JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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Hikozaemon
Nice to see rare some non-hysterical commentary on this. Arudou.... where are you Arudou....?
Posted in: Gaijin -- just a word or racial epithet with sinister implications?
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Hikozaemon
Aiko-sama wuz robbed!
Posted in: Happy birthday
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Hikozaemon
I don't know. Where does Scooby Doo fall on this?
Posted in: Ten years on, do you believe al-Qaida was responsible for the events of 9/11?
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Hikozaemon
Smith - because of Kan's failure in the last upper house election, LDP has the DPJ over the pommel horse like the guy in Pulp Fiction. And Noda isn't the right character to give mad-dog responses (unlike Ishihara in the LDP).
Noda's job is to minimize damage and rebuild the DPJ sufficiently so that it can survive the upcoming slaughter it faces in house elections next year. He's basically a caretaker, and he's only going to focus on doing whatever the Finance Ministry tells him to.
Basically, he marks a return to stabilized party politics, and a return to bureaucracy led policy making like Japan had for 50 years under the LDP. With Kan out, and Ozawa facing trumped up corruption charges, the establishment has achieved its goal of removing people within the DPJ that represent a threat to their monopoly on policy creation., and mark a return to political rubber stamping of rule by administrative guidance. The DPJ is now in autopilot, and the electorate is relieved - until of course they wake up and realize that with the DPJ politically now neutralized as any kind of ideological alternative to the LDP, it really no longer makes any difference which party is in power.
Japan is back to business as usual.
Posted in: Japan's new leadership wins solid backing in more polls
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Hikozaemon
Hatoyama made a similar argument about sharing the burden of US bases in Okinawa. That worked out really well for him.
Govt should be buying up all the land in the 20km zone and declaring it a permanent no-go zone, and deal with all this stuff within that.
Posted in: Hosono says all of Japan should help with Fukushima's contaminated debris
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Hikozaemon
Incidentally, JT is not covering that it has already come up that Noda took funding donations from two South Koreans?
LDP is likely to go after that
Posted in: Noda gets approval rating of 63%
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Hikozaemon
Nice to see someone in office willing to stand up to China and its aggressive military expansionism all over Asia. If the CCP party mouthpieces don't like him, I'd say that's a sign that he's doing something right.
The Senkaku islands have long been treated as part of Japan's territory. China is just trying to wind the clock back 200 years and pretend that international law doesn't apply to them.
Posted in: Noda's election sparks wariness in China
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Hikozaemon
The rating is obviously just a sign of public relief that Kan is finally gone - and a possible endorsement of his efforts to reunite the DPJ with his cabinet appointments.
I don't see his approval rating surviving his promise to raise sales tax to 10% in the middle of a recession, however.
Posted in: Noda gets approval rating of 63%
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Hikozaemon
Pardon me, I meant the sellout 3 party agreement with the LDP and SGI. It will be interesting to see if he continues the Kan approach of isolating and alienating the half of the DPJ that follow Ozawa.
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Amazing how completely ass-backwards people's understanding of Ozawa is in all this. He has had no power since Kan shut him out (the article suggested the reverse of this) and after this, continues to have no power, except for the fact that half the members of the DPJ in the house got their seats in the election campaign he ran that brought DPJ to power and support him as their mentor.
Noda seems happy enough to engage in consensus selling out the DPJ to maintain the capitulation agreement with the DPJ and Soka Gakkai, let's see if he is willing to build consensus within the DPJ and allow disenfranchised members back into the fold with his first cabinet.
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Dotakun - Noda is for hiking consumption taxes and forgiving war criminals.
But yes, lower corporate taxes will be lovely...
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
thesheriff/wanderlust: Noda is pro tax, and pro nuclear. My bet is that he won't have ANY honeymoon period. In fact, I'll bet that he does not get an approval rating of above 20%.
I believe that if/when he tries to increase sales tax, Ozawa will pull the plug and end the DPJ - probably around the end of the year. In the end of the day, the tax increase agenda is the LDP's (via the Finance Ministry) and Ozawa will seek to survive and give his new party a boost by opposing it, and founding a new party based on the DPJ's original manifesto promises.
Noda will play caretaker as the party dissolves, and manage the transfer of power back to the LDP, whose policies he already endorses. Yay.
Peace
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Smithinjapan - I don't click good or bad on posts. Hard to keep up with this new technology.
Noda is committed to - maintaining the agreement to reverse manifesto promises made to LDP and Komeito, he is committed to raising sales tax in the middle of a depression, he is openly pro restoration of nuclear power, and just last week, Economist reports he even spoke openly about how the war criminal convictions of Tojo Hideki and friends were unjust.
He is owned by the bureaucrats at the finance ministry, committed to the pro tax, pro nuclear agenda of the establishment. He is the worst possible choice.
Maehara at least was pragmatic on taxes and nuclear power, and showed as foreign minister and transport minister that he was capable of acting with common sense - something Hatoyama lacked, and showed communication skills that Kan was sorely missing. Yes, he would have been a scandal dart board for the LDP but surely you agree that those scandals he was involved in weren't serious.
None of the candidates were "Ozawa clowns" - no one from his faction stood, but Kaieda was a terrible choice of a horse to back in the race. It was always going to be either Noda or Maehara - I would have preferred Maehara.
That said, Noda is basically powerless, and will remain so until the DPJ is disbanded next year either prior to or following the next house election, where he will be forced to resign. So I guess even if the guy IS a pro nuclear, tax hiking war criminal apologist, how much harm could he do....?
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Noda wins - couldn't think of a worse outcome from this. More sales tax, more nuclear plants.
I was really hoping Maehara would make it.
Posted in: Noda to become Japan's next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Shirokuma2011 - most parliamentary democracies don't elect leaders directly. That's a silly criteria for dismissing a criteria - I don't think the US system works wonderfully at all.
Posted in: Public not very excited over contest to select next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
The government built the nuclear plant. The government was responsible for overseeing nuclear safety by the operator. And the government is responsible for the recovery effort and restitution of people inconvenienced by the explosions of the nuclear reactors.
Kan is head of the government.
Shrugging his shoulders and saying "this was the LDP's fault" doesn't cut the mustard, and plenty has gone wrong since the accident.
He is doing the right thing, although admittedly it is a bit cynical that he is getting in all his apologizing now to help his successor avoid having to do the same thing.
Posted in: Kan visits Fukushima to apologize over no-go zones
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Hikozaemon
Ozawa currently has no power in the DPJ - he only is supported by just under half the party, who have been excluded as a group from government while Kan has dismantled the DPJ manifesto and broken electoral promises.
The fact is that Ozawa isn't even putting forward a single candidate, he has said himself that he thinks it will suck to be PM over the next year. People obsess over Ozawa without really understanding anything about him, or how politics here works.
Posted in: 5 candidates for PM promise to resolve nuclear crisis, revive economy
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Hikozaemon
Maehara will win if Noda pulls out early, or if the vote goes to a second round - the only reason Kaieda has the lead is that Kan's faction has two candidates, ex Liberal party factions back one candidate. Kan supporters have split their own vote.
Noda should step out of the race if he wants the Kan faction to win, but the problem is that he was the original Kan faction candidate and is personally backed by Kan. But Maehara will take his votes.
In the end of the day, it is all meaningless. The next leader will be a lame duck in a hung parliament until the next house election can break the legislative deadlock. The DPJ will breakup either then, or earlier triggering a new election.
I personally hope Maehara gets in.
Posted in: Five-way race to pick new prime minister begins
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Hikozaemon
The public doesn't demand change - it simply has no confidence in the current government, or any of the alternatives. For a couple of years now, the most popular political party and most popular leader in NHK polls has been "none of the above". People are fed up.
The DPJ is a failed political party, and the winner of this contest is doomed to be a lame duck unable to pass legislation until the next house election, which they are likely to delay as long as possible, possibly for up to another year.
All the while, the government has failed the residents of Tohoku and Fukushima, failed the national public on food safety and information, and failed at keeping its most basic election promises.
Yaaay....
Posted in: Public not very excited over contest to select next prime minister
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Hikozaemon
Smithinjapan - fear not - the meeting with Ozawa took 10 minutes and afterwards, Ozawa told supporters that "if Maehara wins, Japan will collapse." So I suspect there wasn't a lot of hugging and kissing going on there.
Maehara's political funding violations were less serious than Kan's, certainly - they were from individuals he knew and did not know were not naturalized. Kan took much more money, from groups, including groups with links to North Korea. The earthquake saved him from impeachment in March.
I like Maehara for the way he handled his tenure as Minister of Transport, and the way he handled China while Foreign Minister during the drunken Chinese sailor flap. Given his rabid anti-Ozawa credentials, he will bring the DPJ to an end when it loses the next house election next year, but I think everyone agrees by now that this is for the best - the party is more interested in in-fighting and factional politics than it is in keeping its election promises and helping people in Tohoku. I actually think it has turned out to be worse than the LDP would have been. Maehara is a good guy, he won't take any crap from bureaucrats or China, and will most likely result in there being a clean end to the DPJ, giving the chance for the opposition to spend a few years again reorganizing into opposition parties that are more viable and trustworthy alternatives to the LDP.
As for the questions about zainichis - please Google people. This stuff gets raised over and over again. Zainichi residents (special permanent residents) have a fast track naturalization path to citizenship if they opt for it. Mindan and Chosen Soren (the South Korean and North Korean citizen's groups in Japan) are opposed to automatic citizenship for their members, and aside from the administrative fee and the criminal background check, there is no barrier to any zainichi born in Japan switching allegiance to Japan - and increasing numbers of young zainichi Koreans in particular are doing this. Any Zainichi in Japan right now is one because they choose not to become Japanese as they are entitled. That's fine, but they know that Japan, like other countries including the US prohibits political funding by foreign nationals. And don't forget also that the vast majority of countries in the world do not recognize automatic citizenship by birth - only a handful of countries with empires, and colonies for whom this approach facilitated conquest and subjugation of indigenous people.
So yeah, Maehara did wrong, and he will get pounded by the opposition for this. But still, I agree what he did wasn't very serious as these things go, and he already "took responsibility" for it when he resigned as foreign minister (not a great job to have while taking foreign national political donations).
I like Ozawa, but I would never back the minister of METI who oversaw the debacle of how the Kan cabinet is mishandling the situation with refugees and cleanup in Tohoku. I wouldn't be surprised however if Kan faction supporters actually go with Kaieda simply to avoid being in control of the party when it disintegrates next year.
Kan's choice of successor - Noda - is as bad a sellout to the finance ministry as Kan was. Already pledged to not restore manifesto promises, committed to raising sales tax in the middle of a looming economic depression, and recent caught suggesting that war criminal convictions were a travesty of justice, the worst thing he did was force Kan to retract comments about making Japan nuclear free - he is a staunch pro nuclear guy and Kan STILL blesses his candidacy.
I hope Maehara gets in - whoever wins, I suggest someone tell the band to move up to the top deck of the Titanic and to start playing some upbeat tunes to usher in the return of the LDP.
Peace
Posted in: Maehara says he got Y590,000 from foreigners in 2005-2010