Three Cartoons By Sato Masaaki On The Abe-Park Meeting

Tokyo Shimbun editorial cartoonist Sato Massaki is a national treasure. With the U.S.-Japan-South Korean trilateral meeting on the fringes of the nuclear security summit at The Hague, the first face-to-face meeting of any substance between the leaders of Japan and South Korea since Abe Shinzo became prime minister, only hours away, here are a trio of recent Sato cartoons on the fraught Abe-Park relationship.

[N.B. The sequence of cells within a cartoon is supposed to be read from the top right to the bottom left.]

"A Collection of Contemporary Disappeared Items"
Published: 18 March 2014


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Relevant URLs:

"Japan's Beethoven Admits He Is A Fraud"
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-26039226

"Reliability of STAP cells 'breakthrough' questioned"
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/03March/Pages/Reliability-of-stem-cell-breakthrough-questioned.aspx

"For Abenomics, 'Third Arrow 'Is Hardest -- And Most Needed"
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/02/25/for-abenomics-third-arrow-is-the-hardest/


"Ending? Beginning?"
Published: 22 March 2014


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Two hooks here. The seemingly eternal run of noontime variety show Waratte ii to mo ("It's OK to Laugh") comes to a close on April 1. Abe, in tribute to the show's longtime appeal and in order to counter his reputation of being a stiff, made the first and what will be last appearance by a sitting prime minister on the show on Friday. (Link)

The recurring bit in the show is to have the guest call up a "friend" on the telephone and invite that friend to appear on the show. The friend, after some banter, is supposed to agree with a cheery "that sounds good."

In reality, Prime Minister Abe called up superstar actor and musical performer Kimura Takuya, who did his part by replying cheerily in the affirmative. In Sato's cartoon world, Abe calls up President Park of South Korea. Her response to his invitation to appear is a grudging, scowling, shrugging resignation.


"We Want This To Be A Match Without An Audience”
Published 25 March 2014


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The title reference is to the Urawa Reds - Shimizu S-Pulse match played to a stadium of empty seats in a league punishment for a fan group's display of a xenophobic banner. (Link)

However, the audience behind Madame Park that Mr. Abe and for the most part U.S. President Barack Obama want gone is composed of North Koren leader Kim Jong-un, a South Korean flag-waving President Xi Jinping of China and the comfort woman statue installed both in front of the Japan Embassy in Seoul and in a park in the California city of Glendale.

Damn You Science! - The Response

Whew, that was fast.

But a single day had to pass after the Obokata announcement of a new and better pathway to producing stem cells, one seemingly consigning to the footnotes the government's 110 billion yen investment in Yamanaka Shinya's induced pluripotent stem cell method, for Education Minister Shimomura Hakubun to announce a plan to dramatically raise both the Riken research center's official status and the Riken staff pay (Link). The Yomiuri Shimbun, perhaps getting a little ahead of itself, speculates that under new guidelines research centers of Riken's new elevated status could offer hot researchers pay packages of USD 1 million per year. (Link - J)

Whatever one may want to say about the Abe Administration, one cannot complain about its moving too slowly and meekly to exploit opportunities to get behind a winning team.

Duck And Cover, HPV Edition

Yesterday, a government advisory panel to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recommended that doctors stop encouraging patients to be vaccinated against the HPV virus. Following a spate of reports of lingering pain from the shots and the organization of a parents support group of purported victims, the panel concluded that the ministry that should ask doctors to suspend the practice of telling patients and their parents that receiving the shots is a good idea. (Link - J)

An oddity in this story is the lack of agreement on how many cases of mysterious pains have been reported. NHK is reporting 33 cases, with 8 patients still suffering from unresolved pain. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun is reporting 38 cases out of the 3.28 million patients who have received the shots since November of 2010 (Link - J). The Asahi Shimbun is reporting 43 cases over the same timespan (Link). The Mainichi Shimbun is also reporting 43 cases, with 11 of them with still unresolved pain. (Link- J)

Ostensibly, all these news organizations had their representatives at yesterday's meeting, or received the reports of the advisory panel's recommendatoin. How can the numbers coming out of the meeting be all over the map?

Since the panel has not recommended a halt in the vaccinations, it is difficult to assess what it is recommending the MHLW ask doctors to do. The incidence of mysterious pains is around 1 in 100,000, with the instances of lasting pains less than 1 in 300,000. At the same time, known adverse reactions to the vaccine (such as anaphalactic shock) numbered over 10,000. That and the fact that cervical cancer kills 2,700 Japanese women every year seems to argue that panic in the face of pressure is...inadvisable?

Women's health advocates fought a long and costly battle to push the health industry and the government into including the HPV vaccine in the regimen of standard vaccines provided free for minors. It is both saddening and entirely in character that the advisory panel has chosen to delegitimize the program at the first sign of trouble, on the entirely political and utterly unscientific excuse of "Well, we do not know what is going on, but to cover our behinds let us retreat to the position of being neither for nor against the vaccinations."