In December 2005, a “fat fingered” Mizuho Securities trader (unnamed, and now presumably unemployed) sold 610,000 shares at 1 yen instead of selling 1 share at 610,000 yen. The error resulted in Mizuho losing 27 billion yen (about US$225 million at the time), perhaps the most expensive single trading error in history.

Mizuho decided to sue the Tokyo Stock Exchange for not having a safety system in place to prevent these types of errors, and almost four years later, the court has ruled that the TSE is liable to the tune of 10.7 billion yen, or about 40% of the original damages. The presiding judge called the lack of safety measures “absurd” and that the exchange failed to exercise the suitably duty of care. In addition to a lack of failsafes preventing such a trade, the TSE’s computer system was unable to process the cancellation order after Mizuho tried to withdraw the trade.

On the one hand, I am frustrated by the ruling because of the vague formula used to calculate the award, which I think is just an arbitrary number that the judge felt was right, rather than a careful calculation. Mizuho was deemed to be partially at fault, and the judge came to the conclusion (perhaps using some type of metric that the TSE bore 70 percent of the blame. The damages to Mizuho are pretty easy to calculate: 27 billion yen—plus three years of interest! How 70% responsibility for the loss results in an award of 40% of the amount of damages makes no sense to me. Such is the problem with judges in Japan, or as some Japanese critics would call it, 裁判できない裁判官—judges who cannot judge.

I see the ruling as a victory for accountability, which is sorely lacking in Japan. The very word means responsibility what happens, yet in Japan it is regularly translated as 説明責任, or the mere “responsibility to explain.” That has often been the approach to accountability in Japan—as long as someone can explain what happened, there is no blameworthiness or real liability. Hopefully we’ll look back at the TSE “Fat Finger” ruling as the first major move by courts to introduce a Western modern style of accountability.

Bloomberg has an interesting article on Nichiryoku, a business offering “mechanical tombs” in Japan (and possibly Hong Kong in the near future):

Secretary for Food and Health York Chow was in Japan last week to visit Tokyo-based Nichiryoku Co.’s mechanized columbarium, as facilities used to store urns are known. Families swipe a smart card and the ashes of the deceased are lifted mechanically within 60 seconds from an underground vault, with 8,545 tomb spaces, to one of 10 viewing areas.
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The seven-story building in central Yokohama, a port city 16 kilometers (10 miles) from Tokyo, uses less space per urn than a facility where all are on permanent display. Each tomb can hold as many as three urns and 95 percent are taken.

The Yokohama columbarium, built by Shimizu Corp., Mitsubishi Corp. and Murata Machinery Ltd., was the first of its kind, according to Nichiryoku. Since then, the company has built three more in Japan, and rival companies are doing the same, according to employees who guided York’s tour.
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“Usually these things are handled by local priests and temples, and in our case we also cooperated with a local temple to open this facility,” said Hisayoshi Teramura, the company’s president. “It’s been a very successful venture for us and we’re getting interest from other cities.” A delegation from Shanghai visited last year and this year, he said.

Nichiryoku’s shares have gained 17 percent this year, against a 3.4 percent rise in the benchmark Topix index. Shares in the only Hong Kong-listed provider of funeral services, Sino- Life Group Ltd., have more than doubled since their debut Sept. 9. The company operates in Taiwan and is expanding into China, where growing wealth is fueling demand for traditional funerals.

At the Nichiryoku’s 24-hour Yokohama columbarium, urns are stored in a “tomb” box that slots into one of the designated viewing areas, decorated with a backdrop of floral designs including cherry blossoms, snowdrops, cosmos and roses. People can bring food and flowers, which must be removed when they leave—in contrast to the tradition of graveyards in China.

If people are supposed to bring offerings back home with them when they leave the columbarium, that’s not just different from the Chinese tradition, it’s a lot different from the typical Japanese graveyard as well.

But I quibble. I’ve never heard of anyone using such a facility, but I did just see an ad for Nichiryoku this morning. It’s a cheaper option than getting a family plot at a graveyard, so I can see why some would go for it.

I am kind of amazed that a tomb operator is listed on the stock market, though. Maybe as Japan gets older the death business will get more and more lucrative.

Since both traditional and simplified characters are still in active use in the Chinese world not only IME software, but also software to automatically convert between the two is readily available, for example as a feature in Openoffice (and MS Word?), and as part of the Chinese language edition of Wikipedia. In the case of Japanese, however, traditional characters are for the most part archaic, and almost nobody ever has any reason to input more than a couple of 繁体字 (for example, to input an unusual or old name) at a time. Except of course for academics dealing with old documents that are not readily available in digital form. Well, I just did a quick search and came across such a tool for Japanese. The web form lets you input either modern Japanese into the top field and have it converted to 舊字體, or post old Japanese into the bottom form and click to convert it into modern kanji. Note that it does not change the kana portion, so if you need to enter a bunch of archaic Japanese text you will still have to make those alterations oneself, but for kanji at least this looks like it good save a fair amount of time compared with either searching the dictionaries one by one or even using the Pinyin/繁体字 IME.

For comparison, here’s a random passage I had open, before:

文部科学省の定義は、「我が国では、学校教育法により、小・中・高等学校等の教科書について教科書検定制度が採用されています。教科書の検定とは、民間で著作・編集された図書について、文部科学大臣が教科書として適切か否かを審査し、これに合格したものを教科書として使用することを認めることです。

And after:

文部科學省の定義は、「我が國では、學校教育法により、小・中・高等學校等の教科書について教科書檢定制度が採用されています。教科書の檢定とは、民間で著作・編集された圖書について、文部科學大臣が教科書として適切か否かを審査し、これに合格したものを教科書として使用することを認めることです。

The page also includes a handy reference chart. Note that it only seems to convert relatively common characters, i.e. those that are simplified forms of the same character. It won’t actually help at all for all those times you have to enter kanji that are either variants （異体字） or just plain archaic.

Robert Kneff of the Marmot’s Hole blog has a neat article in the Korea Times re-telling the little known allegation that Japan tested a nuclear bomb in what is now North Korea shortly before the end of WW2. To be fair, I’ll excerpt the same portion as the Marmot’s Hole did.

It is common knowledge that on October 9, 2006 North Korea tested a small nuclear bomb. But there is debate as to whether or not this was the first atomic bomb test done in Korea. Ever since the end of World War II there have been rumors that Japan, just days before its surrender, tested a small atomic bomb off the coast of modern Hamheung.

I came across this story while doing research on one of my Western gold miners in northern Korea.  This gold miner used to take his gold to the smelter at Konan – in the Hamheung area – and the story eventually encompassed other Westerners working at the this Japanese industrial center including one who, after he returned to the United States, was arrested by the FBI following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  This scientist was deemed so valuable that he was allowed to continue to work in a top secret plant and was eventually one of the scientists sent to Korea to investigate the possibility of Japan building and testing an atomic bomb in Korea.

This story always starts the same way – regardless of who publishes it – so why should I be any different?

Allegedly, on the evening of August 11, 1945, a number of ancient ships, junks and fishing boats were anchored near a small inlet by the Japanese. Just before dawn on August 12, a remote controlled launch carrying the atomic bomb known as “genzai bakudan” (greatest fighter), slowly made its way through the assembled fleet and beached itself.

Nearly twenty miles away, observers wearing welders’ glasses were blinded by the bomb’s terrific blast. “The ball of fire was estimated to be 1,000 yards in diameter. A multicolored cloud of vapors boiled towards the heavens then mushroomed in the stratosphere. The churn of water and vapor obscured the vessels directly under the burst. Ships and junks on the fringe burned fiercely at anchor. When the atmosphere cleared slightly the observers could detect several vessels had vanished.”

While this is a good story, there isn’t really any reason to believe it, and no serious evidence aside from this single interview with an anonymous source, which itself may very well have been fabricated in the first place. One detail that jumps out to me as peculiar is the alleged name of the bomb, genzai bakudan, which according to the article means “greatest fighter.” Except of course that translation is total nonsense. In no possible way that I can think of does either genzai or bakudan mean either “greatest” or “fighter.” Bakudan in fact means bomb, which while reasonable as part of a name for a-well- bomb, is completely different from what was claimed. And genzai means either “present time” or “original sin”, neither of which really makes much sense at all.

On another note, this has reminded me that I need to finish the post I started writing on the book “Let’s drop an atomic bomb on Kyoto”, about why Kyoto was not nuked in the war, that I picked up at a used bookshop near Waseda several months ago.

In October, I wrote about the attempted abduction/rescue of the Savoie children by Chris Savoie from his wife, and explained my sympathy for Noriko, the Japanese wife who had absconded with the children from Tennessee, USA to Japan. While acknowledging and criticizing the Japanese child custody regime, I was appalled by Chris’ conduct and said very clearly that “Christopher is the wrong martyr to rally behind in this fight.” Mulboyne disagreed (right after saying that the post was too long at 200 or so comments—it currently stands at 434), and had this to say:

One of Curzon’s original points was that Savoie is “the wrong martyr for the cause”. It’s beginning to look like he might be the right one… for better or worse, his case has received significant coverage in the US and coverage in the Japanese media is now building up momentum… Even following an announcement in May 2008 by the Ministry of Justice that Japan was beginning to look at the possibility of becoming a signatory to Hague, there was no mention of any specific instance. The same when Canada, Britain, France and the US made a joint diplomatic representation on the issue in May of this year.

Christopher Savoie’s actions in Japan have been reckless and stupid but, whereas most cases have no narrative development, this one has a good deal and promises more. Even coverage of a left behind parent tails off in the US in the absence of any concrete development. Most parents are just sitting and waiting or else tied up in legal proceedings in Japan which generally go slowly and, usually, nowehere. With Savoie, we have a man in jail and something has to happen to him. He might be charged, he might be released, he might be deported. Whichever course of action the authorities take, there will be repercussions and more coverage.

Such was my disgust with Savoie that I did not want to agree with that analysis. Mulboyne later repeated this comment in more detail over beers a few weeks later (we’re a social bunch, us MF and CA bloggers).

Yet we now read that Foreign Minister Okada has set up a division inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study the issue:

The Foreign Ministry has set up a new division to handle international child custody issues in response to overseas criticism that Japan allows Japanese mothers to take their children away from their divorced partners.

The division, officially launched Tuesday, will study the issue, including whether to sign the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, whose aim is to secure the prompt return of children wrongfully removed to or retained in any signatory countries, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said.

Of course, such criticism has been ongoing for years and has been well documented and criticized, yet only now, after the awful CNN press coverage of the Savoie fiasco is the Japanese government taking notice. My conclusion? I can’t bear to acknowledge it twice, so just read the post title again.

Here I am with Garrett of Trans Pacific Radio at the Pink Cow in Shibuya the on Tuesday. We had a discussion about some of the biggest stories of 2009. Watch here!

Topics covered:

– The Noriko Sakai scandal and the arrest of Tatsuya Ichihashi: Sakai received more media coverage than the election. The two cases illustrate how police can hold a suspect for weeks and try and press for a confession. – The new DPJ government: Adamu is a little on the fence about the government’s new way of doing things but supports them on balance. A point that I didn’t quite get to articulate as well as I wanted: once the DPJ eliminates some of the institutions, they will have to fundamentally re-organize the personnel policies of the bureaucracy so there won’t be so many senior bureaucrats who feel entitled to post-retirement jobs. Such reforms could even prove a model to creating a less rigid private sector labor system as well.

[Edited to move video after the jump, as it autoplays on some computers.]

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting move by NK to crack down on the burgeoning market activity in their country:

North Korea revalued its currency for the first time in 50 years and strictly limited how much old money could be traded for new, moves that appear designed to confiscate much of the cash people earned in market activities the country’s authoritarian government doesn’t like.

The action triggered chaos, according to news outlets in South Korea that specialize in obtaining information from the North, as people rushed to banks and offices of the ruling Workers Party to get information, make exchanges or trade existing North Korean won for euros and U.S. dollars.
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Initial reports indicated the government would allow only 100,000 old won to be exchanged for new. That would potentially wipe out the holdings of people who have earned and saved in won from market activities for years. Those who have saved in foreign currencies—which, though not illegal, is difficult for ordinary North Koreans—would appear unaffected.

According to an account by NKNet, a Seoul-based Web service focused on North Korea, people in Pyongyang on Monday night pressed party officials to allow more money to be exchanged. In response, according to the report, the officials lifted the exchangeable amount to 150,000 won in cash and 300,000 won in savings accounts.

While the revaluation could simply be aimed at inflation – Vietnam recently devalued as well – the really low per-person limit seems all but certain to wipe out most private wealth. Because in Stalinist North Korea money spends you!