JAPAN: Stop North Korea & more – 27th Feb 2024

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 27th of February twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Thursday the 22nd, Rio de Janeiro hosted the Group of Twenty foreign ministers' meeting. Foreign ministers of the US, South Korea, and Japan attended and reaffirmed their commitment to getting North Korea to put a stop to its nuclear weapons program.

One of the biggest things the foreign ministers were worried about was that North Korea started helping Russia by sending them weapons, ammo, and the like.

The ministers also talked about what they could do to help maintain peace in the Taiwan Strait in light of China's increased maritime activities.

On that note, Japan is taking measures to bolster fellow Pacific Island nations’ naval security, such as teaching the Philippine Coast Guard how to gather evidence from ship collisions. On Thursday, the 22nd, the Japanese Coast Guard taught around thirty Philippine officials techniques for measuring damage, finding evidence, and collecting paint residue from other ships.

Recently, Philippine ships have had several run-ins with Chinese ships because of territorial disputes. Sometimes ships have literally run into each other or gotten in one another's way. The new training should help Philippine authorities handle such situations and other sea-bound criminal investigations better.

In other international news, South Korea issued a statement on Thursday the 22nd protesting Takeshima Day in Japan. Every year on the 22nd of February, Matsue City, located in the western Shimane Prefecture, holds a ceremony celebrating the day in nineteen oh five when the islets, the Liancourt Rocks, officially became a part of Japan. This year, over 320 people attended the Takeshima Day ceremony and the Shimane governor made a speech saying that South Korea is illegally occupying the islets.

South Korea’s foreign ministry lodged a protest at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul and said the islets belong to Korea. They demanded that Japan stop hosting Takeshima Day. The South Korean foreign minister also spoke directly to his Japanese counterpart and said it wasn’t right for Japan to host such an event.

In an update to a previous story, the Tokyo District Court began a hearing on Thursday the 22nd to decide whether they should strip the Unification Church of its legal status as a religious organization. The education and culture ministry filed a motion to get rid of the church’s religious status back in October because it believed that the church pressured members to donate by exploiting their fears for the future.

The church is based in South Korea, so Tomihiro Tanaka, the leader of its Japanese branch, and the church’s lawyers attended the hearing. They defended the church by saying they only collected donations as part of normal religious activities and asked the court for a fair judgment. They also said that since the culture ministry spent a year interviewing ex-members and gathering evidence, they should also get a year to form a counter-argument. The court has yet to issue its judgment.

Moving on to domestic news, on Saturday the 24th, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited evacuation centers and local businesses in the Noto region, which were damaged by a massive earthquake on New Year’s Day. During his visit, he said that he wanted to set aside an additional 100 billion yen or 660 million dollars to help rebuild the area, and hoped to make a firm decision by next week based on the government’s reserve fund.

Part of the new budget would give up to 3 million yen or 20,000 dollars to people rebuilding their homes. The original budget only gave such aid to elderly people. The new budget would also help local traditional lacquerware businesses that the earthquake hit hard. He even wants the government to fully fund a temporary workshop for public use that will open in April.

Those aren’t the government's only plans. Some officials are hoping to expand the specified skilled worker program to include auto transportation, railroad, forestry, and timber. The skilled worker program makes it easier for foreigners to come to Japan and work in certain industries. Currently, it covers twelve fields, including nursing care, construction, and agriculture.

Officials want to expand the program because there has been a severe labor shortage, especially for jobs like train operators, station staff, and bus, taxi, and truck drivers. Officials made the proposal to the Cabinet on Thursday the 22nd. It will likely be approved at a meeting next month and mark the first time the government has expanded the skilled worker program.

Speaking of work, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, opened its first factory in Japan on Saturday the 24th, in Kumamoto prefecture. TSMC partnered with Sony Group, Denso, and Toyota Motor to operate the factory, so Japan’s Economy Minister and higher-ups from all of those companies attended the opening ceremony.

The factory will start production later this year, and the companies have already announced plans to open a second factory. Together, they have invested over twenty billion dollars into this venture and have received a lot of government subsidies, mainly because many see this as a chance to boost Japan's semiconductor industry, which will help improve the country’s economy overall.

Chips aren’t the only cool new tech coming. SoftBank and Nvidia recently announced at a mobile tech event in Spain that they would use cell towers to process data for AI. The two companies will make a group called the AI-RAN Alliance, where RAN stands for radio access network. Their hope is to make it so people don’t have to rely on big data centers, which would improve AI services on smartphones and AI-powered robots. Eleven other groups, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Samsung Electronics, will be participating.

That’s not all going on in the business world. On Monday the 26th, the Tokyo District Court fined major sushi chain Kappa Sushi thirty million yen or 200,000 dollars for using data that Koki Tanabe, its former president, had stolen from Hamasushi, its competitor. Tanabe stole information about Hamasushi’s supplier payments, which the company and Hideaki Otomo, its former senior official, then used. The court gave Tanabe a suspended prison sentence after he pled guilty.

The defendants said that the data didn’t have any business secrets and they weren’t going to make any money illegally. However, the judge ruled that they were business secrets and sent Otomo to jail for two and a half years.

Hamasushi is very happy with the ruling, but Kappa Create, the company that owns Kappa Sushi, hasn’t made an official response yet.

Meanwhile in health, pharmacies in Japan recently started selling Wegovy, a new treatment drug for obesity. A Danish pharmaceutical company developed Wegovy a few years back, and the Japanese government approved it as a treatment for obesity last year. Health insurance covers Wegovy for those with obesity-related health issues like high blood pressure. Patients using the drug need to inject it themselves into their belly.

Some members of the public are worried that people might try to misuse the drug as a shortcut for dieting, so the health ministry put out guidelines on how it should and shouldn’t be used. They also emphasized that it can have side effects.

In sports news, the Japan Sumo Association demoted former grand champion Hakuho, on Friday the 23rd for allowing wrestler Hokuseiho to physically abuse younger fighters in his stable. Hokuseiho admitted to slapping two junior wrestlers and hitting them with a broom. After his confession, Hokuseiho retired from sumo.

The association said that as the stable master, Hakuho should have reported the abuse. They cut his pay and demoted him by two ranks to the lowest possible for sumo elders, and he will now be known as sumo elder Miyagino.

A stablemaster from another group will act as chief of the Miyagino stable for the upcoming Spring Grand Sumo Tournament and the foreseeable future after that. Depending on Hokuho’s behavior, the association may retrain him as a stable master.

Aaaaand that’s it for this week.

Do you know that besides the Japan Update, we also do others? Our latest ones are the Arctic Update, about the area north of the Arctic Circle, the Ocean Update, about the 70% of the earth covered in salt water, and the Multilateral Update about all the world's major multilateral institutions. The other ones are all country updates, we have a selection of countries from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. Check roroshok.com/updates to see the full list. We left the link in the show notes as well.

Mata Ne!