Officials Taking Kickbacks & more – 19th Dec 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 19th of December twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Thursday the 14th, four high-up government officials resigned after the media exposed them for taking kickbacks from unreported political funds. Later that day, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida appointed new officials for the positions of Chief Cabinet Secretary, Economy and Industry Minister, Agriculture Minister, and Internal Affairs Minister. The new officials do not belong to the Liberal Democratic Party’s Abe Faction, which is the faction that seemed to be most involved in underreporting funds and giving kickbacks to its members.

Ten other lawmakers also put in their resignations, and Kishida said that he’ll decide on their replacements over the next few days. He also said that he would work hard to restore public trust.

Kishida’s move was called into question. Younger people didn’t feel like anything would change because all they were doing was replacing officials with more old dudes instead of getting in fresh faces or making meaningful changes.

Meanwhile, Tokyo prosecutors are still investigating the situation. So far, they have questioned accountants from the Abe and Nikai factions, who confessed to not reporting revenue from fundraisers. Other sources said that the prosecutors might raid the offices related to the two factions of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Some secretaries of the lawmakers have also come forward and said that they used to report the kickbacks as income but stopped when the faction said that the kickbacks were political activity funds and didn’t need to be reported. This was a lie, but the secretaries didn’t question it.

Many suspect that the Abe Faction regularly didn’t report all of their fundraising money, and then poured that money into a slush fund that paid kickbacks to members who exceeded their quota selling tickets to fundraisers.

If that weren’t enough hubbub for one week, North Korea launched two ballistic missiles, one on Sunday the 17th and another on Monday the 18th. Both fell into the Sea of Japan outside of Japan’s exclusive economic zone, and the defense ministry said that no Japanese vessels or aircraft were damaged. This marked the twentieth time this year that North Korea launched either a ballistic missile or an object using ballistic missile technology.

The North Korean defense ministry issued a statement that implied they launched the missile because they were protesting against a deal between the US and South Korea. On Friday the 15th, the two countries agreed to work together to counter North Korea’s nuclear program. Japan lodged a protest with North Korea for violating a UN Security Council resolution.

While that was going on, Kishida met with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, in Tokyo for a three-day summit starting on Saturday the 16th. This meeting marked fifty years of friendship between Japan and ASEAN, and Kishida said that mutual trust was crucial to keeping relations strong. He promised to work together with the other nations to strengthen the global economy and keep the Southeast Asian region safe and secure. Kishida’s plans include encouraging foreign worker exchange, taking steps against climate change, and supporting the production of next-generation vehicles. He also hoped to promote cooperation in terms of defense, especially with China’s increased naval presence in other countries’ territorial waters.

Yoshimasa Hayashi, the new Chief Cabinet Secretary and Kishida’s new right-hand man, told the public that the government would focus on understanding the political funds' misuse, identifying the causes, and making specific plans to prevent it from happening again. He also said they’d keep working hard on budget development and tax reform plans for the next fiscal year.

On Friday the 15th, one day after he got his new position, he promised to get North Korea to return the Japanese nationals they abducted in the seventies and eighties. He expressed regret that none of the abductees have returned since the five individuals that were repatriated twenty-one years ago. He emphasized the urgency of the matter since many of the abductees' family members were getting old and passing away.

Moving on, on Tuesday the 12th, the Fukushima District Court found three former members of the Self-Defense Force guilty of indecent assault on a female subordinate, Rina Gonoi, and gave each a two-year prison sentence.

In a story from a previous show, we told you that Gonoi was featured on Time Magazine’s TIME100 Next twenty twenty-three list of influential figures of the year for her willingness to speak out against sexual assault and fight back against a system that brushed her off.

While her win in court may sound like a small victory, it’s a big step for a country that used to barely recognize sexual violence.

In international news, Japan will give Malaysia some new boats and drones following a new security deal called the Official Security Assistance, or OSA. The agreement is worth around 400 million yen or nearly three million dollars and aims to provide defense equipment to allies.

Japan handed over the boats and drones with the expectation that the Malaysian military would use them to patrol and monitor maritime activities, particularly in the South China Sea and the Malacca Strait, a stretch of water between Malaysia and Indonesia.

Nippon Steel announced on Monday the 18th that they’re going to buy US Steel for over fourteen billion dollars. The US firm, which was once the largest company in the world, will become one of Nippon Steel’s subsidiaries by September twenty twenty-four and will make the company the third largest steel producer in the world. Executives of US Steel said that their company had been struggling against competitors from China, and the Nippon Steel acquisition will help to strengthen the US’s presence on a global scale.

They’re not the only company looking to move up in the world. On Monday the 18th, JR Central showed off some new technology they’re developing that will allow a train to run on hydrogen fuel cells. Unlike fossil fuels, these will produce no carbon dioxide emissions, and the company said they will help make the railway industry more eco-friendly. The hydrogen fuel cells make electricity using hydrogen fuel and oxygen, and the only by-product will be water. They hope that the hydrogen-powered trains will replace the current diesel engine models.

Next up, sport news. Boxing superstar Naoya Inoue has opened his training session to the public ahead of his upcoming showdown with the Philippines' Marlon Tapales on the 26th of December. Inoue currently holds two major belts, the WBC (World Boxing Council) and WBO (World Boxing Organization), and aims for all four possible. To do that, he’ll need to beat Tapales, who is the WBA (or World Boxing Association) and IBF (or International Boxing Federation) champion in the same division. I

To end the day on a light-hearted note, Tokyo’s Kanda Myojin Shrine used a team of robot vacuum cleaners in their annual end-of-year cleaning. The priests swept dust down from ceiling lights and other fixtures, and the robots vacuumed up after them. This was the first time the shrine had used the robotic helpers in the task, but one junior priest remarked that even if it wasn’t strictly traditional, new ideas could become traditions with time.

Aaand that's it for this week!

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Mata Ne!