JAPAN: Heatwave & more – 9th July 2024

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 9th of July twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Japan is in the midst of a severe heatwave that has led to record high temperatures, such as Shizuoka City, where it hit forty degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday the 7th, the highest ever recorded temperature in the city. The Meteorological Agency and the Environment Ministry issued heatstroke alerts for twenty-four prefectures from the Kanto region in central Japan to Okinawa in the south. They encourage people to use air conditioners and to stay hydrated even if they aren’t feeling thirsty.

Officials also said to keep an eye on elderly relatives and children since they are most sensitive to the heat. Many elderly people across the country died of heatstroke, including one ninety-six-year-old man in Bungo-ono City, Oita Prefecture, in southern Japan, whose family found him collapsed in his yard.

In political news, Yuriko Koike won her third term as Tokyo’s governor during the election on Sunday the 7th. Koike is a former defense minister and became the first woman governor in Tokyo in twenty sixteen. After winning, Koike spoke to her supporters about the city’s challenges, such as rising prices and a declining birthrate. She said that current industries have a lot of difficulties because of how the digital landscape has changed the way many businesses work. She also said she would expand free childcare and work to empower women so that Japan can improve its gender equality, as it is very poor compared to other countries.

The most recent election had fifty-five candidates competing for the governor’s seat, which is a new record for Tokyo.

In an update on a story from our previous show, on Thursday the 4th, police arrested a US Marine for suspected groping of women in Okinawa. This marks the third case in recent months of US military personnel sexually assaulting Japanese residents in the prefecture.

Many criticized police and the US military for not immediately telling Okinawa officials about the incidents and instead only telling the central government. So Yoshimasa Hayashi, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, said that central and local governments would start using a more efficient information-sharing system. Denny Tamaki, Okinawa’s Governor, said he was happy about the changes, even though they should have been put into place much earlier. Rahm Emanuel, US Ambassador to Japan, said Washington would propose new steps to improve military conduct by the end of the month.

Speaking of sexual violence, a recent survey found that ten percent of young people aged from sixteen to twenty-nine have been groped or sexually assaulted in public. However, eighty percent of victims don't report the crime to the police.

The survey found that assaults mostly happened between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., with sixty-three percent taking place on trains. Most people said they didn’t report the attacks because they just didn’t want to rock the boat, risk their attacker retaliating, or didn’t think it was report-worthy. Many just wanted to get back to their normal lives.

In international news, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO and Indo-Pacific partners, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, will attend a summit meeting in the US on Thursday the 11th. At the summit, they will talk about issues like cyberattacks, disinformation, and new technologies like AI.

Fumio Kishida, the Japanese Prime Minister, will attend and likely try to strengthen ties with NATO to promote peace and stability in Asia. He believes that Europe and Asia need to cooperate, especially considering how closely Russia and China are working together.

After the summit, Kishida will go to Germany to meet Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor. He plans to talk about creating supply chains for key minerals so that Japan doesn’t have to rely on China for all its resource trading.

Meanwhile, the defense ministry found out that quite a few Maritime Self-Defense Force or MSDF members have been handling confidential information that they don’t have security clearance for. The information includes secrets that are important to national defense, diplomacy, and security.

The issue started in April when the ministry found out that an MSDF destroyer captain had assigned members — who hadn’t been given proper security clearance — to jobs where they would need to handle confidential information. The ministry suspended the captain, but when they investigated, they found that over ten other ships out of the sixty in the MSDF had similar practices. Once the investigation is done, the ministry will likely punish all the senior MSDF officials involved.

After all this came out, Ryo Sakai, the MSDF Chief of Staff, said he plans to resign.

That’s not the MSDF’s only issue. NHK, a national broadcast network, recently found out that some MSDF members have been fraudulently getting money reserved for diving training and duty.

MSDF members get a maximum of 10,000 yen or sixty dollars per hour for diving, depending on how deep underwater they go. However, the defense ministry found out that in the past several years, some members claimed diving benefits without actually diving. The ministry said the total fraudulent claims amounted to tens of millions of yen or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but did not give an exact amount.

Once the investigation is finished, the MSDF will likely punish the personnel involved and demand repayment.

In other news, Monday the 8th was the 2nd anniversary of the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The Nara Prefecture branch of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party set up a tent for condolence flowers on Sunday the 7th near where he was shot. Abe had been giving a campaign speech at the time.

Police arrested Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who shot him, for homicide and illegal possession of weapons, among other charges. They have mostly finished sorting through the evidence, but since the lawyers in charge of the case have not yet finished discussing technical legal details, the trial will probably be held in twenty twenty-five or later.

Next up, some business updates, Teikoku Databank found that a record number of companies declared bankruptcy in the first half of twenty twenty-four, and 182 went under because of labor shortages, which is seventy-two more than last year. Forty percent of the bankruptcies were in the construction and logistics industries, which was the majority of companies going out of business. New strict overtime laws likely made it harder for the companies to keep running because they couldn’t find enough people to work for them, or overwork current employees.

About eighty percent of the failed businesses had fewer than ten employees. To attract workers, more companies are offering higher pay.

That higher pay isn’t just for new employees, either. Many companies gave workers a pay increase in May, but because of inflation, real wages, which are adjusted according to inflation, fell for the twenty-sixth month in a row, the longest period of decline since nineteen ninety-one. The labor ministry reported a one-point-four percent year-on-year decline in real wages.

The ministry said that total average pay, including overtime, increased by almost two percent to 297,000 yen or 1,800 dollars per month, marking twenty-nine months of continuous growth.

And to close this edition, Kyoto bus drivers will soon start passing out pamphlets to combat the rise of foreign tourists accidentally not paying bus fares.

The main issue is that sometimes foreign tourists attempt to pay bus fares with an IC card, which is rechargeable prepaid card, when it doesn't have enough money on it. When this happens, the bus's card machine beeps. However, many times, tourists don't understand what the beep means, and the bus driver's explanation because they don’t speak Japanese. They often get off the bus without paying because the driver doesn’t want to make the bus late.

Since changing how the machine works or how people get on or off would be too difficult, Kyoto buses plan to pass out pamphlets with explanations in multiple languages to fix the problem.

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

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Mata ne!