1. Upskirt photography: Police in upstate New York recently ran a sting operation to catch an upskirt photographer in a clothing store, which led to the unsuspecting victim suing the store.
    
2. Expensive airports that nobody goes to: “Local officials were so confident that tourists would flock to this beautiful, mountainous county in southwestern China that they made the terminal big enough to accommodate 220,000 passengers annually, and built a runway capable of handling a 140-seat Boeing 737. But only a few charters and budget carriers have established service here. A grand total of 151 people flew in and out of Libo last year.“
    
3. Whaling: See this piece in The Economist, then Wikipedia for the breakdown.
    

Did I miss anything?

The media is reporting that Osaka governor Toru Hashimoto is thinking of demolishing Itami Airport and building an international academic village on the property where everybody speaks English. People are already raising hell about this idea over at Debito’s blog. I think it’s a silly idea (as presented, anyway) and will never make it out of committee, but the issue of what to do with Itami is still pertinent, as Osaka really doesn’t need three airports.

What can you do with an airport you don’t need any more? Here are five possibly pertinent examples:

1. Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kong
   Kai Tak has many parallels to Itami. It was mostly built by the Japanese military (during their wartime occupation of Hong Kong), and it occupied a prime central location in huge city that grew increasingly dense over the years. As a result of the latter, the airport was cramped, overcrowded and hair-raisingly difficult to get into: aircraft landing in one direction had to approach the runway at a right angle, then make a hairpin turn just above the ground to touch down (video). Kai Tak was replaced by a somewhat Kansai-like airport, the current Hong Kong International Airport, in 1998, and was promptly closed. Since then, the site has been more or less empty despite constantly-shifting plans to build hotels, cruise piers and a giant stadium there.
    
2. Stapleton Airport, Denver
   In its heyday, Stapleton was one of the busiest airports in the world, serving as a cross-country hub for Continental Airlines and United Airlines. Like Itami, though, it was in the middle of a mostly residential area, which limited its growth potential and caused friction with residents over noise. In the early 90s, the federal government threw millions of dollars into an enormous new airport on the outskirts of the city, Denver International Airport, which is now the second-largest airport in the world. Stapleton was then closed down, and the site converted into a “new town” of 30,000 people.
   (Aside: I visited Denver last November, and the airport strikes me as totally ridiculous—you pass the sign that says “WELCOME TO DIA,” and the next sign says “TERMINALS – 15 MILES.” The largest airport in the world is in Dammam, Saudi Arabia and is larger than the entire country of Bahrain.)
    
3. Hoover Field, Washington
   Hoover Field was the first airport in the capital of the United States, back in the earliest days of commercial aviation. It was built across the river from the city in Arlington, Virginia on the other side of the 14th Street Bridge. The site was incredibly cramped, though—most notably, there was a road running through the middle of the main runway, requiring railway crossing gates to be lowered whenever a plane took off or landed. The field was shut down around the start of World War II, when National Airport opened nearby, and the site was then used to build the Pentagon.
    
4. Meigs Field, Chicago
   Meigs was a small airport on an artificial peninsula right on the lakefront of Chicago—essentially a miniature 1930’s version of Kansai Airport. It was most famous in its heyday for being the default starting location in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Mayor Richard Daley started campaigning in the early 90’s to convert the site into a giant park, and after a decade of bureaucratic stalling by Congress and the FAA, he took matters in his own hands and ordered the runway bulldozed into uselessness overnight. The site is now a lakefront park and was briefly being sold as a potential venue for the 2016 Olympics.
    
5. Old Kitakyushu Airport, Kitakyushu
   This is probably the closest parallel in Japan to a potential Itami closing scenario. The old Kitakyushu Airport was a relatively small facility, with one runway and a handful of daily flights to Haneda Airport in Tokyo, using relatively small YS-11 prop planes, later replaced by faster but still small MD-80 jets. The airport was clearly a bit of joke even in the mid-70s, and so the local government commissioned a new, larger offshore airport nearby, which opened in 2006 (and, surprisingly enough, is still not all that popular). The site was initially envisioned as a new urban project, but there were no takers; economics finally came out victorious, and the site is now zoned for industrial use, housing a hospital and a couple of industrial production sites.
    

There is one fate which Osaka undoubtedly wants to avoid—the fate of Montreal. Montreal spent something like a billion dollars to build and expand a giant airport on the outskirts, Mirabel Airport, which would have been the largest in the world were it ever completed. Just like Osaka, Montreal projected that their old downtown airport, Dorval, would quickly become too small for demand, and they tried to lock international carriers into the more distant Mirabel in order to artificially boost its popularity despite stagnating overall demand. The result was that Montreal lost relevance as an air hub, since nobody wanted to connect between the airports, and the city was getting less internationally relevant anyway. Montreal eventually gave up on Mirabel and moved everything back to Dorval in the nineties, leaving their gleaming new airport as a gleaming white elephant plied only by a few cargo planes.

So what could Osaka do with Itami Airport’s site? As a former Itami resident (I had a host family there back during my first stay in Japan), I have some ideas of my own.

First of all, it would be great as a replacement for the rail freight yard in Umeda, which is a pretty wasteful use of downtown space. ITM is right next to a JR trunk line and could be connected fairly easily—it also isn’t far from the Sanyo Shinkansen, which could theoretically be used for some freight traffic in the future once everything goes maglev. Then the downtown space occupied by the current yard could be fully converted into residential or commercial buildings. (UR has actually already started this process on one side of the yard.) This would also fit in fairly well with the light industrial character of the immediately surrounding real estate.

If you want to get a bit more fantastic, how about a space elevator? Or perhaps a new central government location for some of those Tokyo-bound bureaucrats? (I already proposed a similar fate for KIX in comments to this post.) Perhaps the Defense Ministry could move out there and give up its nice space in Ichigaya, though I’m sure the more lefty locals wouldn’t like that plan.

As a simple reminder, look at the plans for the rail line being built to Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport (former Chiang Kai Shek Airport).

Travelers leaving from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport will be able to check their luggage in at Taipei Railway Station before boarding the Airport Rail, the Bureau of High Speed Rail said yesterday.

“When the Airport Rail is launched in 2014, passengers can check in and get their boarding passes in the city first,” Bureau Director-General Chu Shu (朱旭) said. “The Taoyuan airport will be the fourth system in the world to offer in-town check-in service, following airports in Kuala Lumpar, Hong Kong and Bangkok.”

Even in cities that have a half-way decent rail system, most airports in the US don’t even have a rail connection. NYC’s JFK Airport has the so-called Airtrain, but after trying it once I suspect it might be faster to walk. There is also some talk of extending the PATH 2 miles so that it connects Manhattan directly to Newark Airport, with 24 hour access, which would be a huge improvement. But I can’t even imagine any place in the US putting together a baggage check-in service on the other side of an express airport rail. America was once the world leader in infrastructure, and now look at the list of cities in that article that have not just better airports, but better airports AND better airport rails! Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy to see the rest of the world catch up, but I’m disgusted that 21st America is making so little investment in similar upgrades. China’s insane empty city aside, they are also pumping $200 billion into high speed rail infrastructure. The United States has only about 10% of that figure promised.

In the last week or so, there has been some buzz on the NBR mailing list about Japan’s airliner industry. Many very educated people seem completely unaware that Japan has built whole commercial planes before, and that it is still deeply involved in this business despite not having a strong brand in the aircraft business. For regional pundits who are newbies to the aerospace industry, here’s a brief history of Japan’s forays into my favorite line of business.

The Imperial days

Before and during World War II, various Japanese firms built a variety of propeller-driven planes which were used for both civilian and military transport purposes. Many of these models were based on, or provided the basis for, Imperial Army and Navy bomber airframes. Wikipedia has a good list of these planes in its article on Imperial Japanese Airways, the old state-sponsored airline. I particularly like the Kawanishi H6K, a flying boat which was used for flights between Japan and its South Pacific mandate. Flying boats are awesome.

Besides unique designs like the H6K, there were also Japanese planes based on American or European designs; in fact, the Douglas Aircraft Company was granting production licenses to Japanese firms as late as 1938. Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese forces were flying transport planes almost indistinguishable from parallel models in the Allied forces’ fleet.

After Japan lost the war, the American occupation forces banned Japanese firms from developing or building aircraft, and confiscated all the related technical materials they could find. The demands of the Korean War, however, quickly revitalized the aircraft servicing industry in Japan, as the US needed skilled workers to fix its fighters and bombers at Japanese bases. Japanese aviation resumed in earnest with the peace treaty of 1952, which removed some of the restrictions and allowed scheduled domestic flying to resume.

The YS-11

In 1956, when the aircraft production ban was completely lifted, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry immediately made it a priority to develop a home-grown replacement for the war-era planes then flying throughout Japan. They negotiated with the Finance Ministry and Transport Ministry to come up with a production budget and implementation plan, and in 1957 secured funding to set up a Transport Aircraft Design Research Association (輸送機設計研究協会 Yusōki sekkei kenkyū kyōkai) based at the University of Tokyo, overseen by MITI and a consortium of domestic manufacturers.

The first initials of the Association’s Japanese name, “YS,” were applied to the name of their final aircraft design, the YS-11. With mock-ups prepared and the design ready for production, the Association turned over control to a newly-formed parastatal Nippon Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation (日本航空機製造) or “NAMC,” comprised mainly of staff seconded from the major keiretsu manufacturers.¹

The first YS-11 rolled out in 1962 and represented a major advance in Japanese aircraft-building technology.

There was still work to be done, though. Although most production took place in Japan and was overseen by Japanese firms, Japan did not have the technical capability to make the airframe materials or engines for a modern aircraft, and ended up acquiring these parts from Alcoa and Rolls-Royce respectively.

Still, the YS-11 was a pretty solid aircraft, seating 64 passengers with a cruise speed around 650 km/h. Although most found themselves on regional flights within Japan, Japan’s neighboring countries also bought many of the type. Piedmont Airlines flew YS-11s around the southern United States for a while, and Olympic Airways operated the type around Greece. Having made some return on the government’s investment (though not enough to turn a profit), NAMC set its sights on more advanced planes which never saw the light of day.

The YS-33

In the mid-1960s, NAMC got cocky and decided that it would try to clone the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 widebody trijet, which was one of the most popular airliner models at the time despite an array of safety issues. The initial plan called for three models seating 100 to 150 passengers, but by 1970 it was clear that the market was demanding something more in the range of 200 to 250 passengers. Planned development costs skyrocketed from 15 billion yen to 100 billion yen as the plan got bigger and more technically complicated.

NAMC realized that the government simply could not afford to home-grow an entire jumbo jet, so the YS-33 (alternatively known as the “YX”) never made it past badly-drawn concept art.

In 1971, NAMC shut down its production and design departments, effectively becoming a mere servicer for the YS-11. The company wound down its operations over ensuing years and finally closed in 1983.

The Boeing cooperation era

Around 1970, the global airline industry was suffering from a glut of overcapacity and rising fuel prices, and was shifting its demand to more efficient aircraft. Every major aircraft manufacturer was planning a widebody twinjet at the time: two-engine DC-10s and L-1011s were on the table, as well as the first Airbus (now known as the A300) and a Boeing project tentatively called the “7X7.”

The key Japanese aerospace companies, led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Fuji Heavy Industries, set up a Civil Transport Development Consortium (民間輸送機開発協会 or CTDC) in 1973. CTDC signed a memorandum of understanding with Boeing to become a technical development partner on its 7X7 project. The 7X7 turned into what is now the 767, and Japan ended up providing about 15% of each aircraft, including fuselage and wing sections. The aircraft flew for the first time in 1981.

Since then, Japan’s involvement in large Boeing aircraft has continued. The next Boeing widebody, the now-ubiquitous 777, rolled out for the first time in 1994 with even more Japanese components, comprising 21% of the aircraft. On Boeing’s latest large aircraft project, the ongoing and beleaguered 787, Japanese firms have been contracted to build most of the wings and part of the center fuselage, a total of 35% of the plane, and an extremely important 35% at that.

These huge components are currently built in Nagoya, loaded onto pregnant 747s, and flown across the Pacific to the final assembly line in South Carolina.

This is one reason why Boeing aircraft are ubiquitous in Japan. Airbus’s last sale here was an ANA order for five long-range A340s, which ANA cancelled after placing the first non-US order for 777s. ANA and JAL both later became launch customers for the 787, and ANA has extensively advertised the unprecedented Japanese-ness of Boeing’s upcoming model. But neither airline is particularly beholden to Boeing. In fact, production problems with the 787 led JAL to threaten shifting its order to Airbus.

Airbus, for its part, has not paid much attention to Japan. Instead, it has thrown its money and time into marketing in China, going so far as to open an entire assembly line in Tianjin for its popular A320 family of short-haul jets. Airbus planes are becoming more and more common throughout China, and it’s likely that China will use imported Airbus know-how to jump-start its own large aircraft industry.

Meanwhile, the Boeing partnership is the most successful segment of the Japanese civil aircraft industry today—at least much more successful than all the other money-losing projects to build a “truly Japanese” airliner.

The 7J7

CTDC also came up with a “YXX” plan, first proposed in 1979. They sought to develop a 100-seat jet plane that could be used for domestic routes to secondary cities. Based on their success with the Boeing partnership, CTDC decided to get Boeing on board, and thus was born the Boeing 7J7.

The 7J7 was a fairly unique design in that it would have used propfans for engines. These are basically very aerodynamic propellers mounted on jet engines. Propfans are very fuel-efficient compared to regular jet engines, and are capable of attaining similar speeds. However, propfans are also very loud, which makes propfan aircraft less attractive from a passenger’s standpoint.

In a high fuel price environment, and with the Iranian revolution casting fear in the hearts of fuel-hungry airlines, the propfan’s advantages were extremely attractive. By the mid-80s, though, most airlines were out of money and fuel prices were back to manageable levels. Boeing shelved the 7J7 plan and concentrated on making more efficient conventional jets.

The YSX

Undaunted, the Japanese aerospace industry started chasing another pet aircraft project called the “YSX” in 1986. This aircraft was conceived as a direct replacement for the aging YS-11s, using a similar body with more modern wings and turboprop engines.

The YSX was a very underdeveloped plan which mainly fell victim to bad timing. By the late eighties, Japan was in the middle of an asset bubble while Europe and the US were facing a recession, and domestic manufacturing was no longer quite as competitive. Then came the Pan Am 103 disaster and the Gulf War, which tugged at the finances of already-strained airlines across the globe. By the time the industry picked back up in the mid-1990s, Japan was in a recession, US aircraft manufacturers were turning their attention to Chinese and Korean partnerships, and new types of aircraft were muscling small turboprops out of the market.

Mitsubishi Regional Jet

Today, propeller planes are becoming rarer and rarer. More airlines are switching to small jet aircraft for both short flights (where jets are more comfortable and almost as efficient) and long flights (where small jets can operate more convenient frequencies carrying less people on each flight). This is a market which Boeing and Airbus almost completely overlooked, and as a result, its leading players are now Bombardier of Canada and Embraer of Brazil, hardly countries one would expect to gain a strong toehold in the airliner market. Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian firms are also getting interested in this market segment.

In 2002, the newly-renamed Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry decided that Japan should get in on the regional jet game, and started throwing billions of yen at a regional jet development project led by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The resulting design is called the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, and has managed to capture twenty-five orders from All Nippon Airways, though no other carriers have shown interest so far.

There seems to be little chance that MRJ will ever be profitable, as estimates show 600 airframes would have to be produced in order to yield a profit.

*** UPDATE: Just hours after this post came out, Trans States Airlines, a feeder contractor for a few major US airlines, ordered more than 100 MRJs.

Why can’t Japan build a jumbo jet?

The large-aircraft industry has long been supported by government funding. Boeing’s early money-winners, the 707 and 747 lines, started out as military transport planes and were later adapted for passenger service.² Airbus started out with a huge amount of funding by the British, French and West German governments as a way to jump-start the lagging European aerospace industry, and its parent company EADS is still subsidized to develop military aircraft for European forces. The other country to develop a significant big-plane industry was the Soviet Union in its heyday, and since the collapse of its command economy, its once-great aircraft manufacturers like Antonov and Ilyushin have been relegated to making poor copies of designs developed elsewhere.

While we all know Japan has no qualms about throwing tons of money at questionable business plans, the state’s obvious disadvantage here is Article 9. Strategic military infrastructure is legally out of the government’s reach, yet this is the sector which has the deepest technical nexus with large airliners. Without the prospect of national defense applications, there is much less economic rationale to invest in a whole production line for a plane with more than a hundred seats. It takes a hell of a lot of infrastructure, too: Boeing’s assembly line near Seattle is the largest building in the world, covering 400,000 square meters, and is mainly for assembly, not even producing all the huge components.³

Japan certainly has the native technical capability to put together a jumbo jet; the question is whether they could ever make money on it, and whether they could even put together a business plan which makes more sense than piggy-backing on a foreign producer.

* * *

¹ NAMC’s chief technician, Teruo Tojo, was a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries employee who also happened to be prime minister/war criminal Hideki Tojo’s second son.

² The 707 airframe is still in military use as an airborne command post and mid-air refueling platform; the 747 started out life as a bid for a giant military transport plane, and morphed into a giant passenger plane after Boeing’s bid lost to Lockheed’s (which became the C-5 Galaxy).

³ It also allegedly has the busiest Tully’s Coffee in the world.

Various media sources have been reporting that JAL is now the subject of a tug-of-war between Delta and American Airlines, both of whom are interested in taking a large minority stake in Japan’s largest airline. (Korean Air and Air France have also popped up as “angel investors” in some reports.)

Let’s start with some background.

This is the ex-Narita route map of Delta Air Lines following its acquisition of Northwest. Delta is the #3 carrier at Narita with about 330 flights/week, compared to JAL’s 870 and ANA’s 500.

Northwest, whose operations account for the vast majority of Delta’s combined total, was the first airline to serve Japan following World War II. It provided the technical assistance which was necessary for JAL to start up in the early 1950s, and it has maintained an Asian mini-hub in Tokyo since the immediate postwar era. Delta came into the picture much later: they flew a very odd Portland-Nagoya route for a while in the 1980s, then pulled out of Japan completely, then came back in the 90s with a daily Atlanta flight. While Northwest was well-entrenched with travel agents and corporate travel desks, Delta relied more on feed from its US and Latin American route network out of Atlanta.

Now that Delta has absorbed Northwest, American is the small fry among US carriers at Narita, with just 70 weekly flights in comparison to Delta’s 330, United’s 150 and Continental’s 80. Despite this, AA has great marketing in Japan and their brand is fairly well-known here. Their saving grace is an extensive partnership with JAL through the oneworld airline alliance: JAL sells tickets on AA transpacific and US domestic flights, while AA sells tickets on JAL transpacific, Asian and Japan domestic flights. The carriers also cooperate with each other’s mileage programs, so that one can get JAL miles by flying AA, and vice versa.

AA has been doing fairly well lately, at least as far as US “legacy” airlines go. It just raised a cool billion dollars by selling frequent flyer miles to Citibank, which will, in turn, be dishing out more and more AA miles to credit card holders in the future. It also has more efficient planes trickling in to replace older MD-80 models in its US domestic fleet, which will improve its overall fuel efficiency and make it more competitive with the likes of Southwest and JetBlue.

JAL, on the other hand, is a financial disaster. Its “equal merger” with Japan Air System, which was supposed to make it more competitive in the domestic market, ended up creating two tracks of unionized employees, aircraft and operational infrastructure within the company, and this dichotomy has still not been sorted out. JAL still has a smattering of international routes that it doesn’t really need, most of which date back to the postwar economic explosion when the government basically tried to get JAL to fly everywhere in the world, on top of the extensive ex-JAS network within Japan that generally doesn’t mesh with the international network at all. On top of that, it has a huge, disorganized and fuel-hungry fleet of planes, and no money to swap them all out for a more streamlined fleet. JAL today looks a lot like Pan Am did in the 80s, and we all know what happened to Pan Am.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has been pressing JAL to tie up with Delta for a few months now, according to media reports. Its reasoning is that the two carriers can code share, fill each other’s empty seats and tacitly cede certain markets to each other’s flight operations, much as JAL and American do now. Since Delta has many more routes from Narita, and significant overlap with JAL’s route network, turning the two competitors into allies would help JAL’s finances and justify some level of public funding to keep them afloat. Or at least, that was MLIT’s reasoning as of Taro Aso’s last day in power: New Transport Minister Seiji Maehara is being mum about the situation and implying that the Development Bank of Japan and private financial institutions may be on their own in financing a turnaround plan.

Delta has its own initiative to throw money on the table, and Delta’s interest basically explains American’s interest. I’ll let Cranky Flier, one of my favorite aviation bloggers, explain:

My guess is that [Delta’s Asian routes out of Narita] absolutely suck wind right now. If Delta is really losing a ton of money as I suspect, they could eliminate all those routes and either use the slots to fly to the US or transfer them to JAL. The additional connectivity in Tokyo that they could gain from this link-up would add a bunch more traffic to feed all that US-Tokyo flying Delta does now. (You people in Portland could breathe a sigh of relief, because this could probably help that flight come off the edge of the cliff.)

This move could make a big, immediate difference on the bottom line. If Delta can pour some money in but get it back out very quickly in the form of improved profits, then it’s a no-brainer. ...

Of course, if JAL leaves, oneworld loses, so American has now come back with its plan to invest in JAL.

To this, I would only add that although Delta has inherited Northwest’s excellent sales and operational staff in Tokyo, Delta has not been making much effort to publicize its acquisition of Northwest here, except through a few ads here and there that are apparently direct translations of the ads they use in the US. This indicates to me that they are not particularly interested in developing their brand in Japan, despite the fact that it is now their most important overseas market. It’s much easier, from Delta’s perspective, to let JAL sell seats out of Japan under its own brand.

Some analysts and reporters have also raised the topic of Haneda slots, with very little clarification as to why Delta would care about Tokyo’s downtown, mostly-domestic airport. As many MFT readers know already, the Japanese government is slowly making Haneda more international. They are building a new international terminal and have started the legal documentation necessary to allow nonstop service from Haneda to Southeast Asia, Europe and other new destinations, primarily during late-night and early-morning hours when Narita is closed. The United States is not on the table yet, but many observers believe that an “open skies” treaty to open the aviation market between Japan and the US is long overdue, and with that treaty would come the ability to serve Haneda from the US. The most interesting aspect of Haneda for trans-pac flyers is that it will be open 24 hours, potentially allowing early morning or late-night flights between Tokyo and the West Coast that wouldn’t eat up a working day on either side of the ocean. Delta and American should both have an interest in such a service, especially if they can be assured of good domestic feed within Japan out of Haneda, which JAL is best positioned to provide.

It won’t be an easy ride, though. Whoever bails out JAL will have to sort through their mess of operational issues in order to get some return on the investment.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of my first journey to Japan, as a Rotary Youth Exchange student going to school and generally getting in trouble in Osaka.

Since then, I have flown a hundred thousand miles, earned three diplomas, and have seen my Japanese high school closed down and stupidly renamed while my American high school gets shuttered due to the swine flu.

I still have many memories of that first year, and for the next eleven months, will be sharing some of those memories here on the blog. (Those of you who don’t care can simply avoid the jump, and Adamu will still regale you with tales of the Adachi-ku ballot). Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing the alien theme started by Curzon:

Close to midnight on August 5, 1952, four American air traffic controllers walking across the tarmac at Haneda Airport (then a US military base) spotted a round, bright object in the sky over Tokyo Bay. They went up to the tower and took a look through their binoculars, and noticed a larger dark ellipse surrounding the light.

Over the next few minutes, the controllers tried to get visual confirmation from an airborne observer plane, which couldn’t see anything. They were able to get a radar fix on the UFO, though, and so they had a scrambled fighter jet intercept it. The pilots didn’t spot the UFO, though, and shortly after the radar intercept the UFO disappeared.

The original US Air Force report is available in scanned format here. Nobody was ever able to explain what happened; my personal theory is that the aliens were coming for Kenzo Tange so they would have someone to do their design bidding on Earth.

Japan and the US supposedly operate on fundamentally different legal systems. Japan has a “civil law” system where all the rules ultimately have some source in a neatly-organized set of statutes, whereas the US follows the English “common law” system of letting ancient court cases govern large areas of law, such as contracts and real estate. Although this is what you’ll learn in a Law 101 class, the distinction is actually not so simple in practice. Both systems are fundamentally patchworks of overlapping statutes and judicial fiat.

Japanese employment law is a good example of this. The Civil Code (民法), which is the general basis of private legal relations in Japan (contracts, property and familial relationships), has some basic rules governing employment and labor contracts. The Labor Standards Act (労働基準法), enacted by the Diet after World War II, goes into more detail about workers’ particular rights. Since then, there have been even more statutes covering family care leave, temp staff dispatching and other more minute areas, and there have been a number of precedents which seemingly overwrite the statutes altogether. Lifetime employment, arguably one of the key principles of Japanese employment law, is not enshrined anywhere in the Japanese code books; it comes entirely from court cases playing fast and loose with the Civil Code.

In practice, people usually look to expert advice to figure out what’s going on. One of my favorite online resources is a law firm called Eiko, an outfit of eight horribly serious-looking Japanese lawyers and one not-so-Japanese lawyer based in Osaka. I have no clue how good they are in the courtroom, but they put out four short articles each month in Japanese through their “Business Law Front Line!” (ビジネス法務最前線！) newsletter. You can subscribe here.

This week, one of their topics is employer liability for economy-induced work stoppages. This is a phenomenon you’ve probably heard about in the news: many Japanese companies are shutting down entire lines and telling their employees to take some time off. The full article, by attorney Yukari Ikeno, is here. Here’s a translation of the meat of it:

Under the Labor Standards Act, when work stops “due to the fault of the employer [the company],” the company must pay wages (or salary) at no less than 60% of the ordinary rate.

On the other hand, under the Civil Code, when an employee is unable to provide labor “due to the fault of the creditor [the company],” the employee does not lose their right to receive the full amount of their salary.

Although it is hard to interpret which of these two standards applies to form a duty to pay, the Supreme Court held, in its decision of July 17, 1987 on the Northwest Case (ノースウエスト事件), that if the Civil Code standard is fulfilled, the worker may claim the full amount of their salary under the Civil Code provision.

As some additional color (and because I love to talk about the history of Japanese aviation), this was a case from the late 70s which arose during a Northwest Airlines employee strike in Tokyo. The strike forced the Tokyo station to close, halting Northwest’s continuing service to Osaka and Okinawa. Northwest told its employees in the latter cities (who were not striking) to stay at home and cut their salary for the duration. The Supreme Court used this opportunity to state that the Civil Code provision covered a wider range of issues than the Labor Standards Act provision—and then said that it didn’t really matter, because the strike was caused by the union and therefore the employees had no right to invoke either provision.

Continuing:

This interpretation gives rise to doubt as to why the Labor Standards Act, a law for the purpose of protecting workers, provides for a lower standard of payment than the Civil Code. It’s a bit confusing, but here is how we understand this point:

Under the Labor Standards Act, even language similar to that of the Civil Code would be rigidly construed against the employer from the general legal standpoint of protecting workers. Thus we understand that the company has an obligation to pay 60% or more in any case, except in cases of force majeure such as a factory being destroyed in an earthquake.

On the other hand, under the Civil Code, as the language states, when the employee has become unable to provide their labor, the employee must prove that there is some fault on the part of the company, thus limiting, moreso than the Labor Standards Act, the cases in which the liability of the company may be found.

So compensation under the Labor Standards Act, despite being lower in amount, also greatly relaxes the worker’s responsibility to provide evidence, and is therefore viewed as protecting the worker.

Views diverge as to whether losses from the current worldwide recession can give rise to the 100% payment under the Civil Code. One can believe that these would have to be determined judicially on a case-by-case basis.

Oh no! Litigation! But wait, there’s a solution:

To avoid this sort of dispute, a company should preventively provide in its rules of employment that “for days when a work-stoppage allowance is paid, the worker may not claim any salary in excess thereof.”

That’s why your company writes really long rules of employment; they don’t want to have to go through all that just to find out how much they owe you. That said, such a provision would likely be more of a deterrent than an actual bar to claiming full salary, since the law still applies regardless of what the work rules say.