Japan News for March 28, 2007

This morning’s Japan-related news links:

• The Supreme Court on Tuesday sent back to the Kyoto District Court a case in which the Taiwan authorities demanded eight residents of Kokaryo–a Chinese student dormitory in Kyoto–to vacate the building, and stated that China, not Taiwan, is the litigant in the 40-year-old lawsuit. [Link]
• Incumbent Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara holds a lead over his main opponent, former Miyagi Governor Shiro Asano, in the most closely watched gubernatorial election campaign, an Asahi Shimbun survey showed. [Link]
• The ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Tuesday approved a bill that will extend the deployment of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force for reconstruction aid in Iraq for two years beyond the current July 31 deadline. [Link]
• A former head of the Japan Skating Federation was on Tuesday sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, suspended for five years, for pocketing some 3.9 million yen from the group and for causing it other financial losses. [Link]
• Prosecutors on Tuesday demanded that a 17-year-old Tokyo boy who fatally stabbed a 15-year-old high school girl be sentenced to 15 years in prison, calling his crime unusually cruel. [Link]
• The National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan announced a decision Tuesday to expel Osaka-based Kansai Telecasting Corp for fabricating data in a nationally broadcast entertainment show on health issues. [Link]
• Six Vietnamese technical trainees filed a damages lawsuit against a Toyota Motor Corp. subcontractor and the Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO) on Tuesday, claiming they were forced to work for low wages and had their human rights violated. [Link]
• The government adopted a bill on Tuesday to require private and public school teachers to renew their licenses every 10 years and to have public school teachers take improvement training programs if found to perform inadequately. [Link]
• A 59-year-old man has been arrested for fraud after he wined and dined at a restaurant in Fukuoka for some 35 hours but didn’t pay his bill. [Link]
• A cliff known for being the location of the final scene of a movie based on a novel by Seicho Matsumoto, in Sikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, has fallen away following the 2007 Noto Peninsula Earthquake on Sunday. [Link]
• The head of Japan’s latest whale hunt called for legal action yesterday against anti-whaling activists who clashed with Japan’s fleet during an Antarctic hunt cut short by a fatal fire. [Link]

Afternoon update:

• An electrical glitch has knocked out a satellite in a spy network Japan hoped to use to gather intelligence on North Korea and other trouble spots around the world, a Cabinet official said Tuesday. [Link]
• Japan’s population has been identified as being at great risk from rising sea levels and more intense cyclones linked to climate change, research released Wednesday revealed. [Link]
• The Democratic Party of Japan has decided to submit a bill to the Diet to reduce the time that divorced women have to wait before they can get remarried from six months to 100 days. [Link]
• The Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry announced Tuesday that it has stripped 67 elevator inspectors of the Japanese arm of Swiss elevator manufacturer Schindler and Japanese elevator servicing firm Hain Inc of their licenses, saying they had obtained the licenses through fraudulent means, and ordered the two firms to re-inspect the roughly 2,600 elevators they checked. [Link]
• What Japan Thinks has posted an interesting translation of a survey that looked at Japanese fathers, their eating habits, and what they are teaching their children about food. [Link]
• A group of Japanese academics and lawyers said Tuesday that they will hold a series of symposiums to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in 10 countries with the aim of countering what they see as an increasing trend in Japan to deny wartime atrocities. [Link]
• With Japan lacking enough anti-flu medicine to cover the entire population, a health ministry committee decided who will get preferential treatment during a possible outbreak of a deadly new type of influenza. Did you make the list? [Link]
• Haruki Murakami’s “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” a sometimes surreal collection of short stories, and Greg Mortenson’s and David Oliver Relin’s “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time,” are this year’s winners of the 11th annual Kiriyama Prize. [Link]
• The majority owners of Ultimate Fighting Championship have agreed to buy their biggest mixed martial arts rival, Pride Fighting Championships, in a deal that will establish megafights among the outfits’ titleholders and possibly attract huge pay-per-view audiences. [Link]