Another Seafood Import Ban? & more–3rd Oct 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 3rd of October twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Tuesday the 26th, Russia said it was thinking of taking a page out of China's book and banning seafood imports from Japan due to the treated water release from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Recall the plant has a huge storage of formerly radioactive water that has been treated and diluted to remove the radiation. In August, they started releasing the treated water into the ocean. Most countries expressed their understanding, but China responded by banning Japanese seafood imports.

The Japanese fisheries minister said Russia makes up less than one percent of seafood exports, but he'll still try and convince Russia to make a decision based on science. He also said on Friday the 29th that they would continue testing both the ocean water and seafood to reassure everyone that the release isn't harming the environment.

That wasn't the only tiff with Russia. On Monday the 2nd, Diet member Muneo Suzuki went to Russia to meet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko. Suzuki didn’t get approval for his little trip, which is a big no-no since there’s a government advisory telling people not to go to Russia. Things got even worse as Suzuki had been pro-Russia in the past. The party he’s a member of, Nippon Ishin Japan Innovation Party, said they’re going to question him once he gets back to Japan.

In the meantime, Rudenko apparently told Suzuki that Japan’s sanctions against Russia are regrettable and not in Japan’s best interests. Japan, along with many other countries, has brought sanctions against Russia for their invasion of Ukraine, such as the county’s ban on exporting cars to Russia.

Moving on to the subject of economics, half of Japan’s prefectures raised the minimum wage on Sunday the 1st, so that the national average is now one thousand and four yen or almost seven dollars. The Central Minimum Wages Council gave individualized recommendations to each prefecture on how much to increase the minimum wage since the economic situation and cost of living can be pretty different from place to place. Some prefectures boosted the minimum wage higher than recommended, such as Shimane Prefecture, where a lot of lower-earning workers have been having a hard time due to higher prices. Tokyo now has the highest minimum wage at one thousand one hundred thirteen yen or seven and a half dollars, and Iwate Prefecture has the lowest at 893 yen or six dollars.

Despite this, smaller businesses say that the wage hike will be hard to keep up with, while workers say that it’s not enough considering how expensive everything has gotten lately. Thanks, inflation!

Japan made another change in the economic sector - this time by making laws to regulate stealth marketing. Recently, there has been a lot of shady advertising on social media where companies encourage influencers not to tell their audience that they’re being sponsored as a way to make a promotion seem natural or unbiased. This is already illegal in other countries such as the US, and starting on Sunday the 1st, it will be illegal in Japan as well. The Consumer Affairs Agency said that anyone promoting a product has to disclose if they’re being paid so that consumers can make a more informed decision. The law is meant to target the companies that pressure influencers and other figures to keep sponsorships quiet.

In political news, Hiroyuki Hosoda, a Lower House speaker, is planning to resign due to poor health. The seventy-nine-year-old had to stay in the hospital in both July and early September. He also had to skip quite a few events, including a Hiroshima peace memorial in August and later a Group of Seven meeting in September. The Diet will probably approve his retirement when they convene on the 20th of October.

Some suggested that his connections to the religious group once known as the Unification Church may have also pushed him to retire now rather than hold on a bit longer.

Speaking of which, the culture ministry is planning to get a court order to dissolve the Unification Church as early as the 12th of October. If the court approves the order, the church won’t get any of the tax benefits of a religious organization, but will still be allowed to conduct religious activities. The ministry spent the past year investigating the church and its practices of asking for large donations. They believe that the church has broken the law by harming the public with malicious and systematic money-sucking practices.

The church argues they’re not malicious. To be fair, the only two other religious groups in Japan that lost their religious status broke criminal laws— like, terrorism- and murder-type crimes. That doesn’t mean the church hasn’t caused any harm, but it’s up to the court to decide whether it’s crossed the line.

Let’s go back to the ban on seafood for a minute. The UK reached out to help by hosting Japan Matsuri, a festival that showcases Japanese culture and food, and placed an emphasis on the seafood being safe. The Embassy of Japan in the UK, along with several other organizations, held the festival at Trafalgar Square in London on Sunday the 1st. Although this year its aim was to respond to China’s import ban, the festival has been an annual tradition since two thousand and one but hasn’t been held for the past four years due to the pandemic.

This year, the event featured many different performances, including a finalist from Britain’s Got Talent, and forty different stalls with a wide range of Japanese dishes.

That’s not the only festival to come back after being on hold for four years. From Saturday the 30th of September to Sunday the 1st of October, Tokyo held a Japan-South Korea cultural exchange festival. This celebration used to be held every year in both Tokyo and Seoul, but the cities only held it online from twenty twenty until twenty twenty-two. So, this marked the first “real” cultural exchange festival since twenty nineteen. It took place at Komazawa Olympic Park and featured many Korean performances and cuisines.

In other news, things are looking up for the tourism industry. The Tourism Agency found that foreigners' overnight stays at inns, hotels, and so on, hit over ten million in both July and August. That's fourteen times more than last year, and nine percent more than twenty nineteen. A lot of Japanese residents were traveling as well, with almost fifty-two million booking overnight stays in August. That’s twelve percent more than last year, but the number doesn’t reach pre-pandemic levels.

In a related story, anyone visiting the western island of Miyajima now has to start paying a tax of 100 yen, or sixty-seven US cents, on top of the ferry ticket fee. The city of Hatsukaichi, where the ferry terminal is located, put the tax into play on Sunday the 1st. The tax is only for visitors, so anyone who is a resident or commutes there for work or school wouldn’t have to pay it. City officials said they expect to earn 104 million yen, or 700,000 dollars, by March twenty twenty-four and would spend it on moving underground power cables and keeping the toilets and ferry terminals in good shape. The hope is that it will help Miyajima remain a nice tourist spot.

In sports news, on Sunday the 1st, Shohei Ohtani became the first Japanese baseball player to win the home run crown in the Major League. He finished the season with a record of forty-four home runs, despite getting an elbow injury that cut his season a month short. This was his final season with his team, the Los Angeles Angels, but given his stellar record as a player, it’s likely that he may also win the title of the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award for the second time, the first being in twenty twenty-one.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

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Mata Ne!