This menu item is a minor legend at our company’s cafeteria:
Author: Joe Jones
Deconstructing the Japanese housing statistics
The 2008 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications housing statistics are out. Read them here, or just read my highlight reel below.
57.6 million homes in Japan and 13.1% are vacant
Anyone who has traveled through the countryside of Japan is probably not surprised at this. Several prefectures are now in the 15 to 20% vacancy range, including Yamanashi (the worst at 20.2% vacancy), Nagano, Wakayama, and all of Shikoku.
Stand-alone houses are in the majority, but high-rise apartments are slowly taking over
Of the total home count, 55.4% are stand-alone houses (一戸建). A dwindling 2.7% are row houses (長屋建), i.e. stand-alone houses clustered together sharing walls. The remaining 41.7% are group residences (共同住宅), like apartments and condos. These form the majority of homes in the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya metropolitan areas (52.1% of the three regions combined), and 56.4% of the housing stock around Tokyo.
Although the landscape of the group residences has evolved since the eighties, with a shift towards taller buildings dominating the skyline, one aspect remains constant: the need for reliable gutter services such as the Denver Colorado gutter services.
More owners than renters
61.2% of Japan’s homes are owned, while 35.8% are rented (the remainder is “unverified”). About 6% of the total stock is owned by the government (public housing and Urban Renaissance Agency “UR” housing, about which I plan to write more in the future). For real estate professionals navigating this market, leveraging Digital Business Cards For Realtors can enhance networking and showcase properties more effectively.
Owners have a heck of a lot more space
The average owned home has a floor area of 120.89 m2. The average rented home, on the other hand, has a floor area of 45.93 m2 (494 square feet for our American readers), which I find to be ridiculously tiny for anything resembling a “household.” (It would be interesting to see some more stats, like quintiles or something, or at least median numbers.)
Old people are taking over
8.3% of Japan’s houses are now occupied by single people over 65, and that number is rising (up 22.4% in the last five years). This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, since this is one of the most rapidly aging societies on Earth, but one must wonder who will take care of all these people in the event of a really major disaster. Like an extended LDP administration.
Priests can become jurors, but not lay judges
According to Peter Takeo Okada, who is president of the [Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan], the lay judge system “does not fit in with the mission of the clergy from the start.”
Okada gives two reasons for the conflict. The first is that the basic thinking behind Christianity is the notion of forgiveness. The clergy must preach that whatever the sin, God has mercy for sinners who repent, and therefore, that mission does not go hand in hand with handing down a conviction in a crime.
The other point is the unique position that bishops and other clergy members hold. Their beliefs are formed around the notion that God alone knows whether a person is guilty of sin. Therefore, the clergy do not judge whether a person is good or evil based on information that person has gleaned.
Officials say it would be difficult for the clergy to shift away from such thinking only while they serve as lay judges.
Further down in the article:
In the United States, which employs a jury system, few states make an exception for clergy and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued no instructions to dioceses.
Some suggest that in the United States the clergy have a stronger sense of sharing responsibility as individual members of society.
There’s another major systematic consideration, which Asahi hasn’t picked up on, and which most people overlook when comparing the Japanese lay-judge system to the American jury system.
In the US, a juror’s duty is essentially to look at evidence, to compare that evidence to a list of criteria for legal guilt or liability, and to either decide whether there is reasonable doubt that those criteria exist (in a criminal case) or to decide whether there is a preponderance of evidence that those criteria exist (in a civil case). The judgment of guilt or lack thereof is simply a function of the rules imposed by the system and is not technically up to the juror to decide: the juror is there to decide whether the evidence is credible enough. This is why the judge is generally careful in issuing jury instructions to guide their decision. (Note that, depending on jurisdiction, American jurors can often legally find a “not guilty” verdict if they object to a guilty verdict for any reason, but this ability is disdained by the trial courts and usually isn’t pointed out to the jurors.)
On the other hand, as described in a recent American law journal article (which is horribly edited, confirming all my prior suspicions about Penn kids), Japan has taken a more collegial approach where the roles of judge and jury get blissfully muddled.
At the close of the trial, the panel of judges and lay jurors will retire to deliberate. The Lay Assessor Act provides little guidance for how deliberation should proceed. This question was left to researchers at the Supreme Court. Though every detail is not finalized, summaries of their meetings indicate that some important decisions have already been made. Researchers determined that jury deliberations should open with undirected, free conversation about the trial and evidence, after which judges can clarify disputed points, review the evidence, and explain the law. Great emphasis was placed on guarding against the possibility of judges leading lay jurors to the judges’ interpretation of events. For example, judges will be asked to state their opinion only after the lay jurors have stated theirs. In the case of a disagreement between a judge and the lay jurors, if the judge can recognize the lay interpretation as valid, she should defer to the jurors. Judges should state only their opinion and avoid actively persuading jurors, especially at the beginning stages of the deliberation. However, if a judge cannot compromise on a disputed point, she is permitted to vigorously argue her view.
In short, the professional judges and lay judges (or jurors or assessors or whatever you want to call them) are supposed to be on an even footing in the whole procedure, and they are supposed to reach the decision through a holistic assessment of the situation as a group. In this regard, the lay judges are actually taking a much more active role in administering justice, so it’s little surprise that the Catholic bishops are nervous about subjecting clergy to those duties.
iPhone その2 (and some ranting about eMobile)
I am now the second MFT contributor to buy an iPhone. Roy took the plunge a few months ago.
I generally agree with all of Roy’s comments about the device itself. It has a few drawbacks, but it’s a great machine overall, and probably the best solution for someone who wants a multilingual smartphone that doesn’t suck.
There was one point which grated on me, though:
Softbank hates foreigners
If you read Debito’s blog, you already know this. Back in 2007, he reported that Softbank was requiring passports and gaijin cards from all foreigners entering new phone contracts or requesting special services, despite the fact that Japanese nationals could choose from several other forms of ID. Then, last year, he reported that foreigners with less than 16 months left on their entry permit could no longer pay on the installment plan.
I first tried ordering my phone directly from Softbank, in order to take advantage of a corporate discount which my employer has through its relationship with Softbank. The contact at Softbank corporate replied that he would send over the documents, with one caveat:
I apologize for asking, but do you have Japanese nationality and a Japanese [driver’s] license? If you have a nationality other than Japan, an alien registration card and passport (within its term of validity) are required. They must be within their term of validity and you must have a duration of residence of more than 27 months. There must be a photo, address, name and date of birth, and they must match the address, name and date of birth on your application. If your status of residence is “Temporary Visitor” or “No Status,” you cannot apply. You must also pay by credit card.
Those rules sounded silly to me, so I decided to look them up myself. Here’s what Softbank officially says:
If applying by using an alien registration card and passport as personal identification, please be aware of the following.
(1) If your duration of residence is less than 90 days, you cannot apply.
(2) If your duration of residence is 15 months or less from the date of your application, you may not enter a discounted purchase contract. (You may pay by lump sum at the store.)
(3) If your duration of residence is more than 15 months but 27 months or less from the date of your application, you may only enter a discounted purchase contract divided into twelve payments. (You may also pay by lump sum at the store.)
(4) If your duration of residence is more than 27 months from the date of your application, you may enter a discounted purchase contract.
Note that, by the language of those requirements, they only apply if you are using a gaijin card as ID. Softbank has not publicized any documents which say that a foreigner has to use their gaijin card, or that they have to pay with a credit card.
I would recommend a couple of strategic points for others who want an iPhone, don’t have enough time left on their permit and don’t want to lose a lot of money:
- Don’t go directly through Softbank or a Softbank store. Go through a third party, like an electronics store. They are less likely to care about Softbank rules and more likely to care about getting you out the door with a new phone.
- Don’t use a gaijin card as ID if you don’t have the necessary period of residence left. Use another form of ID, and be sure to point out that the 27-month rule only applies if you are using your gaijin card as ID.
- If you still can’t get the right deal, go to another store. If you ask to talk to a manager, they will probably waste your time calling Softbank corporate and getting a stone-wall answer.
The really odd thing about these requirement is that other acceptable forms of ID do not prove Japanese citizenship or lack thereof (e.g. health insurance card or chipped driver’s license), so if you say you are a citizen, Softbank really has no way to prove you wrong (unless they can bribe their way into government databases).
But that’s enough about Softbank. Let me complain a bit about eMobile before signing off.
Why I switched from eMobile
Readers may recall that I adopted an eMobile phone about a year ago, mainly because I was moving to a new apartment with no existing internet connection. I didn’t want to wait a month to wire the place for high-speed internet, so I decided to get an eMobile phone that would tether to my PC for free.
This turned out to be pretty good for most purposes–fast enough for web browsing and even for BitTorrent. The biggest drawback was ping time. Since the connection had to go through my phone, through the air and through a bunch of 3G routing equipment, it often had crappy latency, which made it hard to use Skype, online games and other connection-intensive software. Even YouTube gave me problems at times.
After a few months of that, I had optical fiber installed, and then the drawbacks of my eMobile phone became more and more apparent. The Windows Mobile OS was buggy and often locked up, requiring a restart in order to use the phone. Some third-party software kept activating my 3G connection even when I didn’t want it activated, which severely ran up my phone bill on a trip to Taiwan.
Then came the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. One night last week, my phone just stopped working. Internet use gave me a “modem connection error,” and calling out gave me a message saying my phone wasn’t activated.
I emailed customer service, and got a reply the next day which said that my phone had, indeed, been deactivated. This was because the contact phone number I gave at sign-up was no longer active. This, in turn, was because it was my old deactivated Docomo phone, which the eMobile store said I could use as my conact number.
Rather than help fix the problem, the online customer service agent told me I had to call eMobile. I called, got an annoying voice prompt, and eventually found my way to an agent, who took down all my personal information and then immediately told me I had to call someone else (at a local Tokyo number, no less). I called the new number, was placed on hold again, and got another agent, who told me that the one person who could help was assisting someone else and would call me back “in a few minutes.” A few hours passed without a call-back, and that was enough for me to put in my MNP application online. My new iPhone was up and running on the same number just a couple of hours later.
When aliens attacked Kawasaki
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.
The zairyu card law takes shape
Japan Times reporter Minoru Matsutani has been engaging in some unusually hard-hitting journalism in his recent series on the new immigration bill making its way through the Diet. In three articles, he went through the LDP’s perspective, the DPJ’s perspective, and the Immigration Bureau’s plans.
The third piece is the most interesting, as it takes on some of the strongest arguments against the new law: that it would be unduly harsh on overstayers and that it would inconvenience foreign residents.
Here’s the counter-argument on the first point:
If illegal foreigners turn themselves in, they may, under certain circumstances, be granted special permission to stay by the justice minister, or placed in custody in preparation for deportation.
The bills stipulate the justice minister must clarify the standard to grant special permission to stay to motivate overstaying foreigners to turn themselves in.
[…]
The bureau currently has no concrete criteria for granting the permit. Instead, it shows on its Web site examples of cases it granted and those it didn’t, but the information provided may not give illegal foreigners a clear clue as to what their fate may be, [Immigration Bureau General Affairs Division official Kazuyuki] Motohari said.
In one case on the Web site, a 27-year-old Southeast Asian woman was granted permission in 2007. She entered Japan with a six-month student visa in October 2004, dropped out of school and continued to stay in Japan.
She was arrested for overstaying in 2007, sent to the bureau without criminal charges and married a South American man, a legal resident, she had begun living with before the arrest. The bureau concluded their marriage was credible and she otherwise had a clean criminal record, it said on the Web site.
And on the inconvenience factor–the issue of certain changes having to be made at the immigration office rather than at city hall:
The Immigration Bureau is considering enabling foreign residents to report changes in workplace and apply for renewal of residence cards via mail or the Internet instead of requiring them to go to local immigration offices, he said.
Currently, renewing alien registration cards, which are to be replaced by zairyu cards, and reporting changes in personal information can be done at municipal offices, more of which exist than immigration offices.
For address changes, residents can go to municipal offices even under the new system. For changes in name, gender and nationality, they will have to go to immigration offices instead of municipal offices, but such changes rarely occur.
Together with the fact that this new system will give foreigners the same residence records as Japanese, as well as other benefits like free re-entry permits, it sounds as if the change is still, all in all, good for foreign residents.
Defending the financial system against yakuza infiltration
Citibank is feeling some FSA heat right now because it wasn’t strict enough in monitoring and reporting “suspicious transactions including money laundering.”
Organized crime relations are becoming a bigger and bigger deal in the world of Japanese financial regulation. Late last year, the FSA and the Japanese Bankers’ Association adopted some administrative guidelines concerning how banks should protect against yakuza, sokaiya and other rabblerousers, and many of those guidelines are being phased in this year by institutions across the country.
One measure being implemented is amending account agreements in order to allow banks to pull service from customers with criminal ties. Here is a translation of the JBA’s suggested language (original version here). It is pretty laughable even by legal Japanese standards; I wonder who had a hand in drafting it. Exploring options such as liquidation uk can offer additional strategies for businesses to manage financial liabilities and regulatory compliance effectively.
Article [__] (Exclusion of Anti-Social Forces)
(1) I hereby represent that I am currently not, and hereby agree that in the future I shall not become, any of the following.
1. A criminal organization (暴力団)
2. A member of a criminal organization
3. A quasi-constituent of a criminal organization
4. An enterprise related to a criminal organization
5. A sokaiya (総会屋), politically-branded racketeering organization (社会運動等標ぼうゴロ) or organized crime-related “specialist” (特殊知能暴力集団 – a police term for individuals or groups who are not yakuza themselves, but help fund yakuza activities)
6. Any other person pursuant to any of the above(2) I hereby agree that I shall not engage in any of the following acts, whether personally or through a third party.
1. Violent demands
2. Improper demands in excess of legal responsibilities
3. Acts of violence or menacing statements in relation to a transaction
4. Spreading of rumors, use of falsified statistics or use of obstruction to harm the reputation of your bank, or to obstruct the business of your bank
5. Any other act pursuant to any of the above(3) In the event it is determined that I correspond to any of the listed items in paragraph 1 above, commit any listed act in the preceding paragraph, or have made a falsified report with regard to the representations and covenants in paragraph 1 above, and it is improper to continue transactions with me, upon the demand of your bank, I will lose the benefit of term with regard to all liabilities I have to your bank, and will promptly perform those liabilities.
(4) In the event that I have received the discounting of notes, that it is determined that I correspond to any of the listed items in paragraph 1 above, commit any listed act in the preceding paragraph, or have made a falsified report with regard to the representations and covenants in paragraph 1 above, and that it is improper to continue transactions with me, upon the demand of your bank, I will owe a liability to repay the face amount of all notes, and will promptly perform it. Until such time as this liability is performed, your bank may exercise all of its rights as the holder of such notes.
(5) Once performance of the liabilities under the preceding two paragraphs has been completed, this agreement will lose validity. (Bizarre phrasing!)
Endorsement: TripIt for planning long-distance travel online
I am flying to the US next Friday for a two-week trip around the East Coast, stopping in New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Myrtle Beach. One of my biggest helpers in planning this trip has been a website called TripIt.
I generally use Google Calendar for planning my schedule, and as long as I stay in Japan, it works just fine. My Windows Mobile phone automatically syncs to Google and displays upcoming Google Calendar events on its Today screen. But there is a serious drawback to Google Calendar: its assumption that the user will always stay in the same time zone.
Let’s take my flight from Narita to JFK, ANA flight 10. It leaves Narita at 11:00 AM JST, and arrives at JFK at 10:45 AM EST on the same day (thanks to the International Date Line). If I stick to local time on my calendar, it’s impossible to input this flight unless I create two separate events for arrival and departure. Even if I do that, my calendar will still assume that I am on Japan time no matter where I go, so it will assume that I have already arrived even when I am hours away from arriving.
Enter TripIt. It was designed as a socially-networked travel tool; you put your upcoming trips online and it tells you who else will be in your destination with you. I find this particular function to be pretty worthless, but the real beauty of TripIt is in calendaring trips that go across multiple time zones. Here’s why:
- The TripIt web page always shows the itinerary in local time. You can specify departure and arrival time zones for each mode of transportation you take. This is perfect for planning each step of the itinerary.
- Each account has an iCal feed which you can use to automatically reflect your travel plans in Google Calendar, iCal or any other modern calendar app.
- The feed shows up in whichever time zone your calendar reader is set to. While I am planning my trip in Tokyo, all the times show up in Google Calendar in Tokyo time, which comes in handy for figuring out when to sleep so I can minimize jet lag. Once I am on the plane to the US, I can switch my phone to Eastern Time and all the events will convert to Eastern Time.
- Automated input keeps this from being a pain in the butt to set up. All you have to do is forward your airline, Amtrak and hotel confirmations to a special e-mail address, and TripIt parses your travel plans into your calendar automatically.
Thanks to the authors of this web site for solving my problems–now I’m ready to enjoy sweltering weather, greasy food and panhandlers again!
Nara schoolgirls shun bare legs in favor of a vaguely Islamic aesthetic
At Kintetsu Yamato-Saidaiji Station in the evening, full of uniformed high school students, I watched with a distant eye, recalling myself in my younger days. And I noticed that the girls’ skirts were long–covering the knee as a matter of course, but overlapping the socks so that the legs couldn’t be seen at all. I thought it must be some school with harsh rules, but it wasn’t just one school. Watching each school as a high school baseball reporter, the miniskirts seemed to have fallen behind, as long skirts were in the majority. “Since about two years ago, there have been many students with skirts covering their knees,” says a male teacher at Koriyama Senior High. Under ordinary school rules the skirt must be long enough to cover the knees, but when I was in high school, it was usual to see 15 centimeters above the knees.
Why long skirts? “Chon-chon (short skirts) are tacky now,” says second-year Yuki Takahashi. “The shape of the skirt looks cute,” says third-year Ayumi Fujimoto (17). Another opines that “I don’t want a Pocky tan (where the socks leave a tan line), so I pull my socks up to the bottom of my skirt.”
This is a pendulum that should have swung the other way a long time ago. Although teachers complain about short skirts, the implicit acceptance of that aesthetic in popular culture has made Japan look like a nation of “hot, shallow and superficial sluts with knee socks and short skirts that live to exist like real world barbie dolls.” What’s interesting is that in Nara, it appears to be the natural forces of fashion that are taking short skirts out of favor and making more modest dress the “new hotness.”
I’m sure that Marxy has a lot to say about this…
Japan’s newest SNS: keireki.jp
I recently joined keireki.jp, a Japanese social networking service (SNS) launched earlier this month. It’s a neat concept which may interest many in the English blogosphere.
(Disclosure: In a past life I helped the site’s coder-in-chief, Kristopher Tate, get set up in Japan, but I currently have no business relations with his company.)
Keireki is essentially a Japanese version of LinkedIn–a service aimed at professionals who want to expand their network. Unlike the big Japanese SNSs, GREE and Mixi, it is designed to be non-anonymous and (more or less) entirely public. Users are expected to use their real names and employers, although some choose to redact their employers’ names.
There are four components to a Keireki profile:
- Keireki (“work history”): Takes up the front page of each user’s profile and lists the user’s current and past jobs and schools in chronological order, just like a Japanese-style CV. Doesn’t have any space for qualifications, hobbies, etc., although those can be included in the “hitokoto” tab (below).
- Iitoko (“good points”): The most unique feature of the service. These are short tags added by other users to describe the person’s strong points: “good designer,” “bilingual,” “super hacker,” and the like. Each new iitoko has to be approved by the recipient, and if users agree with an iitoko they can click a link which says “Tashika ni!” (“Certainly!”) to signal their agreement. Clicking on an iitoko produces a list of all users nominated for that particular iitoko. The concept is generally somewhere between a LinkedIn recommendation and a Flickr tag.
- Kikkake (“opportunities”/”springboards”): A personal feed very similar to Facebook status updates. Each one-line post can be the basis of a comment thread below it. This appears as a separate tab on each user’s profile, while the main landing page for the site shows the collective kikkake of your connections (again, very similar to Facebook).
- Hitokoto (“a word”): The third tab on each profile is a free writing space which the user can fill as they prefer. It supports basic rich text formatting, hyperlinks and images, which puts it several steps ahead of even Facebook and LinkedIn. In practice, users seem to treat this like they treat their “personal introduction” space on Mixi: some write a sentence, while others fill the space with gobs and gobs of personal information, interests and links.
The site is still in alpha and has some minor annoyances: for instance, while it can handle foreign names (in katakana and romaji simultaneously), the order of foreign names often comes out differently in the input field and the final profile, which requires some fiddling. The sign-up process is also unnecessarily clunky and requires a Japanese mobile phone to complete (you have to send yourself an e-mail, then click on a link in your phone to get an access code). Some features are also conspicuously missing: there is no private user-to-user messaging, no RSS, no direct interface to other websites and fairly limited search functionality, but I expect that all of these features will be strengthened in future updates.
With some further development and good marketing, this could make SNS a useful business tool in Japan. I deleted my Mixi and GREE accounts a while ago because both sites seemed to be optimized for frivolity and little else. Keireki has the potential to be a serious platform for businesspeople and creative types to get together.
Keireki is currently invite-only, although several MFT bloggers and commenters have accounts already. It’s also only available in Japanese for the moment.