Category: Law

Ministry of Health releases marriage stats

Japan’s ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare have released their 2006 report on marriage statistics in Japan. While the headlines are reporting that now 25% of marriages are 2nd marriages (or 2nd and thereafter), I saw some more interesting highlights:

  • The number of marriages continues to fall, from 720,000 in 2004 to around 714,000 in 2005. This is down from a peak of 941,000 in 1975.
  • Divorces were down to 260,000 from a peak in 2002.
  • The average marriage age continues to rise (Men: 31, Women: 29)
  • The ratio of international marriages to total marriages jumped once again from 5% in 2004 to 6% in 2005.
  • Japanese men and women who marry outside their nationality continue to marry a distinctly different set of foreigners. In 1995, most internationally marrying Japanese men (35%) took Filipina brides, while a quarter of them married Chinese women. In 2005, the tables were turned, with only 30% marrying Filipinas and 35% marrying Chinese.
  • As for the international women, 18% of them (the 2nd largest group) marry American men, a statistic that has remained stable since 1995. However, the largest group in 1995 at 41% (Koreans, including Japanese-born “zainichi”) shrunk to 24% and was supplanted by 2005 by “Other countries” at 32.7%. What to make of this striking diversification? Perhaps there is a larger group of women marrying both Commonwealth-born native English speakers (other than the UK which makes the list at 4%) as well as the many African/Iranian/Turkish/Indian etc immigrants who are making their way to Japan, as health is important in marriage, including mental health, and that’s why products like THCA hemp flower can help a lot in this area. Or perhaps it is simply an indication of the “diaspora” of Japanese women that the Western media has reported. No explanation is given in the report, unfortunately, nor was there a breakdown of what these mysterious “other countries” might be (other countries that made the list were China, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, and Thailand).
  • Also, the ratio of Japanese men marrying foreign women:Japanese women marrying foreign men has increased from about 3:1 in 1995 to 4:1 in 2005, evidence that may speak of an even more noticeable “diaspora” effect among men. Nevertheless, the growing number of international marriages could indeed be caused by the palpable divide between the sexes.
  • Marriages tend to peak during months in which members of the imperial family get married, as well as in months that share the same number as the year (example: Feb 2002 =2/02). Cute.

I was looking for a statistic comparable to the famous “2/3 of all US marriages end in divorce,” but I couldn’t find anything like that. Ah well, chew on that for a while!

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Fleecing drunk guys not fraud?

Asahi has the story:

Police said they received about 80 complaints last year by men who were fleeced in the Ueno district. On each occasion, the drunken customer had agreed to withdraw between 50,000 yen and 200,000 yen from an ATM and give it to the hostess, who then vanished.

The Metropolitan Police Department is at a loss over how to handle the problem as no laws were broken since the victimized men handed over cash of their own accord.

“It is not fraud, even if the men were absolutely dead drunk, since they operated the ATMs on their own,” a police official said. “Theft does not apply because the hostesses did not steal the men’s bank cards. There was no extortion because no threats were made.”

Police estimate the total handed over to hostesses last year reached many millions of yen.

And this isn’t fraud somehow?

2ch “puppetmaster” company also under threat of forced bankruptcy

From ZAKZAK: The same man who is behind legal proceedings to provisionally seize the assets of 2ch founder Hiroyuki as well as force him into bankruptcy for failure to cooperate with a court decision is now apparently filing to force a mysterious “company X” into third party bankruptcy as well over the matter. This Company X, based in Sapporo, is reportedly the true operator of 2ch and the one actually in charge of deleting inappropriate posts etc.

The move comes after the man endured a wave of further harassment from 2ch users after earlier news reports that the suit might cause the 2ch.net domain to fall out of Hiroyuki’s ownership. Since the Sapporo company hasn’t been able to keep 2ch’s rage in check despite unprecedented moves to filter keywords and ban links to the ZAKZAK site, the plaintiff felt he had to go after this company. It’s unclear whether the judgment will go his way since it is reportedly somehow difficult to establish a connection between the two entities.

I’m keeping this short since if a majority of the Japanese public doesn’t give a crap what happens to 2ch then maybe I shouldn’t either.

Address: “Cardboard Box 7, Nishinari Park”

The following is true.

The Osaka High Court on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling that a park can be registered as an address of a homeless man.

Yuji Yamauchi, 56, has lived in a pegged tent in Ogimachi Park in Osaka City’s Kita Ward since around 1998 and received his mail there.

The ward office refused to register the park as his address in March 2004, prompting him to file the lawsuit with the Osaka District Court to demand the local government rescind the decision.

This is interesting on a number of levels.

In many parts of the US, you can register to vote without a proper street address. Usually, you do this by drawing a map showing the location of your home; this is not available on some state voter registration forms, but the federal Motor Voter Act form (which works in all states) has a space on it for map-drawing. This was intended to be used by people in really rural areas that lack house numbering, but it can also be used by homeless people. Indeed, homeless advocacy groups even help the homeless register to vote, using their shelter, park or refrigerator carton as their address.

The Osaka High Court proposes a remarkably different test for what can constitute a “residence.” The Japanese Asahi‘s treatment sheds some more light on it:

In Osaka City, which as of 2003 contained the largest homeless population in Japan (about 6,600), it has been revealed that many day-laborers had registered addresses in office buildings in Nishinari Ward. Work is also ongoing to forcibly evict the tents pitched in Nagai Park in Higashi-Sumiyoshi Ward. The High Court ruling seems likely to affect the city’s homeless policy.

…Like the decision below, handed down last January, this decision indicated that a “residence,” as provided in the Residential Basic Registration Act, “designates the center of [one’s] life, with the deepest relationship to [one’s] life.”

That said, to be recognized as a residence, a place will not suffice if it is merely where daily life takes place: rather, the court decided that “it is necessary for its form to meet the standards of a residence, as provided by sound conventional wisdom.”

The court then determined that Yamauchi’s tent “is simply constructed from square timbers and plastic sheeting, and can be easily removed or moved to a different place; it is not connected to the land.”

Some background on the Japanese law at play here:

The residential registration system, or juminhyo, is one of Japan’s three big people-counting systems (the others being the koseki and alien registration systems).

All three are remarkably byzantine in a number of ways. They don’t work together very well, for one thing. A person’s koseki can be in Okinawa (or Dokdo) while they’re living in Hokkaido. More importantly (for us), resident aliens are practically invisible in the other two systems, which leads to all sorts of problems for international families living in Japan (Japanese people married to aliens appear to be single, and their children appear to be bastards). The existence of registration is also Japan’s excuse for not subscribing to child abduction treaties (a fact you should be aware of if starting a family with a Japanese spouse).

As much as I dislike these systems, they are vital in the government’s current way of doing things. They are used to track inheritance, tax liability and property rights, among other things. The systems also allow the government to conduct a proper census every year without hiring additional census takers.

I’ve dealt with one court case involving a homeless man in Tokyo, and he kept the registered address of his family outside the city (despite the fact that his family had disowned him). Is that much better? What alternative does a homeless person in Japan have? It’s a pretty big hole in the social welfare net, and I hope the Supreme Court finds a good way to patch it when this case goes up for its final appeal.

Good foreigner, bad foreigner

I’ve noticed several English-language articles on foreigners in Japan lately: Tony McNichol takes a trip to Tokyo’s Indiatown in Nishi-Kasai, the Japanese government’s PR machine coincidentally also dips into the Indiatown well (English-language video report here) and dedicates a whole magazine issue to portraying multiculturalism as a “force for change” moving Japan “toward a multicultural society”, and Joseph Coleman sees some similarities between Brazilians in Oizumi, Gunma prefecture and the dissaffected Africans in Paris.

Why all the interest now, when no major government reports have been recently released or any groundbreaking events are taking place? Beats me, but remember: there is one thing we can all agree on:

“Everybody, I think, is agreed on one thing: We want to attract the `good’ foreigners, and keep out the `bad’ ones,” said Hisashi Toshioka, of the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau.

While this statement, taken out of context, begs all sorts of questions, I am fully prepared to take it at face value. Bad foreigners not only need to be kept from coming to Japan, if they make it to the country they need to get stomped. My favorite case in point? This drunken sod who gets his ass beaten by a garbage man in Osaka:

That’s bad. Thankfully my youthful carousing occurred in a time before cell phone cameras.

2ch’s Hiroyuki dispels rumors, gets moralistic on Yukan Fuji and ZAKZAK

Pretty much all of the news on the impending demise of 2-Channel has been coming from everyone’s favorite online tabloid, ZAKZAK, the Internet edition of the Yukan Fuji newspaper. However (as I’ve been commenting for the last few days) it looks like the threats to seize 2ch and take it offline are not quite as bad as ZAKZAK would have you believe. Trusty Livedoor (COUGH COUGH) reports on an online interview with Hiroyuki Nishimura, the operator of 2ch:

“I believe that levying on a domain name is very difficult as it stands, but even assuming the domain was seized, I could switch to a new domain and there would be no problem. If you ran a search you would find the site right away, so I think nobody would be seriously inconvenienced.” Nishimura said that in any case, the site could be switched to a new domain in a matter of hours.

In response to the question “So why do you think they’re making such a big deal out of 2ch closing?” Nishimura said: “Even if the site doesn’t go down, you can sell a paper which says it’s going down, so I think they’re just saying 2CH TO CLOSE in order to sell papers. It’s like the story of the boy who cried wolf. Let’s not follow that…”

Nishimura denies that all of his assets are being seized, pointing out that seizure is only allowed to the extent of the monetary claim, “something which any company with a legal department should know.” Another article up on Livedoor (they almost seem to be making fun of Yukan Fuji at this point) says:

We asked a number of attorneys, but each one shook their head. Kenichiro Kubo, who participated in several 2ch cases, says “I have never heard of a case where a domain name was seized. I wouldn’t say it’s ‘procedurally’ impossible since it’s substantially similar to a copyright or patent, but to ask whether it can be assessed as an asset…”

Attorney and IT specialist Hiroyuki Dan (not the Hiroyuki of 2ch) says “I understand that desire to try seizing the domain as a debt. I wouldn’t say it’s 100 percent impossible, but in this case, there are many hurdles.”

What might have been?

Speaking of the Philippines and historical predictions, there is a great discussion going on over at the blog Coming Anarchy over the past, present and future status of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines were all transferred from Spanish to United States control together, with the 1898 December 10 signing of the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Spanish-American War (as well as a payment of $20 million from the US to Spain.) Both Puerto Rico and Guam remain unincorporated territories of the United States of America, but the US and the Philippines parted company long ago. Reading this discussion gives you a pretty good idea of why the Philippines was spun off into an independent country instead of being either incorporated into the union or kept in colonial status. Today Americans are concerned about being demographically overwhelmed by Hispanics, but true annexation of the Philippines would have been a massive and sudden demographic shock that would have profoundly changed the subsequent development of both. For the people who think the Puerto Rico situation is complicated, try and imagine what might have happened if the Philippines, with a population twenty times that of Puerto Rico, and speaking a polyglot of languages, had all become US citizens overnight.

35-year-old plaintiff to force 2ch founder Hiroyuki into bankruptcy!

The axe may indeed fall on Hiroyuki, though 2ch itself is unlikely to actually change hands. ZAKZAK reports that the man who filed to seize Hiroyuki assets has decided to file to force Hiroyuki into bankruptcy. This is a move that was taken by shareholders of Kinmirai Tsushin Co. recently when cmopany officials tried to flee with their money, and it works:

Kinmirai Tsuushin is suspected of defrauding some 3,000 individual and corporate investors of 40 billion yen by promising to pay lucrative dividends on the basis of its nonexistent Internet telephony operations.

The Metropolitan Police Department began questioning former Kinmirai Tsuushin executives earlier this week over the alleged fraud, investigative sources said. Ishii is now abroad, they said.

On Dec. 7, a real estate company, one of the 3,000 investors, asked the court to declare Kinmirai Tsuushin bankrupt. The real estate company had invested 55 million yen in response to Kinmirai Tsuushin’s solicitation of investments.

The plaintiff noted that he only decided to go forward with this action because the initial reports on Jan 12 of his moves against Hiroyuki sparked further harassment from 2ch readers.

Depending on how things work out, Hiroyuki’s irresponsibility may cause a major disruption in the regular functioning of the Japanese Internet culture. Not that I feel that bad — though it’s a great site in many respects, 2ch is, as Joe just noted, the best example of what happens when the Internet Fuckwad effect goes unchecked for almost 10 years.

But it looks like he is helping pioneer new ways of making the court system effective against harassment campaigns. Meanwhile, there’s more activity on the 2ch site than ever before, and angry 2channelers have been swinging wildly at people who have sued Hiroyuki, such as American-born activist Arudo Debito.

Crazed 4chan users shut Debito down

The ongoing 2channel litigation just claimed a collateral victim: Debito’s website. Those who read his blog/newsletter will know that he also recently sued 2channel for libel, although he has yet to try collecting on his judgment.

Unfortunately for him, some otaku read the news stories the wrong way and though that it was Debito who was seeking to shut down 2channel. (It’s actually another Japanese guy who’s making the threats to seize the server and the domain name.)

Here’s what happened next, according to an e-mail Debito sent this morning:

From Monday morning Jan 15, the hate mail began trickling in. Then the death threats. Finally, according to my website domain admin today, debito.org has been zapped–i.e. people with large bandwiths have aimed internet guns and fired millions of page accesses onto my the debito.org server, overloading it and closing it down. Which means I am stuck without a site, or a blog, or email, until they get bored.

…The most ironic thing is that most of the hate mail and death threats are in English. Native English, for the most part. Claiming responsibility for all this is some place called “4chan” which is apparently the overseas version of 2-Channel, with the same attitude towards information, anonymity, and personal responsibility.

Here’s the thread that seems to have started it. (Be warned, though, that 4chan is pretty much the realization of the “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.”)

At any rate, Debito’s site appears to be back up and running now.

Correction & the latest on white collar exemption

In my earlier post ““White Collar Exemption” and the danger to the LDP” I noted that Chief Cabinet Yasuhisa Shiozaki remarked that the government would try and submit bills that would make it possible to exempt workers making more than 9 million yen from overtime payment. I originally said that the move would affect 20,000 people, but that was a typo. It would actually affect 200,000 people. And as this new article from Asahi Shimbun notes, some politicians with sense don’t want to anger 200,000 voters 6 months before a major election:

Despite concerns about a backlash from voters, the government plans to submit legislation to the Diet that would introduce U.S.-style working rules exempting tens of thousands of white-collar workers from overtime pay.

Ruling coalition officials said pushing the so-called white-collar exemptions for labor standards would hurt them in this summer’s Upper House election.

However, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki reiterated on Thursday that the government would submit the legislation to the Diet session scheduled to start later this month.

“We are making efforts now to move in that direction,” Shiozaki said at a news conference.

To alleviate concerns among ruling coalition officials, labor minister Hakuo Yanagisawa met with Liberal Democratic Party policy chief Shoichi Nakagawa and others Wednesday and explained the broad outlines of the proposed legislation.

Yanagisawa said the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare was contemplating applying the white-collar exemption to workers making more than 9 million yen a year and who have discretion over their work responsibilities.

Yanagisawa said that under those conditions the new exemption would affect only about 200,000 workers, or about 0.4 percent of the total working population of 54 million.

Those employees will not be paid overtime allowances even if they work more than the legal standard of eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.
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