Category: Current Events

Shimamoto v. United and Japan’s legal attitudes toward alcohol

One of the odder legal stories of 2008 may have been a certain lawsuit against United Airlines by a certain Yoichi Shimamoto and his wife Ayisha. FlyerTalk had a big thread on it. Here’s a quick summary of what happened:

The Shimamotos were on a United flight from Japan to the US in business class, where alcohol is free and generally quite readily dispensed. Mr. Shimamoto became thoroughly trashed on the flight, and apparently a little belligerent. After deplaning at their first stop in San Francisco, while the couple was waiting in the immigration line, they got into an altercation of some sort and Mr. Shimamoto started beating his wife in public. He was arrested for assault, tried and convicted, and sentenced to probation in California followed by deportation to Japan.

Then it gets really weird. First, Mrs. Shimamoto successfully petitioned to have Mr. Shimamoto’s probation transferred to Florida, where Mrs. Shimamoto had a house. Then, with Mr. Shimamoto safely parked somewhere around Orlando, the couple sued United in Florida for Mrs. Shimamoto’s physical injuries and Mr. Shimamoto’s legal expenses, claiming that United should not have served more alcohol to Mr. Shimamoto while he was obviously wasted out of his mind. After a couple of weeks of spirited online discussion between armchair pundits, the Shimamotos withdrew their case. Perhaps United offered a settlement of some kind–the news reports do not say.

* * *

Although the gut reaction of most is to say “Ah-ha! Frivolous American litigiousness strikes again!” it’s actually quite easy for a booze server to incur tort liability because of their drunken patrons’ malfeasance. Every US state has some sort of “dram shop act” which imposes this sort of liability. Sales to minors are pretty much universally a basis for seller liability, and sales to the visibly intoxicated can lead to liability in many states.

Extending this general concept to an airline is not that illogical, although perhaps inconsistent with the fact that airplanes don’t really fall under a particular state’s jurisdiction while in flight (although the airlines themselves, which are tied firmly to the ground, might). Another hurdle is that most international flights fall under the Warsaw Convention, which caps the carrier’s liability for physical or property damage to passengers.

Of course, the real oddity in the Shimamotos’ case is that it wasn’t just the battered wife who sued–it was also her husband, who wasn’t really hurt except to the extent that he got himself in legal trouble. Still, the question of making airlines responsible for cutting off their patrons is an interesting one, and it may someday be solved in court by a more credible group of litigants.

* * *

A few posters at FlyerTalk have raised the question of whether Japanese law (and, by extension, society) condones or even encourages the practice of passing blame to the liquor or its server.

To some extent, this idea is actually getting traction in Japanese law, at least as far as The State is concerned. Anyone who eats out regularly in Japan has probably noticed the growing number of establishments that proudly state they will not serve alcohol to customers who come by car–this is largely because Japan’s revised Road Traffic Law of 2007 makes it a criminal offense for a restaurant or bar to provide alcohol to a person “at risk of” drunk driving. Another example is serving booze to minors, a crime under the “Fuzoku Eigyo” Act (which governs the nightlife industry generally) which can land the proprietor in jail.

Civil liability between private parties is a different story, though. It’s pretty well known that Japan is not a very litigious society–depending on which expert you ask, this is either because of cultural reasons (aversion to argument) or economic reasons (filing fees in Japanese courts are based on claim amount, so big lawsuits on a marginal basis are uneconomical to file, whereas the US system of charging flat filing fees encourages outlandish claims that can be whittled down through negotiation). So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that suing the bar for the drunkard’s acts has been less of a question in the Land of the Rising Nama.

It does come up, though. The scariest case for the bartender must be a 2001 case in Tokyo (noted in the Japanese Wikipedia article on drunk driving) where a group of friends drank for seven hours straight, got in a car and ran over a 19-year-old girl. The driver got seven years in prison, but his friends were found civilly liable to the tune of 58 million yen for having the guy drink while they knew he was getting behind the wheel. But in a more distant commercial context, there seems to be some reluctance to extend liability like this. Take one case in Saitama last year where families of victims of a drunk driving spree demanded that the barkeep’s criminal responsibility was as great as the driver’s. The judge handed down a suspended sentence for the alcohol providers, claiming that “there is no evidence that [they] expected the driver to act so recklessly (運転者の常軌を逸した暴走行為まで予見していた証拠はない).”

What’s the conclusion? Japan has a looser attitude toward alcohol in many ways (when’s the last time you’ve been carded here?) but its system can be pretty harsh on people who completely ignore its dangers. Thankfully, Mr. Shimamoto wouldn’t have much legal support under either system: the only tangible difference between the two countries in his case is that he can actually afford to waste the court’s time in the US.

Is the dual employment system an asset for Japan?

The Economist has its latest update on the economic situation in Japan. After outlining the dire situation of plunging exports and domestic consumer sentiment, the writer drops this bombshell:

There is cause to temper the pessimism. Households still have their savings. And bank lending to companies is on the rise, though a good chunk of this is taking over from credit once supplied by capital markets, which have dried up.

Crucially, adjustments are happening swiftly in areas that beleaguered companies tackled only slowly during the last slump, such as bloated workforces and excessive capacity. Bankruptcies of “zombie” companies long kept alive on cheap credit and an undervalued currency have soared now that credit is harder to get and the yen has risen to a fairer valuation on a trade-weighted basis. And at the end of a decade in which much more use was made of contract and temporary workers, companies are now laying these off fast. In order to reduce inventories, production is also being slashed. This marks a new flexibility in Japan’s economy.

Unemployment, now 3.9%, may head back towards the post-bubble high of 5.5%. At the same time, the structure of the labour force may lessen the pain. As the economy recovered, many companies asked workers from Japan’s huge generation of baby-boomers to stay on past retirement age. Plenty of these will now simply retire with their pensions. Swift adjustments to workforces and inventories mean that Japan may recover sooner than other rich economies.

Really? Is keeping a third of the population in employment limbo really that much of a boost? Surely, I don’t deny that unpleasant realities can prove positive for economic growth and stability, but I just have never senn anyone actually defend the dual employment system.

Among many including myself, it is almost taken for granted that Japan’s dual employment system is unfair and exploitative. And even among those who disagree, I have seen near universal dissatisfaction with the status quo.

In the postwar era, one of the defining aspects of Japan’s economy was lifetime employment, in which most employees at the core companies were given job security in exchange for loyalty and limited input into their career destinies. This system was instrumental in Japan’s development as it provided a highly motivated, highly skilled workforce and contributed to developing Japan’s broad middle class. While never the sole driver of Japanese development, it did form a core component of the “full mobilization” of Japanese society to achieve growth and development.

But the devastation of Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s meant that companies could no longer afford to fund generous seniority-based pay scales. In response, the Japanese government began instituting a series of reforms that expanded employers’ options to employ workers under different schemes, including fixed-term contracts (keiyaku shain) and temporary employment (haken shain).  Today, today non-regular employees make up around a third of Japan’s workforce. For example, a employé de ménage intérimaire roumain may work under a fixed-term contract, allowing her to fill labor shortages in the hospitality sector.

With 2/3 of workers given vastly better treatment for often the same work and experience, many have long called for reforms that would equalize the situation. The dual system persists, however, due to resistance from the big labor unions who instead claim that the temp and contract workers should be brought into the regular employee system.

As I mentioned, many such as the OECD and writer Masafumi Tsujihiro see this system as highly problematic in terms of basic fairness. But unlike the labor unions, they call for the elimination of the excessive protection of regular employees, which is backed up by court decisions that make the hurdles for firing employees quite high. 

Just off the top of my head, I would think that the US, with its reputation for having an enormous capacity to make “swift adjustments to workforces and inventories,” would beat Japan out of recession, all things equal.  So readers, help me out here — are haken really a blessing in disguise?

Once again: 9-11 was not a government conspiracy!

I am cross-posting an e-mail I wrote to a friend who I discovered actually believe in the so-called “9-11 Truth” conspiracy:

I just wanted to make my case for why the 9-11 attacks were most certainly not a government conspiracy. There are lots of crimes that the Bush goons are responsible for, but a massive domestic terrorist attack isn’t one of them.

The arguments for a 9-11 conspiracy usually hang on two big logical fallacies (1) red herrings that prove nothing (dozens of Saudis including bin Laden relatives left the country after 9-11 without being questioned, so the Bushes must be behind it!); and (2) Offering up massive amounts of dubious evidence that proves nothing but is too voluminous to realistically respond to (to illustrate this, just look at the pro-conspiracy Loose Change documentary and then the lengthy sites like this one set up just to debunk stuff like that!).

There is a lot of good, concise writing on this that should set your fears of a government cover-up at ease.

The best I have read so far is this, showing how difficult such a plot would be to keep secret. There are so many interested parties, from fire fighters to the relatives of foreign businesspeople who became victims, who want to know what happened to their loved ones, from a number of different countries, and very few of whom have any reason to accept an alternate version of events. Not only that, if Bush’s political enemies had any credible evidence showing he is really such a despicable monster they’d be using it.

Of course you should also read through the 9-11 Commission Report (PDF). It is on the long side but is actually a very engaging read.

If you are going to take a class on government and politics, it is important to not be distracted by an inaccurate version of events. Conspiracy theories can be very compelling, but much like the stories of alien abduction and alternative therapies they shouldn’t really be taken seriously.

More generally, I would recommend taking a look at the site skeptoid.com, especially his pieces on critical thinking and logical fallacies (parts 1 and 2). I think you’ll find that seeing where conspiracy theorists go wrong is much more rewarding than subscribing to those theories yourself.

Best,
Adam

Graham and Kim

Our friend Curzon over at the Cominganarchy blog posted last week an excellent piece on the history of the involvement between the familes of the Reverend Billy Graham and the Kim dynasty of North Korea. The connections are, as usual, longer and more interesting than one would expect from just reading the news. I highly recommend reading it.

The Masonic Bible

Slate’s Explainer column is always a good read, but this week’s installment on the bibles used for presidential inaugurations was particularly amusing.

George W. Bush wanted to use the Washington Bible for his first inauguration, as his father had done, but the plan was foiled by drizzly weather. The Masons are extremely careful with the Washington Bible: They refuse to let the artifact be X-rayed at airport security and demand that the president be the only one who touches it without gloves.

Drug war roundup

I know we have a lot of fans of The Wire on here, and I think we’ll all appreciate this series on the drug war by Culture 11 magazine. The link is to an anti drug-war piece, which itself links to a pro drug-war piece, a piece specifically on the insanity of marijuana prohibition, and then some debate between the sides. It really is the height of madness that, as a society, we aggressively promote the consumption of the two deadly drugs of alcohol and nicotine and the one moderately safe drug of caffeine (which, did you know, can be freebased like cocaine?) while devoting endless resources to combatting the production, trade, distribution and consumption of every other category of recreational drug. I would be perfectly happy to see 100% legalization of all recreational drugs for adults, replacing the entire drug war aparatus with a moderate boost in traffic cops to manage DUI cases, which are probably the main way that legal drug use can directly harm people besides the user. Of course drug use causes harm to society, but I don’t see how even unrestrained drug use by everyone who wants to go down that road could possibly cause even a fraction of the damage that has been caused by the drug war itself.

[Update] One of the comments on that first piece links to this opinion piece in Time Magazine by the chief three writers of The Wire, in which they suggest that the best way to fight the drug war is through massive civil disobedience.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest.

They make an interesting case. Of course, if I publically stated here that I was willing to make the same pledge, I might be disqualified from ever serving on such a jury, so I’m going to officially call it a “clever theoretical exercise in civil disobedience as a means of protest”.

In Japan, Obama inauguration inspires English lessons, off-kilter likenesses

The Adamu household is just ecstatic and relieved to see Obama inaugurated as president. We can’t tell which feels better: not-Bush in the White House or Obama in the White House? 
Though you might not know it to look around you, there are many in Japan who are excited about Obama who don’t live in a certain newly famous town that happens to be named after him. As just one indicator of interest, NHK announced its late-night ratings almost quadrupled for live coverage of the address. A fairly universal attitude by my observation has been, “Why don’t we have dynamic leaders like that in Japan?” So the buzz over Obama may in part be a kind of vicarious thrill.
So even before the inauguration, individuals and businesses in Japan have been finding interesting ways to express their enthusiasm. Let’s take a look:

1. Learn English

  • Listening to one of the great speechifiers of our time can be inspiring. Obama’s message can call you to serve your country, resolve to be a better person, or sacrifice for the greater good (but tragically apparently not to prosecute those responsible for the Bush regime’s crimes). Some aspiring English speakers in Japan have taken this opportunity to brush up on their own speaking skills. Prominent among the “Obama books” that are currently flooding Japanese bookstore displays is CNN’s Obama Speech Collection for students of English as a second language. The book, so far having sold over 400,000 copies, features excerpts from famous Obama speeches with a Japanese translation on the opposite page, which students can use to follow along as they listen to an attached CD. I picked it up the other day and it has proven useful both as a translation reference for US politics and as a handy record of his landmark addresses. I’m not sure how effective it is as a teaching tool, but for a Japanese learner of English inspired by Obama it will no doubt give them easy access to the tools they need (minus the inauguration address, of course).
  • Meanwhile, much like Kenya’s “Obama imitation contest“, some private English classrooms have started offering Obama mimicry lessons to a reportedly favorable response. In one TV news report, groups of 20+ students lined up to wait their turn to recite famous Obama speeches as a White-boy instructor barked orders on how to mimic Obama’s unique oratory style.

2. Create a mildly unsettling Obama likeness

Here we see some examples of creativity from both traditional and modern artists that deserve an “A” for effort but unfortunately didn’t turn out all that appealing:

no resemblance whatsoever?
No resemblance whatsoever?

Zombie Reagan looking gaunt (or is that Carter??)
Zombie Reagan looking gaunt (so Carter really is irrelevant!)


* Thanks to Andrew Leonard for the correction!

Compare to the real thing:

That’s more like it!

Chinese economy now #3

China has edged above Germany to become the world’s third largest economy, based on newly revised GDP data:

China’s economy leapfrogs Germany

A Chinese farmer transports his produce.

The Chinese government has increased its estimate of how much the economy grew during 2007.

The revision means China’s economy overtook Germany’s to become the world’s third largest in 2007.

Gross domestic product expanded 13%, up from an earlier estimate of 11.9%, to 25.7 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion).

The BBC tries to play this down (“Many Chinese people have not benefited from the boom”), but let’s use some simple algebra with vaguely realistic numbers pulled out of thin air to take a look at some rough growth scenarios:

China vs. Japan

  • Scenario 1: Given zero growth in Japan’s economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake Japan in 2011.
  • Scenario 2: 2% growth in Japan vs. 6% for China = China overtakes Japan in  2014.
  • Scenario 3: 2% growth in Japan vs. 4% for China = China overtakes Japan in 2021.

China vs. US

  • Scenario 1: Given 2% growth in the US economy vs. 8% annually for China, China will overtake the US in 2034.
  • Scenario 2: 3% growth in the US vs. 6% for China = China is top economy in 2057
  • Scenario 3: 2% growth in the US vs. 4% for China = China rules us all in 2080.

So barring some major calamity or re-Maoization, China will overtake Japan as the #2 economy in a few years. The US seems a little safer but numbers like this make you sit up and pay attention to the Business section!