JAPAN: Factions Caught & more – 23rd Jan 2024

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 23rd of January twenty twenty-four A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Ever since prosecutors discovered that factions in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party were underreporting and mishandling political funds, a good chunk of the party has pretty much self-destructed. Three of the party’s five factions, Abe, Nikai, and Kishida, all created slush funds taken from fundraising profits and then gave their members kickbacks. The Abe Faction was the worst offender, secreting away around 600 million yen or four million dollars over five years. Nikai was second, keeping nearly one and a half million dollars off the books.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida led the Kishida faction until he jumped ship last month after prosecutors started looking into everyone’s political funds reports. He said that he wanted to keep a neutral stance, but prosecutors recently found out that Kishida’s former treasurer failed to report thirty million yen or 200,000 dollars over three years. On Thursday the 18th, Kishida said it was just a clerical error.

Since then, Tokyo prosecutors have indicted eight more lawmakers who were key in breaking the political funds control law, including Kishida’s ex-treasurer. Since these were indictments, not arrests, the lawmakers will probably not face jail time. Instead, a summary court will fine them.

On Friday, the 19th, all three factions announced that they were going to disband. Hiroshi Moriyama, leader of Kinmirai Seiji Kenkyukai, one of the two remaining factions, held a press conference on Saturday the 20th in western Japan. He apologized for the slush fund mess but defended his faction, which prosecutors haven’t indicted.

Political reform will likely be a big topic at the next Diet session, which starts on Friday the 26th.

The other big topic on the table is the Noto Peninsula earthquake. 232 people are dead and twenty-two are missing. Over 15,000 people in Ishikawa Prefecture are still staying in shelters.

It’s been especially difficult because the harsh weather and snowfall make diseases spread a lot more easily, including COVID. Ishikawa officials said that for ten days in a row, they recorded over 100 cases of infectious diseases.

As of Sunday the 21st, officials have found that the earthquake damaged more than 34,000 houses, and 49,000 houses still don’t have running water.

Researchers also found land upheavals of seven feet (or two meters) in some places along Noto Peninsula’s northern coast. That is in addition to the upheavals of over thirteen feet (or four meters) found in Wajima City, Ishikawa. They said that studying the shift would help scientists to better understand earthquakes around active seabed faults like Noto.

Not only that, but the earthquake also damaged the Shika Nuclear Power Plant in Ishikawa Prefecture, disrupting the power supply. Shika hasn’t been in operation since twenty eleven, but decommissioning a nuclear plant to make sure that it’s safe typically takes decades. The operator Hokuriku Electric Power Company said the damage wouldn’t cause any public safety issues, but it would take over six months to repair.

In a strange coincidence, the Takahama Nuclear Power Plant, located in Fukui, the prefecture directly south of Ishikawa, also had some problems, but no one knows what caused them. On Sunday the 21st, operators found steam leaking from a pipe at one of the plant’s reactors, and on Monday the 22nd, they found a water leak. There were no radiation leaks, but they are turning down the power output while they find out exactly what caused the leaks.

It may have something to do with the Takahama plant being fifty years old, making it the oldest still-working nuclear reactor in Japan. It had been out of commission for twelve years due to laws that said that nuclear plants had to be shut down after a set period of time, but when the laws changed last year, the operator, Kansai Electric Power Company, put Takahama back to work.

Moving on, Japan had a groundbreaking moment in science. On Saturday the 20th, Japan became the fifth country in world history to successfully land an unmanned probe on the moon. Officials at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA nicknamed the probe Smart Lander for Investigating Moon or SLIM.

There wasn’t any video footage of the landing, but space enthusiasts watched the probe’s altitude countdown to zero at a public viewing center in Sagamihara City. The probe managed to land in its 300-foot target or 100-meter, which is very precise compared to other country’s moon landings.

In light of North Korea’s most recent missile launch, on Thursday the 18th, diplomats from Japan, the US, and South Korea met in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. They agreed to stay strong against North Korea’s recent threats. The diplomats urged North Korea to pay more mind to international security resolutions. They also expressed concern over North Korea's growing military cooperation with Russia. They said they’d work with the UN Security Council to address these issues.

While we’re on the subject of international issues, China’s continued import ban on Japan’s seafood has prompted Japanese companies to look to other countries to process seafood products, such as scallops. The Japan External Trade Organization said that it’s risky for Japan to rely on just one country for its supply chain and that it’s important to spread out as much as possible.

To help this along, the organization arranged an event on Monday the 22nd in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi. There, officials from twelve Japanese seafood processing and trading firms met with Vietnamese manufacturers and toured a processing facility.

One official said that he wanted to choose a partner that could either use the seafood products in their country or reliably process and export them to a third party.

In domestic news, Nagoya City University held an international symposium on Sunday the 21st on the declining birthrate and child populations. It took place in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, and included experts on population issues, an official from Japan’s Children and Families Agencies, and non-profit organizations geared toward parenting.

One expert pointed out that governments giving financial assistance to families with young children hasn’t seemed to help much. He said that people should stop seeing the issue as a problem to be solved and more as a chance to change things about society that make child-rearing hard, like strict gender roles and work culture.

Speaking of changing gender roles, the Japanese Communist Party appointed Tomoko Tamura as its new leader on Thursday the 18th. It was the first time in the party's 102-year history that they had a woman in charge. Tamura, aged fifty-eight, has been a member of the Upper House since twenty ten. Many see her appointment as part of the party's efforts to gain more public support. Kazuo Shii, the Communist Party’s former leader, became the Central Committee chair. The party said they would try to increase their seats in the next Lower House election.

Political parties aren’t the only ones choosing woman leaders. On Wednesday the 17th, Japan Airlines announced that Mitsuko Tottori, formerly a flight attendant and currently in senior management, will become the airline’s new president on the 1st of April.

Tottori became a flight attendant for Japan Airlines in nineteen eighty-five, the same year that a flight crashed and killed over 500 people aboard. She referenced this in a press conference and said that she would work to ensure flight safety. She likely brought it up to reassure people since earlier this month, a Japan Airlines flight collided with a Coast Guard plane.

Closing with business news, clothing company Uniqlo recently sued its Chinese competitor Shein for copying a shoulder bag design. Uniqlo filed the lawsuit on the 28th of December at the Tokyo District Court. Shein has since said that it respects intellectual property rights and is taking the claims seriously.

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

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Mata Ne!