JAPAN: By-Elections & more – 30th Apr 2024

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 30th of April twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Sunday the 28th, three districts across Japan held by-elections for Lower House members, and the Constitutional Democratic Party or CDP won the three seats. This was the first by-election since the news report on the Liberal Democratic Party or LDP members taking kickbacks from a fundraising slush fund.

Elections were held in Tokyo’s District Number Fifteen, Shimane Prefecture’s District Number One, and Nagasaki Prefecture’s District Number In Shimane, the CDP candidate beat out the LDP member, but the LDP didn’t have any candidates running in Tokyo or Nagasaki, where LDP officials had resigned after the kickbacks revelation.

The CDP president said that these wins were a sign that many people in Japan want political reform and are getting tired of the LDP. The LDP Secretary-General said his party must work to regain public trust by reforming itself.

In more political news, lawmaker Hiroyuki Miyazawa submitted his resignation to the Diet on Tuesday the 23rd, shortly after Bunshun, an online journal, alleged that he had an extramarital affair. According to Bunshun, Miyazawa lived with a woman who was not his wife and gave her financial assistance. The Diet approved his resignation on Thursday the 25th.

Miyazawa had served in the Lower House four times and was part of the LDP's Abe Faction, which the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe once led. Miyazawa held the post of state minister of defense for a few months last year but stepped down after the kickback controversy.

Yukiko Mori will likely replace Miyazawa in the Lower House. Mori, aged fifty-two, is the president of Machinery Maintenance Company in Mie Prefecture and a Party Discipline Committee Member.

In international news, South Korea's Foreign Ministry is concerned about Japan's directive to LY Corporation, the operator of the Line messaging app, to review its ties with Naver, a South Korean IT firm, following a data breach. The ministry said Japan shouldn't introduce measures that discriminate against South Korean companies. They did not explicitly say how it was discriminatory but seemed to imply that the government would not have issued the directive if a Japanese company had been responsible for the data breach. The ministry also said they would meet with Naver and hold talks with Japan if necessary.

The issue has stirred tension in South Korea, with a major conservative newspaper saying Japan's actions are anti-free-market and may even violate an investment agreement between the two countries. It urged Japan to stop pressuring Naver.

Moving on, the value of the yen has been bouncing up and down this past week. It briefly hit a thirty-four-year low at 160 yen per dollar on Monday the 29th but went back to 154 just a few hours later. Some market players wondered if the Japanese government or the Bank of Japan intervened to boost the yen since there wasn’t a reason for investors to buy it at that time.

When the news organization NHK asked the Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs about the situation, he refused to comment.

In business news, on Thursday the 25th, four fraud victims sued Facebook Japan, which is part of the US-based tech giant Meta, for 148,000 dollars. The plaintiffs said that Meta allowed fake online ads on their site, which conmen used to scam them out of their money. They argued that Meta was negligent because it didn’t properly examine the social media ads on their platform, which ended up financially hurting them.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said it's not acceptable for such ads to be online. They plan to emphasize the need for the government to implement better regulations and prevent scams.

While some might debate over how responsible Meta should be for its ads, engineering company IHI's wrongdoings are a lot more obvious. On Wednesday the 24th, IHI admitted that its subsidiary has been falsifying fuel efficiency data for boat engines since two thousand three. Transport ministry officials visited two of the subsidiaries’ plants, one in Niigata Prefecture and one in Gunma Prefecture, and will be interviewing management to figure out how the falsification started.

Speaking of management, NTT Docomo, a major telecom company, appointed Yoshiaki Maeda as its new president. Maeda previously worked at Recruit and will succeed Motoyuki Ii in June.

This marked the first time Docomo has chosen someone from outside the group for the role. It’s likely a part of NTT Docomo's efforts to diversify its business. Other efforts include recent partnerships with Monex, Orix Credit, and Amazon.

Whether companies or individuals, it’s always nice when people come together - like the volunteer workers helping recovery efforts in the quake-hit Noto Peninsula. Ishikawa Prefecture has been recruiting more volunteers for the extended spring holiday that began on Saturday the 27th, thinking that many people affected by the New Year’s earthquake will return home during the break. The prefecture is accepting an average of 340 volunteers per day during the ten days through the 6th of May, a forty percent increase compared to the previous ten days.

Volunteers in Suzu City are moving household goods from affected homes, sorting out waste, and performing other tasks to help the victims of the earthquake. Despite the distance from home, volunteers are eager to contribute during the holiday. One resident who was grateful for the volunteers' support said that cleaning up alone had become overwhelming.

In an update to a previous story, on Friday the 26th, the assembly of Genkai Town in Saga Prefecture, home to the Genkai nuclear power plant, approved a petition for a first-stage survey to consider becoming a disposal site for high-level radioactive waste. Two other cities in Hokkaido volunteered to do the survey, but this was the first time a municipality adopted a survey petition. Local groups, including hotel operators and a disaster management council, submitted the petition. Japanese law requires a survey to select potential disposal sites and offers subsidies of up to twelve million dollars to participating cities.

Some assembly members worried that the town’s residents didn’t fully understand the issue, but others said they couldn’t just ignore the problem of nuclear waste piling up. The town mayor will make the final decision, but the governor of Saga Prefecture stated he has no plans to accept a disposal site in his prefecture.

Meanwhile, science took an exciting step forward as researchers at the Institute of Development, Aging, and Cancer successfully transplanted bioengineered lungs made from human cells into mice. Assistant Professor Takaya Suzuki at Tohoku University led the study, which involved removing all cells from mouse lungs while keeping certain fibers and membranes intact. The researchers then injected human cells to create lungs, including blood vessels, which they transplanted into other mice.

The researchers believed their mouse-scale lung bioengineering test could help lead to organ bioengineering for humans in the future, since mammals’ lungs are pretty much the same regardless of species.

That’s not all that science has in store. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced on Friday the 26th that they would launch their third H3 rocket on the 30th of June. They will launch the rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture. The rocket will carry the Earth observation satellite Daichi-four, developed jointly by the space agency and Mitsubishi Electric. Daichi-four will help with disaster assessment and keeping track of volcanic activity.

After facing a failed debut launch last year, the H3 succeeded in its second launch in February. It is scheduled to replace the H2A rocket, which is a type of rocket that Japan has been using since two thousand one. They plan to launch two more H2A this fiscal year before retiring this kind of rocket for good. The space agency aims to launch six H3 rockets every year.

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

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