law

From the AFP, Eight countries press Japan on parental abductions:

Envoys of eight countries met the Japanese foreign minister Saturday to press the government to sign a treaty to prevent international parental child abductions. Activists say that thousands of foreign parents have lost access to children in Japan, where the courts virtually never award child custody to a divorced foreign parent. Japan is the only nation among the Group of Seven industrialised nations that has not signed the 1980 Hague Convention that requires countries to return a child wrongfully kept there to their country of habitual residence. ... Activist groups estimate that over the years up to 10,000 dual-citizenship children in Japan have been prevented from seeing a foreign parent.

The state of Japan basically shields Japanese parents from legal obligations they have elsewhere. The media is sometimes complicit in this in that accusations against foreign spouses are taken at face value.

For a primer on Japanese family law or lack thereof, here is a great article (found via debito.org):

• Judges fill the gaps in Japan's family law

I wonder the following. Perhaps all politicians (not just in Japan, but anywhere) are dirty. Perhaps all politicians have a skeleton in their closet that someone knows about. And perhaps whenever a scandal hits the papers, it's not because, for shame, that single politician actually did something "wrong", but merely because there's a type of turf war going on and someone is being called out as part of it.

Is any of that true? I don't know. But I wonder about it.

Watching the latest scandal revolving around Ichiro Ozawa come to light, it leaves me wondering even more.

Just read the lurid details from the Yomiuri, Ozawa 'got 50 mil. yen as reward for dam order':

... Ozawa's political fund management organization, purchased a plot of land in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, out of 400 million yen in off-the-books cash. The organization did not record the money transfer in its political fund report for 2004.

Okay, that almost $4.5 million of off-the-books cash. Wow. Where'd the money come from? I mean where would Ozawa's organization get this money?

The article suggests this:

Former executives of Mizutani Construction Co. have told prosecutors that 50 million yen the firm gave to House of Representatives member Tomohiro Ishikawa in October 2004 when he was secretary to Democratic Party of Japan Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa was a "reward" for the company winning a dam construction contract, a source said Thursday. The former executives of the second-tier general contractor based in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, told the special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office they handed the money to Ishikawa, who was one of Ozawa's privately hired secretaries at the time. Recently, they told the prosecutors that the money had been paid as a reward after the company won contracts to build Isawa Dam in Oshu, Iwate Prefecture, which was ordered by the Tohoku Regional Bureau of the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry.

Okay. That accounts for about a fourth of the money. How about the rest?

Well the end of the article states:

According to sources, the former Mizutani executives previously told prosecutors they had handed Ishikawa 50 million yen in cash in October 2004 at a hotel in Minato Ward, Tokyo. It also came to light that the former executives told the prosecutors that they handed Okubo another 50 million yen in April 2005 at the same hotel.

And so on and so forth ...

If Ichiro Ozawa has a blueprint for a new Japan, I suppose this isn't it. Is he even guilty? Or is he even *more* guilty than any other politician in Japan -- or perhaps just a little more skillful than the rest?

According to this morning's Asahi, considerations about whether Ozawa should resign -- or not -- are focused on two things. How necessary is he to getting passage of desired legislation, particularly the budget, versus criticism he will bring from the LDP if he continues on. What's obviously absent from this calculation is whether or not Ozawa is innocent or not. Why? Because no one cares. He obviously is, and he obviously isn't.

Update: This entry was first posted on June 26. In early June about 10,000 police files were leaked onto the Internet. This included many violations of individual privacy, for example the names of rape victims and so on. According to the Yomiuri, the officer who leaked the files has been fired:

Cop who leaked data via Winny dismissed
The Metropolitan Police Department dismissed a 26-year-old senior policeman at Kitazawa Police Station on Friday for leaking MPD investigative data on about 10,000 cases to the Internet via Winny file-sharing software on his private computer.The MPD also reprimanded a 33-year-old police sergeant who supervised the fired officer with a 10 percent pay-cut for one month for letting him copy the data ...      

While I am glad to see strong actions taken in this area, I want to point out that so long as actions like this are ad hoc and arbitrary, they will not solve the problem. There needs to be a system set up of random audits to check individual computers along and with pre-determined punishments for those who don't respect the relevant privacy rules.

Gadzooks! This sounds awful. Campaigners can't use the Internet to communicate with voters?

What do we know about the comfort women issue? How many interviews do we have with actual comfort women, soldiers and ex-doctors? To what degree are these interviews accepted at face value as opposed to being scrutinized in some sense? What documents do we possess that provide a historical record? It is generally argued that the following problems exist:

1. Comfort women are resistant to come forward because of the shame and humiliation they are afraid they might experience.
2. Soldiers are reluctant to reveal what part they took in the program.
3. Many documents were burned immediately after Japan surrendered in WWII.
4. Information that would probably implicate the relevant authorities is not being made available to the public, even though some of it still exists.

These are claims that each need to be examined in turn. In this entry, I want to focus on the last one.

While nobody was watching, an interim report drafted by a study group under the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has set down guidelines for regulation of the Internet in Japan which, according to one blogger, would extend as far as personal blogs and homepages.

This sounds serious; here is the link.

The Yomiuri has an interesting article about copyright piracy. I want to comment on this but am pressed for time, so will update this entry later today or tomorrow with some comments! Below is a small excerpt ...

Tokyo air pollution victims lawsuit ... There are four new articles here. The lawsuit filed 11 years ago by plaintiffs suffering asthma as a result of car exhaust has been settled. The most important thing to note for now is that the car companies paid as a matter of goodwill and were not found liable.

If you haven't checked out the comparative consumer law blog yet then you really should. Take for example the neat story they had a couple of days ago. Here's what happened ...

This entry has my comment on this, some recent news links, and links to the topic in general.