Category: Japan

Is Alberto Fujimori Japanese?

Following on Joe’s Alberto Fujimori post, I have some different issues that I would like to examine. Why is Alberto Fujimori being protected by the Japanese government? What legal rights does he have in Peru or Japan? What is his citizenship under the law of both countries? I think the best way to examine this is with a timeline of his life, and references to the appropriate law.

This is going to be a long one, so click below for the entire thing.
Continue reading Is Alberto Fujimori Japanese?

Chilling in Tokyo vs. political martyrdom

, Peru’s first president of Japanese ancestry, was managing to get some peace in Tokyo, where he’s a citizen and outside the scope of extradition treaties. But for some reason, he decided to fly back to South America. He says he wants to run for president again in 2006: the national legislature passed a law barring him from running until 2011, but he claims the law is unconstitutional. (You’d think it would be, assuming Peru has some sort of equal protection…)

Well, whatever his motive, here’s what happened: once he got to Chile, the authorities showed up at his hotel room and arrested him. He’s been denied bail and Peru wants him extradited; his supporters in Peru say that he has “a plan” and won’t be extradited. Whatever happens, he’s going to be in Chile for about four weeks, as that’s how long the criminal procedures in Peru are supposed to take. Chile has authority to hold him for up to two months before he is sent to Peru.

Peru has charged Fujimori with a number of nasty crimes, including supporting the FARC forces in Colombia, “disappearing” a few scores of students, and pushing a policy of forced sterilization for population control. The more plausible charges include millions of dollars’ worth of corruption and way too much zeal in going after terrorist groups, including the Shining Path guerillas and the MRTA forces that took over the Japanese embassy in Lima in 1997.

Make no mistake, though: Fujimori is not a demon in his home country. Peru is sharply divided over him. His supporters see him as a hero for liberalizing Peru’s economy and shutting down terrorist groups that made life difficult in the eighties. His opponents, including President Toledo, see him as a tyrant who stole from the people, handing back just enough to keep his popularity up. While he isn’t doing too well in the polls for president right now, he’s doing all right for someone who’s been campaigning illegally in absentia.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of trial he ends up getting. Will it be a giant political show? Which charges will be brought, and which will be substantiated? Will he ever become president? Will he rot in a prison cell? Or will he spend his final days hawking ?

Taro Aso, Muneo Suzuki violated Japanese Election Law

What, me worry?
According to the awesome citizen reporting site JANJAN, Taro Aso and Muneo Suzuki are among many Japanese politicians who were in violation of the Public Office Election Law as late as October 7.

Article 178 of the law (can be found here after a somewhat cumbersome search) states that it is illegal for the winner or loser of an election to distribute or display letters thanking constituents.

However, as of October 7, Taro Aso had this message on his site:

“I achieved my 9th victory in the 44th Lower House election, held this past September 11, thanks to the passionate support of all of you in [my] election district [Fukuoka 8th]. I give my hearty thanks from the bottom of my heart.”

And Muneo Suzuki, this:
“I express my gratitude regarding [my] recent election victory.”

The Diet members violating this law cannot be punished for it, as the POE Law is one of Japan’s “bekarazu ho” (“shouldn’t laws”) that gives lots of guidelines but little enforcement. However, one can face punishment if there is any sort of direct monetary benefit to voters pre- or post-election.

The same article bans “election victory celebrations,” morale-boosting act such as riding around cars or marching in groups, and giving out the names of people and groups that supported your election.

This issue is not new. In 2000, Shukan Post, one of Japan’s infamous weeklies, fingered MOF bureaucrat-turned-Diet member Ichizo Miyamoto for writing a letter thanking his constituents (article cached by Google here). Kind of unfair, though, (especially given the article’s inflammatory tone) considering that more than 80 politicians (or ex-politicians) are engaging in the same activity almost unscathed!

The article hints that the laws exist to prevent “ex post facto vote buying,” which makes sense. I mean, who wouldn’t vote for whoever throws the most bitchin’ parties?

So long and thanks for all the fish

Iruka

Curzon over at ComingAnarchy.com has this to say on Japan’s scientific whaling program, which incidentally will double the number of minke whales caught this year:

Be against whaling if you like, it’s all a distraction from the vast overfishing of fish, not whales, that is the real environmental issue of the day. And as for the ban on hunting whales, nothing makes people want to eat this relatively untasty meat than being told they can’t eat it by a bunch of self-righteous outsiders.

I’ve never been all that opposed to, or all that bothered by Japan’s whaling policies, so I don’t see much point in beating a close ally over the head about this. And Curzon’s right that there’s no better way to really make whale meat a part of Japan’s culture then to tell the Japanese that it isn’t.

So, I don’t have much to add to that.

However, with regards to the program’s function as a distraction, I think Japan should be glad that environmentalists were too busy gearing up for this fight to pay much attention to the Taiji Dolphin Slaughter. (Japan might also be glad that one of their nickname for the whales, 海のゴキブリ or “cockroach of the sea” hasn’t been widely translated in to English. Why in God’s name anyone would want to eat a cockroach, I’ve not the slightest idea.)

The Taiji Dolphin Slaughter, you say?

Surely you remember last month’s massive Worldwide Day of Protest against the Japanese Dolphin Slaughter?

protest

No?

Actually, I almost didn’t hear about it either. In fact, the only reason I even knew about it was a full page advert in the NYT announcing it. And then I forgot all about it until I read Curzon’s post earlier today.

Anyway, go check out some video and what happens when an environmentalist with a computer has way too much time on his hands here.

Sure, this is some pretty greusome stuff. But I’m not sure it’s all that different from the still moving fish, with its belly meat lined up on a bed of grated daikon, one pays damned good money to be served on a plate at a nice sushi restaurant.

Besides, Japan fought to save the dugong. Don’t they deserve some credit for that?

Teaching courtroom antics in Japan and China

Eddie Ohlbaum, an amazing trial lawyer who teaches evidence and trial advocacy classes at Temple (in which I am a quite happy student), was just in Japan teaching lawyers how to BS a jury.

It’s a fun story, but not nearly as dramatic as the real reason for his Asian tour: he was going to assist lawyers in the first due process trial ever held in the People’s Republic of China. On the last day of class before he left, he gave us a brief but impassioned speech about how proud he was to be part of this.

Note the lack of a link here: that’s because it didn’t happen. Instead, he and his colleagues were allowed to witness… a guilty plea. With some superficial witness statements tacked on to determine sentencing: each side was allowed exactly two questions per witness. Ohlbaum’s account of the entire affair was quite amusing: he described his conversations with the defense lawyer, who had no clue that anything special was going on. “But you just went through fifty pages’ worth of discovery!” “Uh, yeah.” “Have you ever seen that much discovery in a trial before?” “No…” “Have you ever seen ANY discovery in a trial before?” “Uh, I guess not… what’s your point?”

The whole thing smacked of show in the end. One highlight: while the defendant was eligible for 3 to 10 years in prison (extortion charges), he got off with five years’ probation. PROBATION. According to Ohlbaum, when the sentence was handed down, the lawyer looked around the courtroom as if to say: “Huh? Am I still in China?”

The other money quote from the good professor’s Asia recap was this: “If you can choose to commit a crime in Japan or the U.S., seriously, it’s worth it to buy the plane ticket.”

Shinzo Abe, barbarian-defeating shogun?

Now that we’ve completely trashed Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s political qualifications, it’s time to look at Shinzo Abe, the new Chief Cabinet Secretary and Minister of State for Taking Over After Koizumi, shown here in all-out “I’m gonna be a world leader someday!” mode.

Like Koizumi, Abe is a popular guy. Also like Koizumi, he enjoys ruffling feathers, whether it’s advocating a tougher defense policy or visiting Yasukuni Shrine. He is often described as “hawkish,” although I think that word is a bit loaded. He’s certainly confrontational, though: his fame comes from negotiations with North Korea over the abductee issue, in which he refused to take much crap.

Like Aso, he has a political pedigree, although it doesn’t go too far back. Abe’s father Shintaro Abe was Secretary-General of the LDP and served in the Nakasone cabinet back in the mid-80’s. His maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was Prime Minister in the late 1950’s and younger brother of Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Kishi and Sato were both rags-to-riches stories, so Abe’s political lineage ends there.

He started out at Kobe Steel after college, then worked his way into the bureaucracy and became his father’s secretary during the elder Abe’s tenure as Secretary-General. After his father died in 1991, he ran for the empty seat representing Yamaguchi Prefecture, won it, and slipped from the administration into the government.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary position, a combination of press secretary and chief of staff, gives Abe an excellent platform to become even more well-known to the people (many CCSes have gone on to become prime ministers, most recently the late Keizo Obuchi). But he shouldn’t need too much help: he’s already way ahead of the field in opinion polls. Abe has been getting some blogger support too: Lord Curzon is a longtime fan, for one.

Koizumi is using his great political capital to give the country a choice between a hard-ass and a wack-ass. This Yomiuri writer says it Japanese-style:

Koizumi, by including possible successors in the Cabinet, intends to let them compete with each other to come up with ideas and efforts for reform, a decision that suggests the prime minister is grooming an heir to inherit a shogunate named “reform.” … Koizumi, in his reshuffle, made it quite clear he wants this shogunate of reform to be inherited by Abe.

The choice is pretty obvious; hopefully the obvious choice will be made, so Japan doesn’t end up with a prime minister who’s obsessed with “floppies.”

CAVEAT: It could be one of those dark horses, too, like finance minister Sadakazu Tanigaki. But Abe is who just about everyone seems to want.

The origin of “viking”

Hurts... to... look...
I was feeling a little curious, so I looked up the origin of the word “viking” (as in the Japanese word for buffet “baikingu” or バイキング)…

Apparently it was started when the Teikoku Hotel offered up its first buffet… They put out a call for suggestions within the company, and a few people wrote in saying that such a buffet reminded them of the feast scene in the Kirk Douglas movie “The Vikings“… Such an association was apparently common among Japanese people at the time, so the feasts were a huge hit and the name stuck.

(Source: Some random website)

What a boring explanation! I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I hoped it would be better than the name of some movie…

What elegance!

What elegance!

Another airport in Tokyo?

Narita has expanded as far as it can go. Haneda, already the busiest airport in Asia, can’t go anywhere but further into the bay. Tokyo will eventually need a third airport, or so we’re told.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, with Ishihara’s personal blessing, wants to use Yokota Air Base, a U.S. Air Force base in west Tokyo, for civilian flights. That seems somewhat unlikely now, since the base is going to have expanded duty as the Air Self-Defense Force’s command center (protests be damned), on top of its existing role as headquarters for U.S. forces in Japan.

The other option is to build offshore. Several sites have already been proposed, most of them in Tokyo Bay, except for one site off of the Kujukuri Beach on the Pacific coast of Chiba (obviously a bad idea; spoil a nice beach with an airport that’s even farther from Tokyo than Narita?!).

Is the third airport really necessary? After all, Narita just had to cut its landing fees to stay competitive. I think it all has to do with the fact that the Kansai region will have three airports as of next February. Ishihara just doesn’t want his half of Japan to fall behind.

London has five airports and is getting along just fine. That doesn’t mean that more is necessarily better. Berlin is in transition from three airports to just one. Maybe Tokyo will someday admit that Narita was a dumb idea, and run all of its flights from a humongous future version of Haneda, acres and acres of concrete sprawling out into the bay.

Taro Aso: the future of Japan?


Prime Minister Koizumi’s new cabinet is in place this week, and one of the apparent front-runners to succeed him is this interesting fellow, Taro Aso, now Minister of Foreign Affairs.

We’ve already talked about some of his more asinine comments: that burakumin shouldn’t be in government, that Japan is one race, that Korea was better off under colonial rule, that floppy disks are the future, and all that.

But there’s more to Aso-san than just knee-jerk right-wingery. Let’s look at his colorful past:

  • Aso’s father, Takakichi Aso, was a big businessman: he owned a large cement company, Aso Cement. He later entered the Diet and was buddies with Kakuei Tanaka, the Nixonian prime minister of Japan who spent half of his life amassing political capital in Niigata and the other half split between running the LDP from the shadows and fending off prosecution for corruption. (Tanaka’s daughter Makiko is the short-lived foreign minister who called Bush an asshole.)
  • Takakichi’s wife (Taro’s mother) was Shigeru Yoshida’s daughter—Yoshida being the postwar prime minister who set up Japan’s foreign and domestic policy for much of the Cold War era.
  • Yoshida’s wife’s father was Nobuaki Makino, a Meiji-era diplomat and politician; Makino’s father was the famous samurai Okubo Toshimichi.
  • Back to Taro Aso himself: he represented Japan in the shooting events at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, while still president of the cement company he inherited from his father (he gave it up to run for office in 1978, and now his brother runs the company).
  • He was appointed Minister of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications in 2003, and Koizumi apparently likes him, because he’s survived two subsequent cabinet reshuffles.

Now, he’s certainly qualified to be prime minister given the generally low standards that have been accepted historically: take a look at Koizumi’s predecessor, Yoshiro Mori, who greeted Bill Clinton by saying “Who are you?” and went on to screw up the Buddhist rites at Keizo Obuchi’s funeral later that day. Part of me wants Aso to become prime minister because there’s an excellent chance he’ll produce all sorts of hilarious Mori-esque gaffes that will make great blog material.

On the other hand, I love Japan too much to subject its people to this man’s leadership. His gaffes are not silly and laughable like Mori’s, but dark and pitiful, likely to kill what few good relations Japan enjoys with the rest of East Asia. Hopefully the LDP will not be foolish enough to elevate him to the top post; maybe he’s just a foil to make Shinzo Abe look better. We can only hope.