A Spy Satellite & more – 28th Nov 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 28th of November twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Wednesday, the 22nd, North Korea announced that it had successfully launched its first spy satellite into space. It had previously attempted to launch satellites twice earlier this year but failed both times. For all three attempts, North Korea used ballistic missile technology, which goes against UN Security resolutions.

The other problem is that after the Korean War, an international treaty declared the area between North and South Korea a no-fly zone in order to keep peace between the two countries. The satellite launches all violated that treaty, in addition to the UN resolutions. Japan is currently talking to the US about the North’s international law violations.

In the meantime, the US Space Force is analyzing the device. They have doubts about whether it’s really functioning as a satellite or if the whole launch was an excuse for North Korea to test out its missile technology.

North Korea’s continued missile use has prompted Japan, South Korea, and the US to have joint military drills on Sunday, the 26th. The three militaries conducted the drills in international waters near South Korea’s Jeju Island. One of the exercises was an air defense drill specifically targeted toward what to do in case of a missile launch from North Korea.

Although South Korea stands with Japan against its northern counterpart, they’ve got a bone to pick over past wrongs. On Thursday the 23rd, the Seoul High Court found in favor of a lawsuit filed against Japan for kidnapping and turning women into sex slaves or comfort women for the Japanese army during World War Two. The court ordered Tokyo to pay 150,000 dollars to each of the sixteen people who filed the lawsuit, all of whom were victims or relatives of the victims.

Japanese officials argued that the court decision went against a twenty fifteen international agreement where Japan paid roughly seven million dollars to South Korea. After reaching the agreement, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe implied that the women weren’t slaves, but volunteered to be prostitutes.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa met with her South Korean counterpart on Sunday, the 26th, to discuss the court decision. Both agreed that the twenty fifteen deal resolved things, but they should still work to restore the reputations of the victims and their families.

While it doesn’t excuse their past, Japanese citizens have also been kidnapped by other countries, though on a much smaller scale. In the seventies and eighties, North Korea abducted at least seventeen citizens from Japan. The government returned five of them in two thousand two, but the location of the other twelve is unknown. On Sunday, the 26th, about 800 people against the abductions, including relatives, held a rally in central Tokyo.

Takuya Yokota, the brother of one of the abductees, questioned if the government was taking the issue seriously since, at this point, a lot of the abductees’ parents were dying before knowing the fate of their children. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in May that he would meet with North Korean officials to talk about this issue, but there has been no news since then.

In health news, Japan has created its first COVID-19 vaccine. The pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo developed the vaccine for the Omicron XBB point one-five variant and applied for its approval in September.

The health ministry only needs to give its official approval. Officials guess that they’ll be able to start using the vaccine across the country as early as December.

Meanwhile, news organization NHK found that five different groups from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party failed to report at least 40,000 dollars in political funds. The discovery came about after the Internal Affairs Ministry published the political funds' reports for twenty twenty-two on Friday the 24th. NHK said that even though some organizations listed fundraising tickets or fees as expenditures, those same fees were missing from the political funds' reports, either due to a clerical error or embezzlement. In other words, the organizations that supported the political party said, Hey, we spent this money on fundraising! But the political party report didn’t show those donations. Moreover, the party has to report every donation worth over 1,340 dollars.

The Liberal Democratic Party said that they have corrected their reports and are looking into the matter. This is not to say they’ll get off scot-free - earlier this month, a university professor filed a criminal complaint about their failure to report 267,000 dollars worth of funds from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty-one.

Since we’re talking about funds, the Lower House approved the supplementary budget bill drafted earlier this month. The bill will fund over 13 trillion yen or 88 billion dollars to the economic stimulus package designed to help citizens struggling with rising costs. The Upper House has begun to discuss the bill and will likely put the budget into effect by the end of the week.

That’s not all the government’s up to. Earlier this year, officials discovered a huge number of labor abuses against foreign trainees and, in response, put together a panel of experts to fix the law. On Friday the 24th, those experts reported on their proposal for a new training program.

One of the biggest flaws in the old laws was that foreign workers had to commit to a specific employer for up to five years. The intent was to make sure that the trainees wouldn’t abandon the employer that sponsored their visa, but some employers used that rule to force workers into unpaid overtime.

The new program aims for a three-year training period but would allow trainees to switch employers after a year as long as they stayed in the same field, such as nursing, agriculture, construction, and so on. Some companies are concerned that this might increase their costs, but others say it makes sense since it treats foreign technical trainees closer to regular workers.

On a lighter note, Saga Prefecture recently appointed fictional character Kosaku Shima as a mock vice governor to help advertise the prefecture’s policies on sports and semiconductors. Officials got the idea to use Shima because he’s a graduate of a university founded by someone from Saga. They put up a mock office for the fictional vice governor featuring an animation about Saga’s good points. The office will be open to the public from Monday the 27th until the 19th of December.

Moving onto science news, earlier this week, a group of researchers from Japan, the US, and six other countries announced their analysis of the second-most powerful cosmic ray, which struck the Earth in May twenty twenty-one. For those who don’t know, cosmic rays are tiny, high-speed particles from the sun or outside our solar system. Measuring them can sometimes tell us about events in the far reaches of space, such as supernovas.

The researchers who detected the cosmic ray said it had around 244 exa-electron volts and nicknamed it Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology. The strongest cosmic ray, detected in nineteen ninety-one, was 320 exa-electronvolts and was nicknamed Oh-My-God.

Meanwhile, Mori Building Company officially opened the Mori JP Tower on Friday the 24th. At 330 meters or 1,082 feet, it is now the tallest building in Japan and is located in Tokyo’s Minato Ward. It is part of a huge complex with enough offices for 20,000 workers and homes for 3,500 people, plus cultural attractions like a digital art museum.

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Mata Ne!