese economy. The state will now be able to continue offloading bonds to Japan Post, and that will encourage reckless government spending,” said Satoru Matsubara, a professor of economic policy at Toyo University. .
“Private banks will also suffer from unfair competition,” he said.
But anti-market proponents within Mr. Hatoyama’s administration have argued that privatizing Japan Post would lead to cutbacks in the financial services available in rural areas of Japan. For residents of some far-flung villages and tiny islands, the local post office provides the only access to banking services.
Japan Post runs a network of 24,000 offices across the country supported by an army of 430,000 full- and part-time staff.
“Government involvement is necessary to make sure we provide universal services,” Shizuka Kamei, the banking minister, said Wednesday. “We will be careful not to squeeze the public sector,” said Internal Affairs Minister Kazuhiro Haraguchi.
The government expects the postal overhaul bill to clear Parliament in June and the changes to take place around April 2012, said Kohei Otsuka, the vice financial services minister.
Private banks criticized the government’s move.
“If the postal bank continues to operate as a government affiliate, there will be no level playing field,” said Katsunori Nagayasu, president of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and head of the Japanese Bankers Association, which represents 124 banks across the country.
“As a fundamental rule, government enterprises should stick to supplementing the public sector,” Mr. Nagayasu said.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 02:20 PM
National
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There has been protest in Japan over a proposed ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, a day after the European Union agreed to back the plan.
Wholesalers held a protest at Tokyo's fish market, while a top official said Japan was likely to opt out of any ban.
The EU agreed on Wednesday to back the proposal during next week's meeting of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).
But Japanese opponents say it would hit the country's massive tuna market hard.
Bluefin tuna, which is used in sushi and sashimi, is highly prized in Japan.
But a recent scientific assessment concluded that stocks have declined by 80% in the past 40 years.
Nations will consider whether to suspend fishing - until stocks recover - at the Cites meeting opening this weekend in Qatar.
Japan has previously indicated that it will opt out of any trade ban, as it is entitled to do under Cites rules - and its top government spokesman said that nothing had changed.
"The Washington Convention [or Cites] is basically to protect endangered species, but I personally doubt that bluefin tuna is currently facing such a situation," Hirofumi Hirano said.
"Japan will claim its unchanged position that resource control should take place" instead of a trade ban, he said.
Market forces
At Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo - the world's biggest - a group of traders protested against the proposed ban.
"I don't think it's appropriate to discuss bluefin tuna in the forum for endangered species, because you can preserve the species with appropriate resource control," said Tadao Ban, president of the tuna traders' association at the market.
"We want to protect Japanese food culture and to prevent tuna from disappearing as a food source," he said.
Japan consumes about three-quarters of the bluefin tuna caught worldwide, and imports large amounts from France, Italy and Spain.
Countries accepting a Cites suspension would not be allowed to export bluefin caught in their waters, and would not be able to fish in international waters.
The EU is backing exemptions for traditional fishers and deferring the ban for a year. The US prefers an immediate suspension of fishing.
Japan is not opposed to bluefin conservation, but believes such matters should be regulated by regional fisheries bodies such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Iccat).
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 02:17 PM
National
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Japan's 98th airport has begun operations - offering just one flight a day.
Ibaraki airport cost 22bn Yen ($220m, £147m) to build and is being seen in Japan as a prime example of wasteful public expenditure.
It is located 80km (50 miles) and a long bus ride north of Tokyo.
The airport was conceived as a hub for budget carriers but the check-in counters were almost deserted as operations began.
There is just one plane a day, to South Korea. Another flight, to the Japanese city of Kobe, will begin next month.
The airport has become a symbol of decades of public spending to prop up the economy that has left Japan studded with bridges to nowhere and unneeded dams.
The new centre-left government, which came to power last year, has criticised the links between previous conservative administrations and the construction industry, and vowed to cut waste.
International travellers tired of long queues and crowded departure lounges should perhaps consider flying to Ibaraki.
But Ibaraki itself has little to commend it to Korean tourists who might be thinking of catching the single daily flight from Seoul.
Apart from one well-known Japanese garden the prefecture's main claim to fame is the locals' skill in making natto, a fermented soy bean dish that many consider an acquired taste.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 03:01 AM
National
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Signs of the full-blown spring season were observed in Japan when cherry blossoms bloomed Wednesday in the western city of Kochi, coming out the earliest in any location other than Okinawa and nearby southern islands, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The ''someiyoshino'' cherry blossoms in Kochi came out six days earlier than the previous year and tied the record for the earliest blooming on Japan's main islands, which was registered three times in the past -- in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1955 and 1973 and in Wakayama Prefecture in 1959.
The weather agency certifies a blooming tree when ''five or six blooms'' on a cherry tree are observed.
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Posted by: Timmy on Friday, March 05, 2010 - 03:04 AM
National
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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.
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Posted by: Timmy on Sunday, February 28, 2010 - 01:43 PM
National
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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.
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Read full article: 'Japan Breathes Sigh of Relief as Tsunami Passes' (5262 bytes more)
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Posted by: Timmy on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 - 04:52 AM
National
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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.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, December 07, 2009 - 11:35 PM
National
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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.
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Posted by: Timmy on Thursday, July 30, 2009 - 01:57 AM
National
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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.”
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, July 20, 2009 - 02:51 PM
National
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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.
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Posted by: Timmy on Monday, July 13, 2009 - 12:20 PM
National
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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.
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