Chinese Harassing Phonecalls over Fukushima Water Release & more –5th Sep 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 5th of September twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Ever since the Fukushima Daiichi power plant started releasing treated water into the ocean, tons of Chinese citizens have been making harassing phone calls to Japanese organizations, and they aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. On Saturday the 1st, Tokyo’s local government said it got over 34,000 phone calls from the 24th to the 31st of August. Almost all of the calls came from China and usually had someone ranting in Chinese on the other end.

Speaking of China’s response, the country’s ban on seafood imports has hit Japan’s fishery industry hard. So, on Monday the 4th, the government organized a meeting to talk over emergency relief measures for the businesses that are struggling the most. By the end of the meeting, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said they’d create an emergency fund of 20.7 billion yen, or 140 million dollars, for impacted exporters. He also wants to look for ways to encourage the Japanese to consume more seafood so the industry isn’t as reliant on exports.

Japan’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs said that China’s response is not based on science, as scientific entities from both national and international organizations approved the water release plan. Even China has released treated water into the ocean, and way more than Japan. So, the government is thinking of asking the World Trade Organization to step in.

If only China’s energy could be directed to a company that actually deserved it. Like Johnny & Associates, a talent agency founded by a now-deceased abuser who sexually assaulted the agency’s own members. The victims coming out against the agency has already led to new laws to help protect kids in the future, and most recently, the agency asked a team of legal and sexual abuse experts to investigate. On Tuesday the 29th, the team finished their investigation and said the current president, Julie Fujishima, should resign. Fujishima is the daughter of Mary Fujishima, the late founder’s older sister, who not only knew about her brother’s abuse but helped to cover it up. Then, after Julie Fujishima became president, victims told her about her uncle’s sexual abuse, but she ignored them. The team of experts said her failure to investigate, especially when it seems the whole family knew about the abuse, means she should step down as president if the talent agency wants to make a fresh start.

Johnny’s isn’t the only company undergoing turmoil.

The labor union for the department store chain, Sogo & Seibu, went on a one-day strike on Thursday the 31st. Japan hadn’t seen a strike at a major department store in sixty years, so it caught a lot of people’s attention. As for why, the labor union was protesting against the department chain being sold, saying that people were worried about losing their jobs. Back in November twenty twenty-two, the parent company, Seven & i Holdings, said it was going to sell the department chain to a US investment firm for 220 billion yen, or 1.5 billion dollars. However, on Friday the 1st, they ended up selling it for around 580,000 dollars because they had so many debts lowering the value of the department chain.

Yahoo Japan also got in trouble with the communications ministry for mishandling user data. On Wednesday the 29th, officials said that the tech company gave smartphone location data to Naver, a global internet company based in South Korea, without notifying users. Yahoo Japan took users’ information from May to July and let Naver copy it as the company pleased. Officials told Yahoo Japan that they can’t let people copy user data, and to submit a report showing how they’ll change policies by the 29th of September.

Meanwhile, family members of those abducted by North Korea in the seventies and eighties are still rallying for the abductees’ return. On Saturday the 2nd, Sakie Yokota, the mother of one abductee, who was thirteen years old when North Korean soldiers kidnapped her, met with the state minister about getting the abductees back. She showed the minister two thousand messages written by those who support their return. So far, North Korea has only allowed five of the seventeen abductees to return to Japan, and so much time has passed that only one other parent of those abductees aside from Yokota is still alive. And at ninety years old, she doesn’t know how much time she has left, so she urged the government to hurry up and get her daughter and the other abductees back.

In a party election earlier this week, Yuichiro Tamaki, the leader of the Democratic Party for the People (or DDP), won another term on Saturday the 1st. He based his platform on cooperating with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party since they shared some goals. He ran against an opponent who wanted to unite with non-ruling parties instead. Now that Tamaki has been re-elected, he’ll continue as that party’s leader until twenty twenty-six.

In other political news, Kishida boarded a plane on Tuesday the 5th for a seven-day tour of Indonesia and India. While there, he’ll take part in meetings for both the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, and the Group of 20 summit. The ASEAN meetings will probably focus on keeping up international friendships with economic talks. The Group of 20 summit will look at food security, which has been shaky in some countries thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

During both meetings, Kishida will also likely talk about the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s water release. Even though China has been the most outspoken in its backlash, he wants to reassure other nations so they don’t jump on the anti-Japan bandwagon.

Moving on to health-related news, severe temperatures across Japan sent seventy-four hundred people to the hospital between the 21st and 27th of August. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said this marked the third week in a row that the number of heatstroke patients in Japan topped seven thousand. That’s over double the number of patients in August last year. Usually, heatstroke patients go down as the end of August approaches - but not this time around. Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, had the highest numbers. It was way warmer in the north than usual, and many were not prepared for the heat. Weather officials said the heatwave will probably keep going in September, and cautioned people to stay indoors if there’s a heatstroke alert in their area.

So, it’s no surprise that the Meteorological Agency announced that this was the hottest summer in Japan since they started recording temperatures over a century ago. For most of Japan, the average temperature was almost two degrees Celsius (or thirty-five Fahrenheit) higher than the thirty-year average, which mainly summed up to constant, unrelenting heat that didn’t let up at night or in the rain.

Onto the subject of sports, the Japanese men’s basketball team will be competing in the Paris Olympics next year. While they participated in the Tokyo Olympics, that was only because Japan was hosting. This is the first time in forty-eight years that the men’s team officially qualified for the Olympics, thanks to soundly defeating West Africa in the World Cup on Saturday the 2nd.

In some rather interesting science news, a Super Blue Moon appeared over Japan for the first time in thirteen years on Wednesday the 30th. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with Sailor Moon. Or Super Sailor Moon. The super part refers to when the moon is a little bit closer to Earth than normal and looks bigger. The blue part just means there are two full moons in one calendar month, something that only happens every two or three years. Astronomers say the next Super Blue Moon will take place in March twenty twenty-nine.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

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Mata Ne!