The Released Water Is Safe & more –12th Sep 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 12th of September twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Wednesday the 6th, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida attended the Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s Plus Three Summit held in Indonesia. While there, he spoke about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant releasing treated and diluted water into the ocean. He assured the other leaders that the water was safe and that they were sticking strictly to the World Health Organization’s guidelines to keep it that way. The leaders took it pretty well, with most showing understanding. Premier Li Qiang, probably had the sternest take, but he just said that Japan should be responsible.

Kishida and Li Qiang had a quick word on the side later that day, but neither gave any details about their short meeting. All Kishida said about it later was that he’s going to keep asking China to take back its ban on importing Japanese seafood. Rather than just poking at government officials, though, he said that taking a more commercial approach would probably work best. In other words, remind Chinese people how much they love sushi.

After that, Kishida flew to New Delhi, India, for the Group of 20 summit. There, he talked about the treated water release again and gained support from other global leaders. The summit ended on Sunday the 10th, after which Kishida told reporters that the leaders all agreed to uphold the UN charter about Ukraine. Or to put it another way, they agreed that Russia is doing a Bad Thing and peace is better than going around trying to conquer people. Kishida also said that he plans to support emerging economies from the countries that attended the summit and help to promote free and open international order.

He again pointed out that the Fukushima water release was safe. Japan’s Environment Ministry tested the seawater near the release areas once more. This time, tests covered a much wider area than the last analysis. On Monday the 11th, they announced that the amount of tritium, the radioactive isotope that can’t be separated from the water, was still below detectable levels. This means that the release is still going as planned and the water is safe.

On a related note, many Japanese companies have put their full support behind selling seafood domestically to help the fisheries industry stay afloat during China’s import ban. Some of these companies are running campaigns to promote specific kinds of seafood, while others are making a public show of testing seafood to reassure customers. Aeon, a huge supermarket chain, posted its test results on its website, saying that there’s no detectable tritium in its seafood and that it takes pride in what it sells. The Japan External Trade Organization is also looking at new foreign markets that might be interested in importing Japanese seafood.

In legal news, the Children and Families Agency made a report on Tuesday the 5th regarding a new system designed to weed out sex offenders from those applying to childcare work. They created a system based on the UK’s. Their hope is to present the system to the next Diet session and pass a bill so that any organization that works with children, such as schools and daycare, has to implement the system. This will make it impossible for anyone who has committed a sex crime to legally work with children.

While a grim topic, it's a step in the right direction to ensure children's safety.

And speaking of stepping in the right direction, Julie Fujishima, the president of Johnny & Associates announced her resignation on Thursday the 7th. During a press conference, she publicly acknowledged the late founder's sexual abuse of minors and apologized for not investigating sooner, when the victims first spoke out. She then said that Noriyuki Higashiyama, a fifty-six-year-old member of the talent agency who first became a singer in nineteen eighty-five, would become the next president. Higashiyama promised that he would sincerely compensate the victims of the late founder’s abuse and make sure this kind of thing will never happen again at the talent agency.

Fujishima’s not the only CEO resigning this week. The president of Sompo Japan, one of the country’s biggest insurance companies, announced his resignation on Friday the 8th. Sompo got caught up in quite a bit of controversy this month when a used car dealership they associated with was accused of fraud. Apparently, this dealership had been adding random charges to customer bills. What makes things worse for Sompo is that the insurance company tried to keep working with the dealership even after the police started investigating them for fraud.

While those two companies clean up their own mess, other businesses are investing in new ventures. Case in point, on Monday the 11th, eight major companies said they’re going to start a firm called Progmat, specializing in digital assets. The companies include giants like Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking, and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, and they plan to create a brand new cryptocurrency tied to the Japanese yen and US dollar, as well as other currencies. They hope to launch this cryptocurrency in the summer of twenty twenty-four. and make international trade easier and cheaper.

In other news, the culture ministry sent a notice to a Tokyo court on Thursday 7th to fine the Unification Church 100,000 yen, or 680 dollars. The ministry used the Religious Corporations Act, which allows the government to ask religious organizations for reports on their activities, to have the church answer a 500-question report. The ministry said the church didn’t answer 100 of the questions. The church argued that it did answer the questions and intended to fight the fine. They say that the ministry is looking for an excuse to target them, which isn’t entirely off-base. The ministry itself said they’re thinking of removing the church's status as a religious organization so it can't receive special tax breaks and protections. Some argue that the church's religious freedom should be protected and that the freely given donations are used to benefit the whole community. Others say the church is scamming its members and shouldn't be treated as a religious organization.

Meanwhile, there have been some heartening advancements in medical science. A doctor and textile company joined forces to create a unique material for repairing children’s hearts. The material is designed to grow with the child’s body so they won’t need to undergo countless heart surgeries growing up.

Moving on to tech news, fans of the anime Gundam will be ecstatic to learn that a company in Tokyo is building giant robots you can sit in and pilot, just like in several wildly popular anime. These ARCHAX robots are four and a half meters or fifteen feet tall and have both a robot and vehicle mode. At the moment, they’re on sale for 400 million yen, or about two and a half million dollars, so they’re really only for the super-rich. However, the company president hopes that in the future, they can use the robot for disaster recovery, space programs, and entertainment.

In sports news, Japan has seen a lot of wins, both in rugby and soccer.

In the men’s Rugby World Cup in France, Japan flattened Chile’s team on Sunday the 10th. Their next match will be on the 17th of September against England, the runner-up from the last World Cup.

The other win was on Saturday the 9th, between Japan’s national soccer team and Germany. It was just a friendly away match, but still notable since the Japan soccer team is ranked twentieth, and the German team they competed against is ranked fifteenth.

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