Japan News for June 28, 2007
Today’s Japan-related news links:
Most-Viewed Site: Netratings have published Japan PV and user numbers for May 2007, and Yahoo! Japan has come out on top with 31.8 billion pageviews per month. [Link]
Unshakable? Japan said on Wednesday that its ties with Washington would not be shaken by a US Congressional move to seek an apology for forcing women to serve as sex slaves during World War Two. [Link]
Tell Us What We’re Paying For: A Japanese government panel Tuesday urged mobile phone operators to introduce a new fee system by 2010 that clearly separates communications charges from the cost of handsets so consumers know what they’re paying for. [Link]
International Marriages Frowned Upon: Japan’s navy plans to move officers married to foreigners away from posts with access to military secrets after sensitive data was leaked through an officer with a Chinese wife. [Link]
Blame Me: Ex-health minister Yuya Niwa, one of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s top executive officials, said Tuesday he has stopped receiving public pension payouts to assume political responsibility for the Social Insurance Agency’s record-keeping fiasco. [Link]
Punish The Employees: The head of Japan’s Social Insurance Agency (SIA) said he will ask all 17,000 employees to return up to half of their summer bonuses to atone for the debacle over the agency’s sloppy pension record keeping. [Link]
Warning Signs Ignored: A geological survey company warned of a possible natural gas explosion if hot water was pumped up from the spring source indoors in a report about 10 months before the opening of the Shiespa spa facility in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, where an explosion killed three people on June 19, it has been learned. [Link]
Post-Retirement Enrichment: At least 366 former central government bureaucrats landed post-retirement jobs with private-sector or semi-public entities from April 1996 to April 2006 by exploiting loopholes in the rules, Asahi Shimbun calculations showed. [Link]
Jusco China: Aeon Co., Japan’s largest supermarket operator and owner of the Jusco chain, said Tuesday it may invest 15 billion yuan ($ 1.97 billion) to increase its stores in China to 100 in the next five years. [Link]
Going To The Ranch: The United States and Japan are trying to arrange a summit between President George W Bush and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in or around January at the president’s private residence in Crawford, Texas, U.S. administration officials said Monday. [Link]
Restoration: The Cultural Agency removed the western wall of the early eighth-century Takamatsuzuka stone chamber in Asukamura, Nara Prefecture, on Tuesday, completing the removal of its 12 walls featuring ancient murals for preservation and repair. [Link]
Burning Grudge: A jobless man was arrested Wednesday in Kangawa Prefecture for burning down a shrine he held a grudge against because a relative he had trouble with previously worked there. [Link]
Illegal Labor: Police have arrested an executive of a language translation service company in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, home to a large community of Brazilian workers, on suspicion of providing manpower services without a license. [Link]
Arrests Made: Philippine police have detained four suspects, including a policeman, in connection with last weekend’s murder of a Japanese man outside a karaoke bar in a Manila suburb. [Link]
Cold Hearted: A woman has been arrested in Kyoto for abandoning her bed-ridden husband at their home and letting him freeze to death. [Link]
Death Row Diet Member? Notorious curry killer Masumi Hayashi plans to run for next month’s Upper House elections from Death Row. [Link]
The Dark Side: The criminal trials of those who are accused of being “chikan” ・men who use the anonymity of crowded trains to grope women ・represent the dark side of Japan’s judicial system, defense lawyers said Tuesday at a public meeting in Tokyo. [Link]
Wrong Turn: An elderly former taxi driver died on Tuesday after making a U-turn on an expressway and colliding with two oncoming vehicles. [Link]
Inconvenient: A man died after jumping in front of an oncoming train at a railway station in Tokyo on Wednesday morning, inconveniencing some 30,000 passengers. [Link]
When Buddhas Attack: A homeless man who has withheld his identity and calls himself “Buddha” pleaded not guilty Wednesday to the charges of assaulting and injuring two city officials who asked him to remove his belongings from a park. [Link]
