月別: 2017年3月

1)   The head of a Japanese nationalist school at the heart of a swirling political scandal said in sworn testimony in parliament on Thursday that he received a donation of 1 million yen from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife in her husband’s name.

2)   Fewer Japanese are taking their own lives, a positive sign in a country with one of the world’s highest suicide rates.

Experts say it’s difficult to pinpoint a reason for the decline, attributing it to a combination of factors. The government has made a determined effort to tackle the issue, starting with national legislation in 2006. Consumer loan laws have been revised to try to keep people from taking on too much debt.

“Now we can talk about suicides,” said Yasuyuki Shimuzu, founder of Lifelink, a nonprofit that lobbies for suicide-prevention measures. “I believe the change in environment has made it easier for the needy to seek help.”

3)   British police arrested seven people in armed raids Thursday linked to the deadly attacks the day before on the symbol of the country’s democracy.

Britain’s top anti-terror officer Mark Rowley also said police have revised down the number of victims from Wednesday’s rampage to three from four. Some 40 people were wounded.

4)   The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has unveiled an outline of a facility designed to boost young people’s communication skills in the English language.

The Tokyo government is planning to open the educational facility called English Village in September next year, in the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The project is part of Tokyo’s efforts to foster globally-minded talent.

The facility will be named Tokyo Global Gateway and located in Koto ward. It is expected to be operated by a private company. Courses will be offered for fifth-grade students through high-school seniors with priority given to applications from schools.

5)   Writers and film directors in Japan have voiced opposition to a proposed bill to criminalize preparing to carry out terrorism and other organized crimes.

The Japan PEN Club, a group of writers and poets, said in a statement that the legislation would violate freedom of thought and beliefs guaranteed by the Constitution.

The group criticized the government’s argument that the legislation is necessary to host the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The group says the existing organized crime law is sufficient for taking anti-terrorism measures.
6)   A government survey says abuse of elderly people by family members and others reached 16,384 cases in Japan during the year ending March 2016. That’s a 2 percent increase from the previous year.

7)   An internet-based bank in Japan plans to soon start allowing customers to withdraw cash from ATMs using only smartphones.

Jibun Bank account holders will be able to use the service at more than 23,000 ATMs owned by Seven Bank. The machines are located around the country, mainly in Seven-Eleven convenience stores.

Customers must first enter the withdrawal amount on a smartphone app. The ATM will display a QR code to be scanned with a smartphone camera. The app will then show a number for the transaction.

Once users enter the number and an account password, they’ll be able to get their money.

今日は硬い話が多かったかな。森友とか福島のこととか。

1)   A court in Japan has found the central government and Tokyo Electric Power Company liable for failing to prevent the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.

In a ruling on Friday, the Maebashi District Court in Gunma Prefecture ordered the government and TEPCO to pay more than 38 million yen, or about 335,000 dollars, in damages to a group of 137 evacuees.

2)   Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says neither he nor his wife made a donation to build a school for an organization embroiled in a controversy over a state-owned land deal.

Abe was answering a question in a Lower House committee on Friday. One day earlier, Moritomo Gakuen President Yasunori Kagoike suggested that Abe had donated one million yen, or about 8,850 dollars, to build an elementary school.

3)    An upgrade being rolled out this summer to Mastercard’s mobile payments service will let people open, manage and close their tabs at participating bars and taverns completely through their phones, without having to hand over a credit card.

4)   Japan is laying the groundwork for a free education program for some households that will cover a student’s costs from preschool to college to ensure the country maintains a highly-skilled workforce.

The program, still in its early stages, is expected to feature in the government’s economic strategy due sometime around June.

5)   The number of crime syndicate members in Japan fell below the 20,000 threshold for the first time in 2016, as gang groups are struggling to secure financing on the back of stronger police crackdowns and a growing civil movement to eliminate them, a national police report showed Thursday.

6)   The Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games on Friday confirmed that the International Olympic Committee Executive Board has approved the Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium in Fukushima Prefecture as an additional venue for Baseball and Softball events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

7)   Managers at Japan’s major companies are putting their offers on the table in response to workers’ demands for higher wages.

The outcome so far of annual labor negotiations indicates workers will probably take home higher pay, but their raises will be less than agreed upon last year.

 

今日はここから韓国と南スーダンと震災の話。

1)   “Radiation! Bang bang!”

Gesturing as if with guns, two boys in Tokyo repeatedly taunted a girl whose family fled to Japan’s capital to escape radioactivity unleashed by the Fukushima nuclear crisis of 2011.

The girl began to skip classes, and switched schools to escape the bullies, her mother told Reuters. But the very radiation that uprooted the family brought more pain in her new home.

“For her to be called ‘radioactive’ was heartbreaking,” said the mother.

Six years after an earthquake and tsunami sparked the Fukushima meltdown, several cases of “nuclear bullying,” as the Japanese media calls them, have prompted discrimination similar to that suffered by survivors of the World War Two atom bombs.

2)   Support for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has plunged after questions were raised in parliament about a murky land deal involving an elementary school to which his wife had ties, according to an online poll published this week.

Abe has said neither he nor his wife, Akie, was involved in the deal for state-owned land purchased by Moritomo Gakuen, an educational body in the western city of Osaka.

3)   In a historic, unanimous ruling Friday, South Korea’s Constitutional Court formally removed impeached President Park Geun-hye from office over a corruption scandal that has plunged the country into political turmoil and worsened an already-serious national divide.

4)   Six years after a huge tsunami ravaged Rikuzentakata, the coastal city in northeastern Japan is moving on to rebuild tourism with a unique home stay program.

The “minpaku” private lodging program organized by the city’s tourism promoting organization Marugoto Rikuzentakata enables visitors to get a taste of the daily lives of local fishermen, farmers, and other residents while learning about the disaster.

5)   Computers of Japanese companies and individuals are becoming the prime target of an attack using “ransomware”—programs that bar victims from accessing their business files or family photos unless they pay money to do so.

A computer gets infected with ransomware typically when its user opens a file attached to a spam email from a sender pretending to be a company, often a parcel delivery company, according to the government-affiliated Information-Technology Promotion Agency.

6)   A 36-year-old truck driver who was playing Pokemon Go when he hit and killed a 9-year-old boy last year, was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday by the Ichinomiya branch of the Nagoya District Court.

7)   Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Wednesday he plans to visit Germany, France and Italy from March 19 for talks with the countries’ leaders on ways to address security and other challenges facing them.

8)   Rattled by North Korean military advances, influential Japanese lawmakers are pushing harder for Japan to develop the ability to strike preemptively at the missile facilities of its nuclear-armed neighbor.

9)   China is violating its free-trade pledges by pressing foreign makers of electric cars and other goods to give technology under an industry development plan that is likely to shrink access to its markets, a business group said Tuesday.

The report by the European Union Chamber of Commerce adds to  complaints Beijing improperly shields its new developers of robotics, software and other technology from competition.

10)   The top U.S. commander in the Middle East signaled Thursday that there will be a larger and longer American military presence in Syria to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State group and quell friction within the complicated mix of warring factions there.

11)   Japan’s Prime Minister says his administration will end its main UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. The government will not send another team to replace the current unit. Japan’s top government spokesperson says the country’s withdrawal from a UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan is not due to worsening security there.

12)   The Osaka prefectural government may decide not to approve a plan to open an elementary school in Toyonaka City in April. It is concerned that the school’s operator has failed to give convincing answers to the questions raised over a controversial land deal.

Moritomo Gakuen wants to open the school on a plot it bought from the Japanese government. But the operator has been mired in controversy since it came to light that the site was purchased for a fraction of its market value.

13)   25 Filipino women have arrived in Japan to engage in housekeeping work under the government’s strategic special zone program. They will start working in April in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. At present, foreigners can perform this type of work in Tokyo, Kanagawa, and the city of Osaka.

The women are allowed to work for up to 3 years. Live-in jobs are prohibited in order to protect the workers from possible abuse.

14)   A record 54,000 children in Japan were referred to child welfare centers in suspected abuse cases in 2016. The National Police Agency said on Thursday that reports on 54,227 children were filed last year. The figure was up 46 percent from 2015 and is the highest since comparable data became available in 2004.

トランプさんの話はなくて豊洲と森友の話が多かったかな。先生はフロリダにいるのだけどまたどこかに移ろうかなと言っていた。でもフロリダより好みの場所が思いつかないらしい。

1)   Former Tokyo Gov Shintaro Ishihara urged incumbent Gov Yuriko Koike on Friday to relocate the aging Tsukiji wholesale market to a nearby site without further delays, criticizing her reservations about the long-stalled project.

“She should be held responsible for wasting money,” Ishihara told the Japan National Press Club, referring to the running costs for the unused relocation facility in the Toyosu area which used to host a gas production plant.

2)   A bill that would make Saitama Prefecture the first local government in Japan to charge for helicopter mountain rescue operations was submitted to the prefectural assembly Thursday.

3)   In March, housing subsidies run out for those who fled the Fukushima nuclear disaster from areas other than the government-designated evacuation zones, and as the clock ticks down, they have had to decide whether to return or move once again.

Many of these so-called voluntary evacuees are mothers concerned to avoid any risk to their children’s health, with the fathers remaining back in Fukushima Prefecture, according to freelance journalist Chia Yoshida.

4)    Would you support a complete ban on smoking in public places in Japan?

5)   Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday he does not intend to start a probe into the government or his ruling Liberal Democratic Party as questions mount over their possible roles in a controversial sale of government-owned land in Osaka.

6)   The Japanese government pension fund said Friday it posted a record investment profit of 10.50 trillion yen ($91.90 billion) in the October-December period, boosted by a rally in stocks at home and abroad following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election last November.

The Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest pension fund, logged the biggest investment profit for a quarter since fiscal 2001, when it started managing its investments on its own.

7)   With a month to go this fiscal year, Japan’s installation of new wind power capacity in 2016-17 is set to come in almost double that of the previous 12 months, propelled by higher tariffs guaranteed by Tokyo and a rising number of offshore wind farms.

8)   A North Korean envoy rejected a Malaysian autopsy finding that VX nerve agent killed Kim Jong Nam, saying Thursday the man probably died of a heart attack because he suffered from heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure. Malaysia dismissed the claim.

9)   Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday it was inappropriate that a kindergarten in Osaka run by a controversial school operator made children cheer for him during a sports event.

“I have no intention whatsoever of making a kindergarten say (such a thing). I think it is inappropriate,” Four preschoolers raised their right hands and shouted twice, “Go fight, Prime Minister Abe.”

Video footage showed the children also saying, “Adults should protect the Senkaku Islands and Takeshima. Chinese and South Korean people who treat Japan as a bad (country) should amend their minds.” They also said, “The passage through the Diet of the security legislation was good.”

10)   Smartphones have become a mine of personal information, holding bank data, credit card information and addresses, making them the preferred target for cybercriminals, experts warn.

“Cybercriminals go where there is value, and they have understood that the smartphone has become the preferred terminal for online shopping and payment,” said Tanguy de Coatpont, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

11)   SpaceX plans to launch two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon next year using a spaceship under development for NASA astronauts and a heavy-lift rocket yet to be flown.

The launch of the first privately funded tourist flight beyond the orbit of the International Space Station is tentatively targeted for late 2018, Space Exploration Technologies Chief Executive Elon Musk told reporters on a conference call.

12)   The Japanese government is planning to reduce penalties for those who plot serious crimes like terrorism but turn themselves in before actually committing them under a contentious anti-conspiracy bill it is preparing, sources close to the matter say.

The government plans to submit the bill to the ongoing Diet session to amend the law on organized crime to criminalize the act of making preparations for terrorism.

13)   Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso says he’s in the process of arranging his first round of economic talks with US Vice President Mike Pence for mid-April.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Donald Trump agreed in February to launch dialogue between their deputies to deepen economic relations.

14)   A campaign to boycott Lotte Group’s products is growing in China in opposition to the planned installation of an advanced US missile defense system in South Korea.

The protest began when the South Korean government said on Tuesday that it officially acquired a golf course in the country’s south from Lotte Group as a site for deployment of the system.

Seoul says it will install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system this year to boost its defense against nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.

15)   Police in Japan have arrested an environment ministry official for alleged bribery over decontamination work following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Fifty-six-year-old Yuji Suzuki, who works at a ministry sub-branch in the prefecture, is suspected of helping a construction company land such work in exchange for wining and dining.

Fukushima and Tokyo police found that Suzuki was provided entertainment at hostess bars and a free trip worth about 1,750 US dollars from the construction firm in Toyama Prefecture.