JAPAN: Violating Workers’ Rights & more – 25th Jun 2024

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 25th of June twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Tuesday, the 18th, the US National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint saying that Honda Motors violated workers' rights by trying to stop employees from unionizing at its factory in Indiana, the US. According to the complaint, Honda instructed workers to remove union stickers from the United Auto Workers or UAW from their helmets and threatened union supporters with disciplinary action. The board will hold a hearing in October.

Honda denied the allegations and said the UAW had filed this kind of complaint before to get publicity.

The UAW got pay raises for its union members from three major carmakers last year. It also encourages workers at foreign auto plants in the US to unionize.

Speaking of work, on Friday the 21st, following a bill to create a new training program for foreign workers, the government introduced new measures to improve living and working conditions for foreign nationals. The program aims to give trainees specified skilled workers status after they’ve worked in Japan for three years.

Officials said that foreign trainees need support in studying Japanese before they arrive and are encouraging companies to help foreign employees with their language skills.

Yoshimasa Hayashi, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, said he hoped to create a society where Japanese and foreign nationals could live side by side respectfully and safely. He said officials had to make Japan's workplaces foreigner-friendly.

Also on Friday, the Lower House of Japan's Diet rejected a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Cabinet. The Constitutional Democratic Party or CDP criticized Kishida's political reform efforts and called for his resignation or a snap election.

Kenta Izumi, the CDP President, argued that Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party (or LDP) still hadn’t properly resolved the unreported funds issue from last year.

The CDP, the Democratic Party for the People, the Japan Innovation Party, and the Japanese Communist Party supported the motion. The LDP, which holds over half of the Lower House seats, and the Justice Party, or Komeito, opposed it.

More on politics, on Saturday the 22nd, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police warned the leader of a political group that putting inappropriate ads on a campaign board was against advertising laws for adult businesses. The political group put up the boards for the Tokyo gubernatorial election. Police found twenty-four posters that featured the name of an adult entertainment shop in Shibuya Ward. The group has since replaced the posters.

A similar incident happened on Thursday the 20th when another electoral candidate put up campaign boards with a picture of a nearly-naked woman. The police also warned him that such images violate regulations.

In international news, on Monday the 24th, a man with a knife attacked a bus carrying students from a Japanese school in Suzhou City, China. He injured a Japanese mother, her child, and a Chinese bus attendant. The police arrested the suspect but they don’t know why he attacked the bus yet.

Japanese schools in the country are now working on better security measures. The Japanese school in Suzhou closed on Tuesday the 25th, while schools in Beijing, Shanghai, and other areas are open, but on high alert.

The Japanese Consulate-General in Shanghai asked local authorities to make sure there are no more attacks and to support the victims.

The Cabinet is also looking to care for children. On Friday the 21st, it approved its first white paper, which aims to promote child-related measures. It is a new annual report that combines three old annual reports concerning child policy.

The report highlighted measures such as expanding child allowances and introducing systems that allow daycares to take in children even if the parents aren’t working. The document also talked about successful child-related practices, such as efforts to fight against bullying and suicide in Nagano Prefecture and Kumamoto City. It also mentioned places like Kobe City, which sends social workers to help children who are taking care of family members.

The government hopes to use these practices nationwide.

On a related note, the health ministry said on Friday the 21st that it plans to create a new task force to develop the healthcare and nursing industries. They hope to make it easier for foreign patients to access Japan's medical technology, train foreign healthcare workers, and share Japan's experience with an aging society and universal health insurance system with other countries.

The task force will also look at international demand for Japanese medicine and medical technology. The ministry will request funding for these initiatives in the fiscal twenty twenty-five budget.

Since we mentioned technology, on Friday the 21st, the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Safety Commission gave level-four approval to a self-driving bus that runs on a public road near Haneda Airport. A Tokyo-based subsidiary of Softbank created the bus, which can carry up to ten passengers at speeds up to twelve kilometers or seven miles per hour.

The Safety Commission has five levels of approval for self-driving technology. At four, the law doesn’t require that the vehicle has a human driver as long as it keeps to a certain speed and route and runs only in good weather. Five would mean no limitations on routes. Four is the highest level of approval the Safety Commission has given to a private company.

The government hopes to implement fully autonomous driving at fifty locations by twenty twenty-five.

Maybe one day there will be a self-driving bus going to Mount Fuji. Until then, the Fujisan World Cultural Heritage Council released a calendar to help people avoid crowded days during the upcoming summer hiking season in July. The council includes officials from Yamanashi and Shizuoka Prefectures, who made the calendar based on the most crowded days last year.

They expect the busiest days to be on weekends and during the summer holidays between the 7th and 18th of August. The council also made a video advising climbers to avoid the peak between 3 a.m. and dawn, saying that hikers can enjoy the sunrise from any mountain hut on Mount Fuji's Yamanashi side.

In science news, researchers from the University of Tokyo and the Nippon Foundation held a news conference on Friday the 21st to announce they’ve discovered huge pockets of mineral resources called nodules in the Pacific Ocean. The researchers found the nodules off Minamitorishima Island in Japan's exclusive economic zone at a depth of 5,500 meters or three miles. They contain valuable metals like iron, manganese, nickel, and cobalt, which are crucial for electric vehicle batteries. The team estimated the nodules had about 610,000 tons of cobalt, which is enough to last Japan for about seventy-five years, and 740,000 tons of nickel, which would last eleven years.

The research team is planning to work with an overseas firm to harvest 2,500 tons of nodules daily starting next year. The overall cost will be around forty-four to fifty million dollars. It will be Japan's first major undersea mineral resource extraction effort.

Finally, Navitime Japan, a Tokyo-based IT firm, conducted a survey that found that many foreign tourists are traveling to lesser-known places in Japan. Minamiashigara City in Kanagawa Prefecture had the biggest increase in visitors, with thirty-two times more visitors in spring twenty twenty-four than in twenty twenty-three. Katsuyama City in Fukui Prefecture came second with twenty-four times more visitors — most of them went to see the huge Buddha statue in the city.

Navitime said that social media posts spread the word about lesser-known places, which helped to attract more tourists.

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

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Mata Ne!