JAPAN: Fake rescue requests & more – 6th Aug 2024

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 6th of August twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Wednesday the 31st of July, Masato Kanda, a former top currency diplomat, retired from his position as the vice finance minister for international affairs. Atsushi Mimura succeeded him as the new vice finance minister.

That same day, the Chief Cabinet Secretary announced that Kanda would become a special adviser to the Cabinet starting Thursday the 1st. As an adviser, he will help the prime minister make informed decisions about international financial trends.

In other political news, Tokyo prosecutors searched the offices and home of Megumi Hirose, a Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker in Iwate Prefecture, on Tuesday the 30th. They suspected that Hirose was fraudulently paying a salary to the wife of an aide after a weekly magazine said that even though Hirose hired the aide’s wife and paid her a salary, the wife didn’t actually do any work.

Hirose denied the allegations, saying the wife worked remotely during weekdays and went to the office on weekends. She also said that the wife worked as a chauffeur sometimes, driving Hirose to where she needed to go.

Japan will need all the financial advice it can get, considering the Nikkei Stock Average had a record drop of over 4,000 points on Monday the 5th, even bigger than the infamous Black Monday crash of nineteen eighty-seven. This followed an over 3,000-point loss in the prior two trading days.

However, right as trading began on Tuesday the 6th, the Nikkei Stock Average went right back up by over 3,000 points, beating the previous record gain within a single day of 2,677 points in nineteen ninety.

The sudden drop and subsequent rise came right after the US released its job data, which was weaker than expected and made traders afraid that the US economy was slowing. The yen also hit 142 against the dollar, its highest point in seven months.

Many investors are selling the US dollar and buying the yen, hoping the interest-rate gap between Japan and the US will narrow.

Moving on, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology recently said that around 10% of Noto Peninsula earthquake rescue requests on Twitter made on New Year’s Day were fake.

The institute said there were over a thousand tweets asking for help, and 104 were fake. Some of the posts included the name of nonexistent places, while others sounded realistic enough that police followed up, but found nothing when they arrived at the scene, wasting precious time during a natural disaster. The institute believes that the people who made the fake requests were trying to get online revenue from the views.

Police found and arrested at least one person, a twenty-five-year-old man from Saitama Prefecture, who posted fake requests. Reo Kimura, a university professor, said rescue workers need guidelines to manage social media misinformation.

Speaking of Twitter, many Twitter users heavily criticized Shimamura Co., a clothing company, after they advertised a new line of baby clothes decorated with lines such as, “Dad doesn’t take care of me at all.”

Shimamura deleted its original Twitter post and pulled the baby clothes on Tuesday the 30th, less than twenty-four hours after first posting it. The company then posted an apology in their Twitter bio and said they didn’t mean to discriminate against men.

They’re not the only ones who need to apologize. On Wednesday the 31st, an Osaka court found that a metalworking company was at fault for a foreign worker’s accident after failing to give him proper safety training.

In twenty fifteen, the worker, a forty-two-year-old from Vietnam, had a workplace accident where his finger got caught in a machine and he ended up with a long-term disability. The company had given him safety training materials in Japanese, but he could not read them and barely spoke Japanese.

The judge said the company should have given the worker training material in his native language, especially since it was obvious he didn’t understand the training they’d given him. The court also said that the company didn’t properly manage the machine’s safety device, which might have prevented the accident.

Speaking of accidents, we have an update to a story last year with the Defense Ministry creating enhanced safety measures for its seventeen Osprey aircraft. These measures followed a fatal crash of one of the US military’s Ospreys in November twenty twenty-three. The US Air Force investigated and found that a gearbox failure and the pilot’s decision to fly despite multiple warnings caused the crash. The report also said that personnel didn’t have enough information about safety risks.

To increase safety for Japan’s Ospreys, the defense ministry will do more gearbox maintenance, revise the flight manual to tell pilots to land quickly if warning lights turn on, make sure flight training routes are close to emergency landing airports, and train personnel with the updated rules.

Meanwhile, on Monday the 5th, top diplomats from Japan, the US, Australia, and India, met in Tokyo to discuss maritime security and cybersecurity in the Asia-Pacific region. They talked about military activity in disputed areas of the South China Sea, but didn’t directly name China.

The four nations agreed on deals to counter cyberattacks, ensure maritime security, and fight against disinformation, while giving more support to Southeast Asia and Pacific island nations. One initiative included creating a secure telecommunications network in Palau, a small island nation east of the Philippines, and helping the Philippines and India with cybersecurity.

This meeting followed a US-Japan security meeting, where they talked about military cooperation and specifically mentioned China as a strategic challenge.

Moving onto sports, the Olympic games continue, and Japan won bronze in women’s fencing on Thursday the 1st. This was the first time Japan’s women’s fencing team won in the Olympics. Just a few days later on Sunday the 4th, the men’s team won gold.

In golf, Hideki Matsuyama won bronze, becoming the first Japanese person to get an Olympic medal in the men’s golf category.

The weather is breaking a different sort of record. On Thursday the 1st, the Meteorological Agency said that last month was the hottest July since records began over a century ago. The average temperature was over two degrees Celsius or four degrees Fahrenheit than normal. According to the disaster management agency, heatstroke has killed at least fifty-nine people since April.

Because of the intense heat, the Japan High School Baseball Federation said on Friday the 2nd that they are putting together a consulting group to see if they can shorten games from nine innings to seven so that high schoolers don’t have to be out in the heat for so long. The group will figure out the pros and cons of using a seven-inning system for national championships and regional tournaments and will report to the federation’s board meeting in December.

The federation has already put in some measures to help players in the heat, such as introducing breaks between innings and tie-breakers at the end so that games don’t run too long.

Some look for a break from the heat by attending festivals, such as the Nara Tokae Lantern Festival, which runs from Monday the 5th until Wednesday the 14th in Nara City.

In Nara, many different temples and shrines, such as Todaiji Temple and Kasuga Shrine, host fire festivals throughout the beginning of August. In the spirit of the festivities, many people light lanterns and place them on festival grounds around the city. You can see the lanterns for free or you can go to Nara Park and buy your own paper lantern for 500 yen, which is just under four dollars.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Mata Ne!