Light Blue for Boys, Pink for Girls, Yellow for Flashing Warning Lights

Chihō bunken - "decentralization"-- the verbal smokescreen deployed by those advocating pseudo-reforms that eviscerate citizens services while failing to increase transparency or stamp out fraud and waste. See "shell game" and "horse manure."

According to today's Yomiuri Shimbun, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour is considering relaxing national minimal standards on the facilities and grounds for day care centers (hoikuen) in favor of allowing local municipalities to set their own standards.

Uh-oh. A problem nobody thought existed is about to be solved by the tempting local municipalities to skimp on childcare facilities.

Niwa Uchirō, the chairman of general trading giant Itochū and the Chairman of the Commission for for the Promotion of Government Decentralization (Chihō Bunken Kaikaku Suishin Iinkai) presents the planned relaxation of national standards of the sizes of rooms and playgrounds as responding to the regional (environmental?) variation:

"Having a single standard from Hokkaidō to Okinawa is bizarre. There is no scientific basis for it."

But Niwa-san, the proposed revision is not about the maximum size of facilities, of the area of open space, indoors and outdoors, per child. If we were talking about taking advantage of regional differences, the ability to expand the beyond the minimum grounds would make sense--as land is abundant in all but a few areas.

The Yomiuri correspondent dutifully repeats the canard that this sudden plan to hand off to the local municipalities the ability to set the standards for child care facilities is necessary because relaxing the standards would make it possible to enroll more children in non-standard facilities, eliminating need for children to be on waiting lists.

In the example in the Yomiuri article, municipalities with children on waiting lists but insufficient open land to build a center to national standards could convert a floor of an office building near a train station into a day care center. Impoverished rural communities could convert old, unused elementary or middle schools into day care centers.

Now color me stupid, but this slide in the Ministry's own March 2008 Powerpoint presentation on Japan's day care facilities indicates to me that the Commission seems a little too eager to fulfill its mandate of promoting decentralization.

Slide #8 tells me the number of children on waiting lists to get into day care centers is 17,926.

You read that right: fewer than 18,000 children are on a waiting lists nationwide. At the same time, some 2.11 million children are currently enrolled in day care--meaning that over 99% of the children seeking immediate entry into day care centers are enrolled in facilities operating according to the current national standards.

There is no waiting list crisis.

What is more, the number of children on waiting lists has fallen by 31% over just the last five years, from 26,000 children in 2002 to under 18,000 in 2007. Given the decline in the number of children nationwide, this seems to a problem that is going to solve itself.

Furthermore, as the right graph shows, 70% of the children on waiting lists today are from 74 municipalities--with the remaining 30% coming from an additional 294 municipalities.

A small fraction of the country's total number municipalities

Now it may be the case that these municipalities are hard cases--chronically incapable of providing a sufficient number of open spaces at facilities that meet the minimum national day care center standards. Perhaps these hard-pressed municipalities need flexibility in terms of the minimal facilities so that they help their young parents.

But is the problem facilities? Some 70% of the children on waiting lists are under three years of age. The size of the facilities are usually not the issue for such children--the limiting factor is almost always is the number of caregivers that must be employed to watch over them. Under national guidelines, one caregiver can watch over 3 infants under 1 year of age or 6 toddlers of either 1 or 2 years of age.

When children turn 3 years of age and ratio of children to caregivers drops from 6:1 to 20:1--the number of kids on the waiting list falls.

The waiting list problem seems more likely an employment issue than a facilities issue.

So what is this about, this handing off of standard setting on childcare facilities to the local municipalities, having the municipalities set their own lower minimum standards for facilities, replacing the minimal standards first established in 1948 when the country was dirt poor?

Could it have anything to do with local officials possibly noticing that

a) young adults in the childbearing years vote too infrequently

b) children cannot vote at all

c) the number of children is falling

d) the number of the elderly is rising

e) young working parents (for the children to be eligible for the day care centers both parents must be working) are grateful for whatever childcare they can afford

f) the elderly, who also put heavy demands on government services, vote at the highest rate of all

g) in an era of limited resources something, somewhere has to give, doesn't it?

Of course, this is an exceptional case. One almost certainly could not find another example of decentralization encouraging the possible rationing of services out to special interest groups within the electorate.

Pour l'exemple - Hadnott sentenced

Last month I was stunned at the U.S. military's filing a mountain of charges against Staff Sergeant Tyrone Hadnott in relation to an alleged rape of a 14 year girl in Okinawa on February 10.

I was beside myself. I could not believe that a U.S. military court could try and convict a service member of serious sexual assault when Japanese prosecutors, laboring under extreme political and community pressure, could not file charges.

Despairing that my own lack of faith in law enforcement may have tainted my assessment of the case, I posted the following on April 25, the day the news broke of Hadnott's arraignment:

I must admit, I have hoped Sergeant Hadnott not guilty of the crimes of which he has been accused. I suppose I have not lost hope that he is still partly innocent--that he is being charged with very serious crimes in order that he may be intimidated into confessing a lesser crime as a part of a plea bargain--a dirty trick but one exasperated prosecutors will employ in order to win a conviction sometimes.

It is a long shot though--and one that unfairly impugns the motives of JAG officers--a really bad initial assumption, generally.

Not so long a shot and possibly not so unfair, as it turns out.

The extremely serious charges against Staff Sgt. Hadnott -- all bargained away.

Hadnott goes to the brig for three years for the crime of abusive sexual conduct: touching the victim in a sexual manner over clothing.

US Marine gets 4 years on sex charge
AP

By TOMOKO A. HOSAKA –TOKYO — A U.S. Marine accused of raping a 14-year-old Japanese girl was convicted of a lesser charge Friday during a court martial and sentenced to four years in prison in a case that inflamed public anger at the American military presence on Okinawa.

Staff Sgt. Tyrone L. Hadnott, 38, was found guilty of abusive sexual conduct, said Master Sgt. Chuck Albrecht. He said four other charges — rape of a child under 16, making false official statements, adultery and "kidnapping through inveigling," or trickery — were dropped.

Though Hadnott was sentenced to four years in prison, he will only serve a maximum of three years, with the fourth year of the sentence suspended under a pretrial agreement, the Marines said in a statement...

Justice has been served.

I am sure of it.

We have nothing to fear.

The new elder care insurance system and the disappearing art of dying at home

Over the next few weeks, the ruling coalition and the Democratic Party of Japan-led opposition will have to make some tough decisions about the newly-installed elder care insurance system.

The ruling coalition will have to look at the numbers and decide whether or not the system can really afford the proposed fiddle with the payments of low income elderly. In the proposed revision to the law, low income couples would see the monthly withdrawals from their pensions shrink from 30% of the standard cost for their prefecture to 10% of the standard cost.

The proposed revision seems to defeat one of the basic goals of the program: encouraging the very poor to go to see a doctor early on because they have already paid a significant lump sum upfront. The proposed revision would of course also decrease the aggregate contributions to going into the insurance system -- meaning that the revenues supporting the the program will have to be drawn from elsewhere.

For its part, the promise-happy DPJ-led opposition will have to decide whether it is serious about the submission of a bill to House of Councillors bill reversing the imposition of the new elder care system. The opposition camp has made pledges and noises about passing a such a bill by the end of the month....then again, the opposition also swore that if the the road construction bill were overridden,it would pass a motion of censure in the upper house of the Diet against the Prime Minister.

One can hope that both sides in this political fight will leave the program alone. While unpopular, the new program has the ambitious and admirable goal of providing for the healthcare system that exists--not those of some fantasy trade-off-free universal low cost system for an imaginary group of cuddly and genki oldsters.

* * *

A few weeks back I looked at the publicity campaign for a book by Sakurai Yoshiko. In the ad, the right wing's Madonna calls on the Japanese people to rediscover their identities in their traditions, one of which she identifies as "seeing the dying off while seated at their bedside" (kazoku no saigo wa mitoru).

Too bad Sakurai's moral lashings are reprehensible nonsense--people are not staying away from being by the bedside of their dying relatives out of selfishness or disinterest--for she does hive near an ultimately unsustainable trend in the country's handling of death.

Public opinion polls conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare find that about 60% of citizens would prefer to die in their own homes in their own beds. However, figures from the Ministry show that while fifty years ago 80% of all deaths took place at home, in 2007 only 12% of all deaths occured at the deceased's residence.

The Tokyo Shimbun published this dramatic graph of the new reality of death and dying:

Image courtesy : Tokyo Shimbun

The number of deaths at home has plummeted (white line) while the number of deaths in hospitals and other medical facilities has soared (black line). The percentages of each have almost completely reversed over the course of the last 50 years. Since Japanese have low rates of deaths from accident and disease and nearly all suicides happen outside of hospitals, this number--8 out of 10 deaths in a hospital--can only represent the accelerating warehousing of the feeble elderly in medical facilities.

The immense additional cost to the national health insurance system resulting from this complete reversal in the treatment of death is one of the major reasons for the new elder care system's introduction. It is simply not reasonable to expect that the previous system of low payments and a moderate deductible can finance the final hospitalization of 850,000 pensioners per year.

Beyond the monetary cost of keeping all these near moribund persons in a hospital, the opportunity cost--the loss of hospital bed space to a persons with little chance of long-term survival or improved quality of life--is large and growing. It should not be at all surprising that there is a crisis in "patients in need of emergency care being turned away from hospitals multiple times because of a lack of beds and proper facilities". In 2006, 83.5% of all hospitals beds were occupied at any one time. For assisted care facilities (kaigo ryōyō byōshō) the occupancy rate was 94.1%.

Unless there is a dramatic shift in behaviors--meaning at least a doubling of the rate of those dying at home over the next decace--the dying elderly will simply overwhelm the physical plant of the healthcare system. As the passing of the baby boomers drives the number of deaths per year from its current 1.1 million to at least 1.7 million, where will those near death going to be drawing their final breaths?

Perhaps I am just doomed to suffer the disquiet arising from the ravages of intelligence, but underfunding the health care of the very old in order to score cheap political points seems a hell of an answer.

Google Translation Aspirates

Free online translation engines, a comparison

Original text - Yomiuri Shimbun. May 16, 2008.

与党は１５日、７５歳以上を対象とした後期高齢者医療制度（長寿医療制度）について、低所得者の保険料を軽減する措置を拡充する方針を固めた。

Google

The ruling on May 15, more than 75 years later, a medical system for the elderly (long-running medical system), low-income earners to reduce the premium policy measures to expand the sources said.

Excite

The government party decided the policy of expanding measures that reduced low income earner's insurance of medical-care system for the elderly of latter term intended for 75 years old or more (long life medical care) on the 15th.

Sergey and Larry, stick with search.

An Industry Washes Out?

After recording the production in Japan of a stunning 1580 film cameras in January of this year, the Camera and Imaging Products Association (Kamera Eizō Kiki Kōgyōkai) seems to have ceased counting the number of film cameras produced by its members.

I have drawn up a graph of the last year and a quarter of monthly production data. According to CIPA figures, manufacturers in Japan produced 92,716 film cameras in July 2007 and 79,210 as recently as October.

Click on image for full size

From all appearances, the industry has just evaporated.

I believe I now can understand what my great-grandparents must have felt when they read in the newspaper one day that the last cart owner in the city had put his old mule out to pasture.

Original report from Wired's Gadget Lab.

Later - It seems Kitanaka-san checked in with her getto first.

Stars in the Clouded Sky

Not in my normal line, but as regards the collapsed schools of Sichuan, a coda.

None of the newscasts I have seen nor any of news reports I have read has paused to note that China, with exceptions, still has a one child per couple rule.

The parents we are seeing grieving on television or in photo images have not lost a child.

They have lost their child--the singular expression of all their hopes and striving.


Later - Jim Yardley of The New York Times gets close.

Well Said

Tobias Harris does a supercalifrajilistic job of explaining the ramifications of yesterday's House of Representatives vote on the road construction bill.

Nihon Cassandra drinks of the bitter cup and expounds upon the TCI/J-Power ruckus and vermicious Steel Partners extortion play. We mere mortals are properly edified.

Anna Kitanaka wonders how "Japan" can want stuff.

David Morales, writing about the short stories of Murakami Haruki over at Néojaponisme, entirely fails to grasp the concept of "you should get this into print" -- with his on-line readers reaping the benefits.

Later - M.A.R.X.Y. quite rightly asks in comments me what the hell I am saying.

I Am the Voice of the Zaikai...Pay Heed To Me

"I find you unworthy."

I had though that yesterday morning's rushed Cabinet Decision (kakugi kettei) endorsing the Prime Minister's plan to have the proceeds from gasoline taxes shifted from road construction to the general fund in 2009 would supply sufficient political cover for the ruling coalition as it used its two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives to override the House of Councillors's rejection of the 10 year, 59 trillion yen road construction bill.

Evidently the editors of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the readers and leaders of conservative corporate opinion (and no friends of the Democratic Party of Japan, believe you me) were nevertheless unimpressed by the Cabinet's tail-covering exercise:

A spineless conversion to the general fund is impermissible
May 14, 2008

The Road Financing Special Measures bill, which retains for 10 years the special tax revenues for road construction, has been passed by the House of Representatives through use of the two-thirds majority. It has now become law. The law clearly contradicts the stated policy of Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo who promises to switch the full amount to general fund in fiscal year 2009. Having forcibly passed a bill as is without correcting it is deplorable...

The Prime Minister and the Cabinet were all smiles after the override vote...but with every victory, this impatient and innumerate ruling coalition loses more and more support.

What drives them to win the battles but lose the war?

Totalitarianism Ain't What It Used To Be

TV Asahi's evening broadcast had a very interesting snippet from a government press conference on the conditions in earthquake affected Sichuan Province. According to the translation, the young Chinese woman reporter asked government officials, in a live broadcast:

"We have seen so many collapsed schools but very few other severely damaged government buildings. To what would you attribute this difference?"

Whoa. I am guessing the officials on the spot wanted to think before answering that question. Only problem was, they were on TV, where you do not get any time at all to craft a ideologically and politically savvy response.

The national leadership sure does not look as self-confident as and the people sure look less cowed than I have been told they are due to the new flowering of Chinese patriotic nationalism. The local officialdom seem to be unable to suppress what is going on--at least, not to the extent I have heard they can.

The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be.

I wonder what Sakurai Yoshiko and Komori Yoshihisa are thinking Japan should do in this, the Chinese people's time of trial? Which is it, action or inaction, the Golden Rule or the Silver, that best serves Japan's national interest?

Because the national interest is so easily defined, yes? And China is a monomaniacal behemoth, bent on crushing Japan's freedom, yes?

Oh, let't be honest: the whole fearmongering cabal has nothing to teach us. To heck with the whole lot of them.

A Paladin Responds

A surprise and an honor it is to retrieve the following from comments:

Jake writes:

"Well, it seemed like a pretty reasonable idea at the time. I know I'm an idiot. I know I'm stubborn and bit off more than I chew and I should have dropped that one story years ago.

Believe me, I hear this from Okamisan, all the time.

If I had known the details of the story and how much it "meant" to Goto--I would have been a little more cautious. In a bizarre way, I kind of understand his thinking on the matter. He's betrayed the Yamaguchi-gumi. He may have told them, "oh yeah, i made the deal but I'm so much smarter than the FBI--I gave them nothing." I can't believe that there would be a yakuza dumb enough to believe that. If he hasn't told them, them being the ruling faction,--my article represents a death sentence for him. Even if he has, the story being in print raises a hell of a lot of questions. He has about 900 people. There are another 39,000 members that are going to be a little suspicious about him making a deal with the FBI and saying NOTHING?

He also has a son in the yakuza and having a rat for a father is a promotional hindrance. I can understand why he would like me buried in a concrete foundation in Kobe.

No Japanese magazine or newspaper has followed up the Washington Post story. I doubt they will soon. Goto has a long reach and powerful friends. Even the police files on him mention this.

I really do believe that the organized crime cops in Japan are trying to bust yakuza ass. The problem is that they don't have the tools to do it. No wire-tapping, no plea-bargaining, no witness protection--no incentive at all for the thugs on the bottom to turn over the the thugs on the top.

In terms of contract law, since Goto promised the FBI in information terms, about let's say $100.00 worth of material and since he only gave them about a twenty-dollar bill--I figure he should return 80% of his liver back to the United States and it should be given to a worthy donor. It seems fair to me.

Here is the text of Jake's original article, courtesy of The Washington Post:

This Mob Is Big in Japan

By Jake Adelstein
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B02

I have spent most of the past 15 years in the dark side of the rising sun. Until three years ago, I was a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, and covered a roster of characters that included serial killers who doubled as pet breeders, child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls, and the John Gotti of Japan.

(...)

Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it's not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime -- a realization that led to my biggest scoop.

I loved my job. The cops fighting organized crime are hard-drinking iconoclasts -- many look like their mobster foes, with their black suits and slicked-back hair. They're outsiders in Japanese society, and perhaps because I was an outsider too, we got along well. The yakuza's tribal features are also compelling, like those of an alien life form: the full-body tattoos, missing digits and pseudo-family structure. I became so fascinated that, like someone staring at a wild animal, I got too close and now am worried for my life. But more on that later.

The Japanese National Police Agency (NPA) estimates that the yakuza have almost 80,000 members. The most powerful faction, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is known as "the Wal-Mart of the yakuza" and reportedly has close to 40,000 members. In Tokyo alone, the police have identified more than 800 yakuza front companies: investment and auditing firms, construction companies and pastry shops. The mobsters even set up their own bank in California, according to underworld sources.

Over the last seven years, the yakuza have moved into finance. Japan's Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has an index of more than 50 listed companies with ties to organized crime. The market is so infested that Osaka Securities Exchange officials decided in March that they would review all listed companies and expel those found to have links with the yakuza. If you think this has nothing to do with the United States, think again. Americans have billions of dollars in the Japanese stock market. So U.S. investors could be funding the Japanese mob.

I once asked a detective from Osaka why, if Japanese law enforcement knows so much about the yakuza, the police don't just take them down. "We don't have a RICO Act," he explained. "We don't have plea-bargaining, a witness-protection program or witness-relocation program. So what we end up doing most of the time is just clipping the branches. . . . If the government would give us the tools, we'd shut them down, but we don't have 'em."

In the good old days, the yakuza made most of their money from sleaze: prostitution, drugs, protection money and child pornography. Kiddie porn is still part of their base income -- and another area where Japan isn't acting like America's friend.

In 1999, my editors assigned me to cover the Tokyo neighborhood that includes Kabukicho, Japan's largest red-light district. Japan had recently outlawed child pornography -- reluctantly, after international pressure left officials no choice. But the ban, which is still in effect, had a major flaw: It criminalized producing and selling child pornography, not owning it. So the big-money industry goes on, unabated. Last month's issue of a widely available porn magazine proclaimed, "Our Cover Girl Is Our Youngest Yet: 14!" Kabukicho remains loaded with the stuff, and teenage sex workers are readily available. I've even seen specialty stores that sell the underwear worn by teenage strippers.

The ban is so weak that investigating yakuza who peddle child pornography is practically impossible. "The United States has referred hundreds of . . . cases to Japanese law enforcement authorities," a U.S. embassy spokesman recently told me. "Without exception, U.S. officials have been told that the Japanese police cannot open an investigation because possession is legal." In 2007, the Internet Hotline Center in Japan identified more than 500 local sites displaying child pornography.

There's talk in Japan of criminalizing simple possession, but some political parties (and publishers, who are raking in millions) oppose the idea. U.S. law enforcement officers want to stop the flow of yakuza-produced child porn into the United States and would support such a law. But they can't even keep the yakuza themselves out of the country. Why? Because the national police refuse to share intelligence. Last year, a former FBI agent told me that, in a decade of conferences, the NPA had turned over the names and birthdates of about 50 yakuza members. "Fifty out of 80,000," he said.

This lack of cooperation was partly responsible for an astonishing deal made with the yakuza, and for the story that changed my life. On May 18, 2001, the FBI arranged for Tadamasa Goto -- a notorious Japanese gang boss, the one that some federal agents call the "John Gotti of Japan" -- to be flown to the United States for a liver transplant.

Goto is alive today because of that operation -- a source of resentment among Japanese law enforcement officials because the FBI organized it without consulting them. From the U.S. point of view, it was a necessary evil. The FBI had long suspected the yakuza of laundering money in the United States, and Japanese and U.S. law enforcement officials confirm that Goto offered to tip them off to Yamaguchi-gumi front companies and mobsters in exchange for the transplant. James Moynihan, then the FBI representative in Tokyo who brokered the deal, still defends the operation. "You can't monitor the activities of the yakuza in the United States if you don't know who they are," he said in 2007. "Goto only gave us a fraction of what he promised, but it was better than nothing."

The suspicions about the Yamaguchi-gumi were confirmed in the fall of 2003, when special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whom I've interviewed, tracked down several million dollars deposited in U.S. casino accounts and banks by Susumu Kajiyama, a boss known as "the Emperor of Loan Sharks." The agents said they had not received a lead from the Tokyo police; they got some of the information while looking back at the Goto case.

Unlike their Japanese counterparts, U.S. law enforcement officers are sharing tips with Japan. Officials from both countries confirm that, in November 2003, the Tokyo police used information from ICE and the Nevada Gaming Control Board to seize $2 million dollars in cash from a safe-deposit box in Japan, which was leased to Kajiyama by a firm affiliated with a major Las Vegas casino. According to ICE Special Agent Mike Cox, the Kajiyama saga was probably not an isolated incident. "If we had some more information from the Japan side," he told me last year, "I'm sure we'd find other cases like it."

I'm not entirely objective on the issue of the yakuza in my adopted homeland. Three years ago, Goto got word that I was reporting an article about his liver transplant. A few days later, his underlings obliquely threatened me. Then came a formal meeting. The offer was straightforward. "Erase the story or be erased," one of them said. "Your family too."

I knew enough to take the threat seriously. So I took some advice from a senior Japanese detective, abandoned the scoop and resigned from the Yomiuri Shimbun two months later. But I never forgot the story. I planned to write about it in a book, figuring that, with Goto's poor health, he'd be dead by the time it came out. Otherwise, I planned to clip out the business of his operation at the last minute.

I didn't bargain on the contents leaking out before my book was released, which is what happened last November. Now the FBI and local law enforcement are watching over my family in the States, while the Tokyo police and the NPA look out for me in Japan. I would like to go home, but Goto has a reputation for taking out his target and anyone else in the vicinity.

In early March, in my presence, an FBI agent asked the NPA to provide a list of all the members of Goto's organization so that they could stop them from coming into the country and killing my family. The NPA was reluctant at first, citing "privacy concerns," but after much soul-searching handed over about 50 names. But the Tokyo police file lists more than 900 members. I know this because someone posted the file online in the summer of 2007; a Japanese detective was fired because of the leak.

Of course, I'm a little biased. I don't think it's selfish of me to value the safety of my family more than the personal privacy of crooks. And as a crime reporter, I'm baffled that the Japanese don't share intelligence on the yakuza with the United States.

Then again, perhaps I'm being unreasonable. Maybe some powerful Japanese are simply ashamed of how strong the yakuza have become. And if they're not ashamed, they should be.

jla.japan@gmail.com

Jake Adelstein is the author of the forthcoming "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan."

jake -

First - my admiration for your bravery.

Second - my thanks on the part of all who dwell in this land for what you have tried to do. Especially for those of us with children.

Third - I do not think you are an idiot.

Fourth - you give the police force far more credit than I ever would. I hope that they live up to your image of actors rather than down to mine, where the least pernicious of them are mere observers and notetakers.

Fifth - my best wishes, as I have nothing else to offer.

Help Us Kimutaku, You're Our Only Hope!

"The person who changes Japan....it could be you, maybe."

So with this teaser Fuji Television tonight invites us to enter a world that is supposed to be like our own, except in it Kimura Takuya is a nebbishy elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer in rural Nagano (implausible? Noooo...) whose world is turned upside down when his father and elder brother are killed in an automobile accident.

Oh, the ghastly carnage necessary to set up a fish-out-of-water comedy-drama!

Now it just so happens Father was a member of the House of Representatives from Fukuoka (a political hotbed in the real world right now, the home prefecture of three faction leaders--Aso Tarō, Yamasaki Taku and Koga Makoto--as well as Justice Minister Hatoyama Kunio) and Elder Brother was being groomed to succeed him. With the seatholder and the heir apparent out of the picture, the chairman of the General Council (played by the avatar of exhaustion, Terao Akira) and his frighteningly bloodless secretary (played by Fukatsu Eri, revisiting their pairing in Hakase no aishita sūshiki) hatch a plan to have Son #2 run for the seat in the necessary by-election.

A hopeless plan, given that Son #2 is a total dweeb.

Still, they see something in him...something fresh, something new...something that gets them thinking about the Prime Minister's record low support levels in the public opinion polls...something that might have something to do with Son #2's being Kimura Takuya hidden behind thick black glasses and underneath an electro-shock medusa of hair.

Real by-election victory material, seemingly.

And the title of this new series, in English: CHANGE

Prime Minister Fukuda, watch your back.

Political junkies of a certain kind will furthermore be grateful that staffer Miyamoto Hikaru (played by semi-Italiana Katō Rōsa) will be providing supplementary explanations of the political jargon used in the program.


Something about the excessive attractiveness of the main players me has me guessing that CHANGE will not be a hard-hitting and cynical examination of the political process.

But you never know.

The black dragon

It is not enough that the country is saddled with a representative government where a third of the elected do not actually represent anybody; has "a beautiful nature" (sic) that is a biological nightmare due to mismanagement, climate change and introduced species; has a justice system bent on seeking the criminal first, then determining the crime; has public employees striving toward the singular goal of not making any trouble until they are old enough to retire (a goal shared by many company managers, sadly).

It must also be subject to a brazen criminal element, unfettered by police investigations, political pressure or press exposure--as one intrepid Yomiuri Shimbun reporter has found out.

Poor bugger--dreamt he could make his living stalking the yakuza and also have a family.