Very Kind of Him # 52

Steve Miller of Asia News Network has put up the home version of his podcast (some might find the recording studio decor a bit...eccentric). He and I have a short conversation about the bill in the Diet proposing to lower the voting age in national referendums to 18 years of age. (Link - Video)

I know, I know. I have the voice of a 25 year old, at best. As for the photo, I took it at home in October 2013. Really.

For Japanese speakers, here is the link to a report from Fuji Television on Liberal Democratic Party Policy Research Council Chair Inada Tomomi letting the cat out of the bag as regards to what may have always been the goal of the bill (Link - J). Note how she weaves in the theme of "not just rights, citizens must have responsibilities too" found in the LDP's proposed revisions to the Constitution.

And yes, this I wrote about this subject earlier this week.

First Read - 6 March 2015

- The knife attack yesterday on U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert (Link) immediately brought to mind the much more serious stabbing of U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer in Tokyo on 24 March 1964 (Link). However, seemingly only to my mind, as a Google News search of "Reischauer" in katakana returns nothing more recent than reports of the visit of Dr. Kent Calder of the Reischauer Center.

For those historically minded, Dr. George R. Packard, the author of book in the above link and Ambassador Reischauer's special assistant, is still with us. Someone should try to contact him for historical perspective -- especially because he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Ampo disturbances.

- For those of us who were wondering, "When only about 33% of those in their twenties vote in national elections, what is the point of lowering the voting age from 20 to 18 years-of-age for national referendums on constitution revisions?" the Liberal Democratic Party let the other shoe drop yesterday. The LDP unveiled plans to have all definitions of adulthood lowered to 18 years of age -- in particular the right to charge (and presumably, in the case of murder, execute) youths 18 and 19 years-of-age as adults. "With rights must come responsibilities (gimu)" intoned LDP policy research chief Inada Tomomi, repeating the conservatives' mantra regarding the Constitution.

That this proposition comes amidst then nation's horror at the murder of 13 year old Uemura Ryota by a gang of youths led by an 18 year old is a mere coincidence.

The Komeito and opposition parties are deeply skeptical about the LDP's plans, saying that changing the legal definition of childhood goes far beyond discussions the parties have had on the subject of altering the franchise. (Link - J)

Just what the LDP has been thinking on the issue of lowering the voting age, aside from a bizarre, "if we can lower the voting age AND change the education system to inculcate hyperpatriotism, making younger voters more ready to vote for us AND we can hang the killer of Uemura Ryota, we will be invincible!" is a mystery.

Then again, what the other parties cooperating on the bill lowering the voting age are thinking is equally mysterious.

As for Inada, a wild, wild guess: though no hint of this has escaped Abe Shinzo's lips, he wants her or Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Taka'ichi Sanae to succeed him as prime minister.

Duck And Cover, HPV Edition

Yesterday, a government advisory panel to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recommended that doctors stop encouraging patients to be vaccinated against the HPV virus. Following a spate of reports of lingering pain from the shots and the organization of a parents support group of purported victims, the panel concluded that the ministry that should ask doctors to suspend the practice of telling patients and their parents that receiving the shots is a good idea. (Link - J)

An oddity in this story is the lack of agreement on how many cases of mysterious pains have been reported. NHK is reporting 33 cases, with 8 patients still suffering from unresolved pain. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun is reporting 38 cases out of the 3.28 million patients who have received the shots since November of 2010 (Link - J). The Asahi Shimbun is reporting 43 cases over the same timespan (Link). The Mainichi Shimbun is also reporting 43 cases, with 11 of them with still unresolved pain. (Link- J)

Ostensibly, all these news organizations had their representatives at yesterday's meeting, or received the reports of the advisory panel's recommendatoin. How can the numbers coming out of the meeting be all over the map?

Since the panel has not recommended a halt in the vaccinations, it is difficult to assess what it is recommending the MHLW ask doctors to do. The incidence of mysterious pains is around 1 in 100,000, with the instances of lasting pains less than 1 in 300,000. At the same time, known adverse reactions to the vaccine (such as anaphalactic shock) numbered over 10,000. That and the fact that cervical cancer kills 2,700 Japanese women every year seems to argue that panic in the face of pressure is...inadvisable?

Women's health advocates fought a long and costly battle to push the health industry and the government into including the HPV vaccine in the regimen of standard vaccines provided free for minors. It is both saddening and entirely in character that the advisory panel has chosen to delegitimize the program at the first sign of trouble, on the entirely political and utterly unscientific excuse of "Well, we do not know what is going on, but to cover our behinds let us retreat to the position of being neither for nor against the vaccinations."

Long Time, Hard Time

Anecdotal -- but it seems that judges are handing out increasingly long sentences to parents who have killed their own children. Just yesterday the Osaka District Court upped the prison terms of a father and mother who killed their infant daughter from 10 years to 15 years (J). Last Friday, another Osaka court handed out a staggering 30-year prison term to a 24 year-old bar girl who abandoned her two children to starve to death in the family apartment (J).

I want the courts to be merciless with the killers of the children of others, for those that kill the children of others rob parents of life's only true treasures. However, persons killing their own children is almost always the result of families or individuals being under extraordinary stress. Judges should be taking circumstances into account, rather coming down with peculiarly arithmetic maximum sentences for these first-time offenders. In the first case mentioned, the baby, the family's third child, was killed out of a moment's rage at her not eating her food. In the second case, the young woman had only been recently divorced and was in retrospect overwhelmed by both her night work and childcare.

I can understand that society would have a vested interest in transmitting the message "Do not kill your kids." However, is it really necessary to deliver the message with a sledgehammer? Furthermore, is the judicial system the transmitter of choice?

For Those Who Have Lost Much, A New Day

Headline on the front page of my newspaper this morning:

Aiming Toward Accession to the Hague Convention: Prime Minister Indicates the Preparation for the Legal Underpinnings

After so many years, and after so much utter excrement about how it would be too difficult to reform family law and police practice in such a way as to force law enforcement officials into treating child abduction as a crime, a first step toward justice.

The prime minister's assertion that "in order to come to a quick resolution, we have to find a path toward making this happen" is only a start -- but a good one.

Some folks still hold a cynical "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss" view of the Democratic Party of Japan and the ruling coalition -- that all the hopes the people have for change will come crashing down due to inescapable realities. This dismissive view is rapidly losing value. Considering the amount of time, energy and attention that have been lost to going through Prime Minister Hatoyama's and DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's finances these first few months under the new regime, I would be willing to be on record as saying the revolution has been moving forward at an encouragingly rapid clip.

Just Kidding

Because a national program to protect children from the dangers of the Web and mobile telephony is like soooooooo last week.

Fresh from a globe-girdling brouhaha over the prime minister's education revitalization panel's highlighting of the dangers that unsupervised use of Internet-enabled mobile telephones pose for elementary and middle school children, the ruling and opposition parties put aside their mutual disdain for one another yesterday (June 2) in order to agree to pass a bold new law...that will not create national standards for Internet content. In a non-partisan show of their mounting concern, the parties have agreed that third parties (corporate-NPO partnerships) -- and not the Government -- should craft recommendations for manufacturers on how to improve their technology for filtering the content of websites and text communications.

Furthermore, to demonstrate their determination to protect the children of Japan from the threats posed by the new communications technologies, the ruling and opposition parties agreed that the legislation mandate the installation of filtering software in all new communications and web access devices. It will also require that operators of servers comply with the development of means to prevent children from accessing sites deemed harmful.

Non-compliance with these new, strict regulations will carry no penalties, of course.

Sigh...

Could they have not at least waited a little while longer before showing their actual lack of concern regarding this latest inflated social crisis? There was hardly enough time for the television networks to put together the usual hailstorm of half-hour reports on the various ways the Internet is corrupting and killing people.

By agreeing to pass a toothless law just before the expiration of the Diet session, it is as though the entire political class were trying to establish new national standards for...blasé insincerity.

The Quality of His Councils

Last week the Prime Minister's advisory group on education revitalization caused quite a stir by advocating a public education program discouraging the use of mobile telephones by elementary and middle schoolchildren.

Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo was asked in his daily news gaggle his opinion of the recommendation.

He responded:

"It is a fact that there are also harmful effects from the possession of mobile telephones. They cause many kinds of problems. It is necessary for parents to carefully consider whether or not it is good to give mobile phones to children. It is necessary for society to take an interest in the question of whether or not the carrying of mobile phones has a purpose in childrearing."

Wire services and publications around the world carried the story, lured by the heady mixture of the seeming hopelessness of trying to crack down on access to wireless communications, overblown reporting of crimes against and by children abetted by the new technologies, latent technophobia and the ubiquity of mobile telephony.

A few mentioned another recommendation, that children start English language education in the third grade.

In their reports, the news services referred to the authors of the recommendations as a government panel or government advisory council. A lot jumped the gun, saying that limiting access to mobile phones was a new government program.

It isn't.

It likely will never be.

Because they aren't.

In a furious op-ed entitled "Education Revitalization: Their Feet Don't Reach the Ground" (Kyōiku saisei: chi ni ashi ga tsuite nai no de wa) the editors of the Mainichi Shimbun last Tuesday asked, quite seriously, "Who are these people making these idiotic recommendations in the name of revitalizing education?"

Who indeed?

It turns out that the Commission on Education Revitalization (Kyoiku saisei kaigi) -- the advisory council organized by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō which set out to and did produce a blueprint for toughening up the yutori (slack) education curriculum and the new, some say anti-union, standards for ensuring teacher quality -- quietly, without any fuss, closed up shop earlier this year.

In its place Prime Minister Fukuda appointed similarly-named Roundtable on Education Revitalization (Kyoiku saisei kondankai). Unlike the Commission, though, the Roundtable has no clear mission: it is not required to produce a report; it does not seem to have a particular problem or set of problems to tackle. Continuous improvement of education, as the Mainichi editorial points out, is the remit of another, well-established advisory group: the Central Education Council (Chūō kyōiku shingikai).

So what the heck is the Roundtable on Education Revitalization for?

It seems to be simply a talk shop, its members commenting on whatever they want to comment on.

Without considering the consequences or implications of their recommendations.

For example, in the case of the recommendation that English be taught third graders, no projection is made on how the program is to be funded or how the necessary teachers would be recruited. Its just an idea, floating in the wind...

The establishment of the freelancing Roundtable on education reform would not be quite so disturbing if it were balanced by an institutionalization of advisory organs in other policy areas. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Fukuda has overseen a dismantling of an independent advisory and policy making apparatus around the prime minister, reversing the trends of the last decade. Unlike his predecessors Koizumi Jun'ichirō and Abe Shinzō, Fukuda has no economic point man or woman on his private staff. He has failed to follow in the footsteps of Abe in appointing a Prime Minister's Special Advisor for national security. Indeed, Fukuda seems to have little use for the special advisors he has retained: I cannot recall the last time I saw any of them mentioned in the news. He has allowed the plan for an independent Security Council to languish and has kept Sadakazu Tanigaki in charge of the Liberal Democratic Party's Policy Research Council...

Just what one would need to make an evisceration of politician-driven policy change all the more complete.

Why is Fukuda allowing this regression? Is Japan suffering from a surfeit of reformism and/or a dearth of pie-in-the-sky dreaming, making it necessary to deprofessionalize the adjunct advisory councils to the prime minister?

The Temple of the Law

Going through my files (I call them my files even though they really are just uncollated, dog-eared sheafs of paper) I came across a newspaper report of an Aichi court decision from one year ago. It casts an interesting light of the Okinawa police force's decision to not charge Sgt. Tyrone Hadnott, particularly as it applies to the issue of how intent can have an effect on the prosecution of sex crimes.

On May 24 last, newspapers reported that the previous day a Nagoya Municipal Court had found a 32 year old man not guilty of violating Aichi Prefecture's Youth Protection and Nurturing Ordinance (seishōnen hogo ikusei jōrei, also called the "Prohibition against Harlotry" – inkō no kinshi). The man, an assistant restaurant manager--married, with a pregnant wife and one child at home -- began a relationship with a then 17 year old high school student working part time at the restaurant. Four months after the girl began working at the establishment, the man and the girl began visiting a local hotel to engage in sex. The recorded number of visits to the hotel were six...

The police arrested the man for violating the ordinance's prohibitions against inciting a minor to lewd and licentious behavior. Prosecutors demanded he pay a 400,000 yen fine.

The judge ruled the man not guilty, with the explanation, "It was a sincere and continuing relationship for which it cannot be said that the man carried it out solely with the intent of satisfying his own lust." As a consequence, the judge concluded, there is no evidence of a crime having been committed.

Prosecutors brought up the seemingly important point of the man being already married. The judge would have none of it, saying, "The girl knew of the situation and accepted it. She sought out this relationship out of mutual affection."

As for the argument that the man abused his position as the girls's supervisor—the judge dismissed it out of hand.

In closing remarks, the judge nevertheless warned the man:

"This court's decision does not represent the public's placing a mark of approval on your actions. I want you to think seriously that even though what you have done is permissible under the law, what you have done has elements in it that are morally impermissible."

Very odd. Not very encouraging too. I can perceive no legal principle being honored. The special needs of children for protection...the definition of sexual harassment...impartial application of the law as written...the separation of the powers...all dissolved in the bathetic cauldron of "affection."

Sometimes it seems as though the law is just one vast, empty edifice.