Japan news for December 29, 2006

A few news links for today:

• Mutantfrog Travelogue is reporting a rumor that Prime Minster Shinzo Abe might step down in May if his party does poorly in the April 2007 elections.
• About 7 percent of new medium-rise apartment complexes in Japan are believed to fall below the mandatory quake-resistance strength standard, an infrastructure ministry report showed. Is your building one of the “lucky” seven?
• Telecommunications across Asia were slowly being restored on Thursday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged cables and knocked thousands offline, but access in parts of South Korea and Taiwan was still patchy.
• The lower parts of a human body were found Thursday in a garden of an empty house in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, police said. They are now investigating if the latest find is related to a torso found in a plastic bag on a street in Shinjuku on December 16th.
• A recent Asahi Shinbun article reveals a few details of the Japan-China join history study group’s disagreements. It seems that Chinese historians are refusing to budge from the 300,000 Nanking Incident death toll and are refusing to agree that the number could be 200,000 or lower, as some Japanese historians claim.
• A Russian media report has accused the Japanese government of “brainwashing the public on a massive scale”.
• South Korea’s foreign ministry has called for Japan to make more efforts to improve the legal rights of ethnic Koreans living in Japan. Meanwhile, South Korea’s justice ministry has clarified the legal rights of foreigners in Korea: “Foreigners may face deportation or fines if they volunteer at orphanages or organize performances without reporting them to the authorities.”
• Hanshin Tigers outfielder Tomoaki Kanemoto became the highest-paid player in Japanese baseball on Thursday when he signed a 550-million-yen ($4.6 million) a season three-year contract with the popular Kansai team. He had actually been offered a higher salary, but asked the club to spend the money on his teammates instead!
• An investigative panel set up by the Chikuzen town education board in Fukuoka Prefecture has concluded that that the town-run Miwa Junior High School bears grave responsibility for the suicide of a bullied student in October.
• The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project, which launches in the glitzy Ginza district next month, sends shoppers information from nearby shops via a network of radio-frequency identification tags, infrared and wireless transmitters.
• The number of entertainer visas issued by Japan is estimated to have fallen by more than 70 percent from a peak of 140,000 in 2004 to 40,000 this year after visa rules were tightened, according to data released yesterday by the Foreign Ministry. The number of entertainer visas is expected to decline from 85,000 to less than 10,000 for Filipinos this year, from 8,500 to less than 5,000 for Chinese, and from 6,000 to 3,000 for Russians. Will the foreign hostess industry ever recover?
• Some dog breeders in Japan are inbreeding cute dogs to the extreme, creating a nightmare of genetic defects, reports the New York Times.
• Will everyone’s favorite South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, visit Japan early next year?