JAPAN: Nuclear plant leak & more – 13th Feb 2024

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 13th of February twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Police in Yamaguchi Prefecture, in western Japan, suspect that someone stole over a hundred copper cables from rail tracks in the area. West Japan Railway Company found out the copper cables, known as rail bonds, were missing from Ajisu Station on the JR Ube Line and the JR Sanyo Line in Ube City on Wednesday the 7th and Thursday the 8th. These rail bonds conduct electrical currents through the tracks to signals, so trains can’t run without them. The train operators suspended services to do repair work.

Rail bonds are several centimeters or roughly an inch thick, so the railway company believes that the suspects must have cut them with a very sharp tool. Police are still trying to figure out who’s behind the theft.

Meanwhile, operators at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant found an outdoor vent leaking radioactive water on Wednesday the 7th. They found the leak during an inspection and believe the workers accidentally left a valve open when they were washing away the untreated water. Around six tons of water leaked in total, but none of it got outside the nuclear plant’s grounds. The plant’s operator stopped the leak and recovered both the water and the dirt it soaked into to ensure that the leak wouldn’t cause any harm to the environment outside the plant.

In international news, special envoy Julie Turner began an eleven-day trip to Japan and South Korea on Monday the 12th to speak about North Korean human rights issues. In Japan, she will talk to officials about North Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals forty years ago. In South Korea, she’ll focus more on Pyongyang’s human rights violations of its own citizens and how to help those in North Korea.

The trip marks the tenth anniversary of the UN Commission’s inquiry on human rights in North Korea that acknowledged the abductions of Japanese and other foreign nationals and the North Korean political prison camps. The US said that they want Turner’s trip to emphasize their dedication to helping human rights in North Korea.

North Korea isn’t Japan’s only source of anxiety. Thanks to China’s increased activity in the South China Sea, Japan is creating a ten-year plan to support the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, hoping to make allies with other Pacific Island nations to strengthen maritime security in the region.

The Japanese government has already conducted on-site surveys in the Philippines and Indonesia, with similar activities planned for Malaysia and Vietnam. They’ve provided drones, radar systems, and patrol boats to these regions and have also done things like joint rescue drills.

Part of the reason for Japan’s eagerness to improve naval security is that China made a law three years ago that allows the Chinese Coast Guard to use force in the region.

Moving on to business news, the major supermarket chain Ito-Yokado is closing seventeen stores across the country, including all outlets in Hokkaido. The company has had net losses for the past three years, so they’re planning on closing thirty-three stores by February twenty twenty-six and focusing all their energy on Tokyo.

To lessen the impact, Ito-Yokado plans to transfer the operations of over half the stores to other supermarkets. That way, there won’t be as many job losses since most new operators will want to re-employ the old employees.

It’s a shame that a decent supermarket is forced to shut some of its doors when a company involved in corruption like Daihatsu Motor is doing just fine. Even after the government found out that Daihatsu falsified safety tests for many of its vehicles, all they made the motor company do was submit a list of ways they would improve to prevent future corruption.

Daihatsu’s president delivered the list to the transport ministry on Friday the 9th. The list included things like extending the vehicles’ development period so employees wouldn’t feel pressured to bend the rules, having more staff in legal affairs and certifications so that anything illegal would be harder to hide, and reorganizing management.

Daihatsu’s domestic plants have been suspended for the past several weeks, but they returned to making two types of cars on Monday the 12th. On the 26th of February, they will resume production of ten more car models.

Moving on to entertainment, the music world experienced a great loss last week. On Tuesday the 6th, world-renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa died due to heart failure at the age of eighty-eight. He was Japanese but born in northeastern China. He went to grade school in Tokyo, where he entered the Toho Gakuen School of Music. As an adult, he traveled all around the world and became the music director for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Vienna State Opera.

Many orchestras and fellow conductors took a moment to mourn Ozawa’s passing, posting on social media and elsewhere offering condolences to his family and reminiscing on his many contributions to the music world.

On a lighter note, some sumo wrestlers made their own contribution to the music world. On Saturday the 10th, news network NHK held a charity sumo event with 4,300 people at Tokyo’s Ryogoku Kokugikan arena, where famous sumo wrestlers came on stage and sang.

In the past month, the charity raised money to buy six vehicles to give to welfare organizations in the areas hit by the Noto Peninsula earthquake. Before the singing started, sumo wrestler Endo handed the keys to the six vehicles off to a welfare organization representative. Many applauded, but fans were even more excited by their favorite wrestlers showing off their singing chops.

In other news, the Lunar New Year holidays have begun in China and Hong Kong, and now that Beijing has lifted a ban on group tours to Japan and other countries, many tourists started flooding into Tokyo on Saturday the 10th. China put the ban in place at the beginning of the pandemic and lifted it in August twenty twenty-three, so this is the first time in several years that many Chinese people have been able to travel internationally for the Lunar New Year.

Some places, such as Chinatown in Kobe City in western Japan, started celebrating the Lunar New Year with festivals and fireworks.

While Chinatown launched fireworks, Major League Baseball teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers launched their spring training on Friday the 9th. The Dodgers have two Japanese players preparing for the new season: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The season will open next month and will be held for the first time in South Korea.

The Dodgers will compete against the San Diego Padres on the 20th and 21st of March. Funnily enough, the Padres also got a new Japanese player, Yuki Matsui, in December.

Then, in a follow-up to a previous story, the Supreme Court of Japan rejected lawmaker Mio Sugita’s appeal. She now has no choice but to pay damages to journalist Shiori Ito for liking defamatory tweets about her back in twenty eighteen.

In her lawsuit, Ito claimed that Sugita liked those tweets and spread them to her large Twitter following. The Tokyo District Court initially dismissed Ito's claim, but the Tokyo High Court later ruled in her favor and ordered Sugita to pay damages. The Supreme Court upheld the high court's decision, concluding that Sugita's repeated "liking" of defamatory tweets was intended to harm Ito's reputation.

Sugita has a reputation for making controversial comments, including derogatory statements against Korean residents of Japan and the LGBTQ+ community.

Finally, if you need something to cheer you up after a dreary news cycle, consider heading to Mt. Hodo’s Plum Blossom Festival, held at the top of Mt. Hodo in Nagatoro City, Saitama Prefecture, from the 23rd of February until the 17th of March. The Nagatoro Tourism Association hosts many special events so that travelers can join in fun activities while admiring the plum blossoms. The Nagatoro Station is the closest train station and is about a twenty-minute walk to the plum blossom grove.

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

Last week we asked you to fill in a survey to get to know you and we got quite a few replies, thank you so so much ! We are very excited, tons of great ideas! We’ll be sharing the link to the survey one more time this week in case you didn’t see it. All respondents will be entered in a lottery to win a cruise in the Mediterranean… just kidding, it's in the South Pacific, but we would love to hear from you! Don’t be shy!

Mata Ne!