This is breaking news out of Fukuoka. A 69 year old American English conversation teacher has been arrested on charges of child molestation. There are reportedly as many as 40 possible victims in the case. The abuse happened over a period of over a decade. He is also accused of having taken photographs and videos of the children.

The crimes are said to have happened at his home. Police uncovered hundreds of videotapes and other evidence of the crimes. Most of the victims were in elementary school at the time of the crimes. The suspect reportedly denied the charges and claimed the videos were taken so that when the children grow up he could show them how they’ve matured.

The man’s name has not been released at the time of this writing.

I debated whether I should report on this and let it sit a few hours, but I think that its something that needs to come out in English language news as well as Japanese language news. If the story gets much bigger, non-Japanese teachers in Japan, especially those with their own schools, or those who interact with young children may be asked about it either directly or indirectly, or may think it’s a good idea to proactively address these topics with employers or students’ parents.

I’ll update this post if I see any big changes in the story.

A former truck driver who was promoted to a low level management position at  the Sagawa Express package delivery company committed suicide recently. His wife is accusing Sagawa of bullying and power harassment which resulted in his suicide.

After being promoted, the 42 year old man began working from before 6am until after 10:30pm every working day, and from 3 to 4 hours a day on days that were designated days off. In addition to berated and having epithets yelled at him by his boss, his name was erased from the company name list, and he was called over the company loudspeaker without “san” being added to his name. (note: Not adding “san” or some other term to a person’s name in Japan is called “yobisute” which is extremely rude.  It is much ruder than just calling someone by their last name in the U.S.). He was also sent to orientation sessions for new employees several times after being told he was “not needed” (again in front of other employees).

On May 16th and 17th he took a few days off citing depression. He returned to work on May 18th, and emailed his wife who was in Tokyo on a business trip. He wrote that there was no way he could solve his problems at work. He thanked her for everything, and told her that he had been happy. After sending the email, he jumped off the top of a local supermarket building to his death. I really wish the guy had known that his wife would fight for him as she is now. Just introducing the charges of power harassment must have taken courage for her. In a working environment where it is common for superiors to get angry and yell at workers, where various kinds of abuse and harassment are common place, it can especially be a problem if there is also no way for workers to report such problems.

I know of women who worked for companies, became pregnant and told their bosses thinking they would be congratulated. The bosses in this case asked them to quit immediately. When the women asked to be allowed the legal allowed time off for having a baby, the boss said something like “I guess I have no choice, but when you come back from your vacation I’m going to make it hell for you to work here.” In the end both women quit their jobs then. (The two cases I have personal knowledge of were in two very different industries, two different sized companies with near identical results.)

A lot of what I have seen in Japan would send the boss into anger management classes, but in Japan it’s common. I’ve even heard people suggest that the worker who was yelled at and embarrassed might take small opportunities to get back at the boss to make themselves feel better. Again, in my experience this is not the case at all. A scary boss is a scary boss, and if a worker makes things harder there is a danger that the boss will realize what happened and come down even harder on the worker. Sadly the problem is that there is not a large system in place to protect these workers or an easier way for people to be able to lodge complaints or work out disputes. I hope the wife of the Sagawa express worker fights to the end leading to some kind of legislation that will provide people in similar situations with an outlet, a means to take action, or a place to get counseling.

The cynical side of me worries that the woman will must settle for monetary compensation and Sagawa (often rumored to be rife with bullying, sexual harassment, and abuse of power by superiors) will never have to be investigated.

In a previous post I wrote about six Kyoto University of Education students who raped a girl at a party in February. The university never reported the incident to police until June. There were some pretty outrageous moral violations by the school, such things as refusing to report the incident to authorities, and the fact that the perpetrators were not even expelled from the school.

In an explanation meeting held on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009, Kyoto University of Education president Mitsuyo Terada  spoke in front a nearly full, four hundred fifty person classroom, and addressed students directly.

During the meeting, Terada explained why the six perpetrators were never expelled from the school despite having gang raped another student by explaining that the university itself is an educational university, and it is their responsibility to help rehabilitate the perpetrators and help them become productive members of society.

Here is an article (in Yahoo News in Japanese) describing Kyoto University of Education’s meeting with students.

Since, I feel its therapeutic for me to comment on the stories, please indulge me in a little sarcasm…

…I believe what this educator and university president has thought of  is quite revolutionary. He has decided to open his school up and offer it as an alternative to prison. If he feels there is a place in a well-regarded education university for six violent rapists, I’m sure he would be honored to accept a Yakuza member whose only crime is shooting a few rivals. The Yakuza member would probably never think to do harm to other members of the university community, unlike the six criminals he has offered golden tickets to. If his school’s responsibility to society is to rehabilitate felons, I’m sure he would be happy to play host to any illegal immigrants in Japan who have been discovered after countless years of living a law abiding life in Japan. Maybe the next generation of teachers in Japan will all have a “story to tell”. I also expect these future ex-killers and rapist-turned-teachers to cast a very forgiving eye on students who’ve forgotten to do their homework.

Stable leader Junichi Yamamoto (formerly Tokitsukaze) who ordered members of his Sumo gym to beat and abuse a sixteen year old junior Sumo wrestler (including breaking beer bottles over his head and hitting him with an aluminum baseball bat) resulting in his death, could be a future valedictorian.

Thank you for indulging me in a little sarcasm there, but I am surprised the Japanese authorities are not coming down on Kyoto University of Education for trying to handle this crime off-record and for even now making a mockery of any laws designed to protect victims of sexual assault.

Karaoke shops in Osaka are reporting that their shops are packed with students who are off school (and supposed to be at home studying) for the H1N1 influenza outbreak here.

Some of the karaoke shop owners are troubled, saying they are concerned about the flu being passed on at these large gatherings, while other owners are offering half-price karaoke during this time.

If you read Japanese news with the preconception that people here follow rules you may be surprised to hear that the students are ignoring the schools’ orders to stay home. You may be even more surprised that while the world watches a mini-pandemic unfold here, shop owners are offering half-price discounts in order to encourage people to gather in large groups, but this is the way it goes here.

It should come as no surprise at all that H1N1 has found such an accommodating home in Japan.

In a nutshell, a 67 year old Japanese man is suing his country because the weekend and holiday reduced tolls are only applicable to cars that pay by ETC (the Japanese equivalent to EZPass or other automatic toll paying systems).

He claims it’s unfair that he has to pay full price on weekends just because he doesn’t have ETC. He filed the lawsuit after recently driving from Tokyo to Gunma and paying 3800 yen roundtrip instead of the 2000 yen it would have cost otherwise. The 1800 yen difference inspired his 1,500,000 yen law suit.

This is a man who is either horrible at math, or drives between Tokyo and Gunma at least 1000 times a month, only on weekends and holidays.

His argument is one often heard in Japan… if it’s not for everyone , it’s unfair, if it’s unfair it’s got to be done away with.

Let me give another example…

A lot of schools in Japan host little singing contests among the classes in a given grade level. If the students in a certain class want to do something a little unique (say use an instrument other than a piano, put some original lyrics into the song, practice somewhere else, where special clothes…) often the school will go against it. The only logic is that the other classes aren’t doing that so it’s unfair. Nevermind the logic that says “Good job, innovator.”

Interestingly, there are two different concepts that will come head to head in the case of this particular litigant. The only thing we have protecting our economy-stimulating inexpensive vacation drives is a little thing you hear in staff rooms and teachers rooms and homes all over Japan…

きりがない

…meaning that if this guy wins the law suit, the government will have to pay every non-ETC having driver in Japan when the case goes class action.

There are plenty of frivolous lawsuits like this in Japan but most of them get settled quietly and swept under the rug. I’m going to try to watch and see where this one goes. The bulletin board denizens are ripping the guy apart, so hopefully that serves as advice for the judge to throw this out. Maybe they should settle with him for a cheap ETC box, a high interest credit card, and a kick in the pants.

Most of the government agencies in Japan are creating Youtube channels. The cynical side of me wants to add, “so they can pretend that they are reaching out to and receiving the approval of the people”, but I’ll refrain.

So here’s the top video from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries.

… and let the debates begin. There’s so much in this video that we could take issue with, not least of which why they decided to make English subtitles for the major points they are trying to make.

There’s the issue of whether changing diets is the cause of Japan’s need to import so much of it’s food, or whether laws interfere with the natural flow business here making competition irrelevant and ultimately making it so that it’s just simpler and cheaper for Japanese companies to import necessary goods. 

… or could it even be that a small, sandy, mountainous, volcanic, gradually sinking island country with half the population of the US and one twenty-fifth the size is having trouble feeding its overcrowded masses. If one subscribes to this idea than the gradually shrinking (disappearing) birth rate is the least of Japan’s worries, or maybe even one of the best things that can happen to Japan. Maybe a little downsizing of all the companies and industries, a little cutting of the fat, a little attention to efficiency and meaning, and a little look in the mirror is what Japan Inc. needs. With the crazy “amakudari” (descent from heaven – when a government official steps down from government directly into a big company and uses his connections, influence, and security clearance to lobby for the company in return for a fat paycheck), and the way that tax money is being used, the country needs some wake up calls.

Note that in the very beginning of the video they point out that 80% of the ingredients in tempura soba are imported now. Then 18 seconds later they say that it’s due to the changing diet (note the hamburger to the left of the guy and the list of things Japanese people have begun to eat – meat, fat, and oil… what is tempura cooked in?)

I didn’t really understand the part about the changing diet resulting in the disposal of more edible food…

They also mention that eating more “meat, fat, and oil” in the developing world is in greater demand for soy and cereal grains, however they don’t outright say how this affects Japan.

The Ministry’s opinion about what should be done starts at around the 3 minute mark. (Notice how fat the couple in the video is after eating their meat, fat, and oil.)

I like the idea of food producers producing what I want, and farmers being more efficient and safety conscious resulting in people eating healthily, safely, and economically… but it’s all talk, and it will be a long time before I believe that professional bureaucrats and government officials in Japan will ever do what’s best for the people the.. ahem… are supposed to be serving.

Sorry people, I don’t know what’s got me ranting so much… Oh yeah, that’s right it’s that Ministry of Agriculture video I mentioned.

Watch for yourself, and keep in mind that there are two levels of “scary” going on here… if the people believe what the government tells them then the “scary” is at yellow. If the government believes what it’s saying then we’re at orange, but if the government is going to try to ACT on these “facts” then we’re blinking bright red!

Anyway, if people are interested in these videos, maybe I’ll make some subtitles for some of the other cool and twisted stuff the government is telling its people.

I’ve commented on this phenomenon before. I sit here in Japan reading and watching the news.  We’ve got the full gambit of news. Top stories include the brutal murder of a professor on a college campus, Diet members sneaking cameras into closed-door meetings, internet death threats against a champion Sumo wrestler, a sex scandal involving Prime Minister Aso’s deputy chief cabinet secretary…

But what do we get from CNN?

This: Dad Impersonating Son in Exam Arrested

Certainly this is one of those news-of-the-weird type stories… there may even be a bittersweet angle to the story of a father wanting his son to get a license to work in a pharmacy so they could work together… but there’s much more going on in Japan than

• Japanese Game Shows
• Male Escorts AKA “Geisha Guys”
• Hostess Club’s 16 Year Old Playboy

Although someone at CNN seems to be very interested in the phenomenon of the host and hostess clubs in Japan, there don’t seem to be a lot of articles depicting what people in Japan are really talking about around the water coolers of Japan.

I’m not complaining though, hopefully I can help fill the gap.

The trial for the Junichi Yamamoto (formerly Tokitsukaze), head of the Sumo stable that ordered the “discipline” that resulted in the death of sixteen year old Sumo wrestler Takashi Saito is yet to be held.

The three senior member of the stable that carried out the beatings that caused the death have been sentenced to suspended sentences of two and a half years for Masanori Fujii, and three years each for Yuichiro Izuka and Masakazu Kimura.

The three were given suspended sentences by Judge Masaharu Ashizawa because they were following orders from the stablemaster and it would have been very difficult to refuse him.

Saito was beaten and forced to spar excessively, reportedly hit over the head with beer bottles, and beaten with wooden sticks and a metal baseball bat to train him and discipline for trying to run away from the dorm.

I reported on this previously in “Facts About the Sumo Murder Case as I Understand Them“. The details are gruesome and sad.

Editorial Commentary:

I don’t understand why they don’t want to let people quit things when they’re unhappy here. If the kid hates the Sumo stable enough to run away with no money and clothes, it’s detrimental to the whole stable to keep him around as well.

In schools in Japan, club advisors will counsel kids for hours and hours to try to keep them from quitting a club or extracurricular activity they’re unhappy with. Why not let them go? Japan doesn’t cut people from teams based on playing ability, but surely a kid that doesn’t want to be on the team in the first place isn’t very good for morale. Not to mention the kid is forced to be somewhere he or she is unhappy every day (sometimes seven days a week).

The three in the story here received suspended sentences because they followed orders from the stablemaster and were under his influence. The fact remains however that the three of them did things that killed a sixteen year old boy. Whether under orders from a superior or not, they should be forced to take responsibility for their actions. They weren’t forced at gun point, they were just given orders which they chose to carry out. Although it may have destroyed their careers in Sumo to refuse, isn’t that worth a life?

I’m looking forward to the trial of Yamamoto who gave the orders. If no prison time results, I’ll have to give up the Japanese justice system for lost. I’m already jaded enough to believe that Yamamoto will get off with an extremely light sentence or no jail time at all.

Lastly, the fact that Yamamoto himself broke a beer bottle over the head of the boy during an eating and drinking session that occurred when the boy was still being disciplined. This is not mentioned in the recent articles I’ve read, so we’ll see if the direct violence on the part of Yamamoto will continue to go unmentioned. If so, we may have an infinite loop getting everybody involved off on suspended sentences… by this I mean the three were only following orders so they get off, Yamamoto only gave orders and never touched Saito so he’ll get a suspended sentence. I hope for the sake of Justice that it does not play out that way.

I’ve been in Japan close to 15 years now, so when I read a recent article in The Telegraph about JR (Japan Railways) starting a campaign to improve people’s manners on trains, the following paragraph:

Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for passengers on Japan’s crowded trains to witness a female office worker applying make-up on her way to work. But now, grooming in public is commonplace. For some, such behaviour reflects the fact that the politeness and courtesy that was a trademark of Japanese society are fading fast.

…really jumped out at me.

I remember being surprised by people’s manners further back than 5 years ago. I would agree that manners seem to be getting worse, but I don’t think this behavior was unthinkable.

In Japan, the train is a public place, but at the same time it’s a place where people try to save time. Students who choose 3 or  4 hour commutes over living on their own use train time for sleeping, studying, catching up on their emails, and a myriad of other things. It goes without saying that some of them wake up after a two hour nap on a crowded train and want to fix their make-up before getting off and going home.

The five year quote above bothered me because it’s the same thing again, a general statement being made about Japan and never backed up with fact or evidence. I think an argument can be made for gradually worsening manners on the train, but it needs to be more qualified with a little easier to swallow wording than unthinkable.

In this day and age, such a flippant comment is very easy to check, thanks to our good friend Google News. A search for “Japan train manners” turned up thousands of results, many of which mentioned the rampant molesting problems on the country’s trains which prompted the creation of “women’s only cars”. I’m not sure if molesting fits the bill for “bad manners”, but there were enough results to make me continue my research.

Next I limited the search to dates between 2000 and the present. A quick glance down the page gave me several well dated articles about bad manners on trains. There was plenty of data to support my initial impression.

Here’s an in depth article also from The Telegraph about the increasing number of assaults on Japanese trains published in 2001.

Here’s another useful article from 1995 published in the New York Times. This reporter also identifies Japan as “probably the most polite society in the world”… which seems true as long as you do direct translations of the way they “greet each other with apologies”. People who are immersed in the culture and fluent in the language know better than to think of “sumimasen” or “shitsurei shimasu” as apologies (but I digress).

The article is mostly about the molesting problem (yes, it goes back even beyond 1995), but if you get down the bottom there are paragraphs relevant to our present rant.

But efforts are being made to stamp out other discourtesies and establish better subway manners. Inside the train cars, cartoon posters tell people to step aside as passengers exit, avoid whirling zippered backpacks into childrens’ faces and lower the volume of Sony Walkmans.

This seems to indicate that the problem has been around for a while longer than five years.

I don’t deny that the problem seems to be getting worse, but I don’t think it was non-existent in the past. I also don’t think Japan has ever been the politeness Shangri-La that it’s often purported to be in the media.

I don’t think people in Japan are especially rude or especially polite. I think people are people and rudeness is a natural part of human society. Many people who visit Japan are blissfully unfamiliar enough with the language and the culture to spend years here without ever realizing the “naturalness” going on around them.

The

The show is held every once in a while, your favorite tv personalities, comedians, and even singers (wtf!) compete in a singing contest. It’s one of those classic Japanese tv show type shows with the famous people watching from the stands, singing along, acting amazed at how well the singers sing.

Although I don’t really find the show interesting, it’s usually just a harmless although self-indulgent 3 hours of tv personalities singing and stroking each others’ egos. Sometimes some slightly forgotten comedians have a chance to resurrect their careers for a short time, but there’s not usually much commentary necessary.

This time however, they decided to have the former Sumo wrestler Konishiki sing “Umiyuki”, a song recently remade and popularized by the African-American enka singer, Jero.

This decision is a little bit hard to swallow, mostly because Konishiki is an American of Samoan decent born and raised in Hawaii. Basically it’s the American connection, or even the person-of-color connection that seems to have primarily influenced the choice of song.

A non-Japanese did the remake and popularized it, so when the song is done karaoke style on tv, this particular song is given to a non-Japanese to sing.

Having Konishiki do the song that Jero brought back is the kind of thoughtless generalization of foreigners that keeps Japan from just being normal about non-Japanese people in their midst.

Here’s the video to Jero’s version so people who have no idea what I’m talking about can get a sense of who Jero is.

Konishiki’s version was broadcast a few weeks ago.