Philip Brasor - The Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Aug 11, 2018

Hoarding in Japan isn't as dark as NHK makes it out to be

Thanks to Marie Kondo, everyone knows about the Japanese art of katazuke, or "tidying up." Kondo's books on organizing your things and deciding what items you should throw away have been translated into numerous languages and she's been interviewed by myriad international media outlets.

JAPAN / YEN FOR LIVING

Aug 10, 2018

Pricey family graves a fading tradition in aging Japan

Last month, a man was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police for leaving human remains at a garbage collection station near his residence in Adachi Ward. The remains had been cremated and were mixed in with shards of funerary urns, and according to a report on NHK News, the man admitted to dumping the urns but claimed he knew nothing of the ashes and bone fragments.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Aug 4, 2018

Japan's rigid koseki system keeps it all in the family

Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Mio Sugita is being criticized for comments she made about how LGBT individuals should not receive government “support” because, biologically speaking, they can’t have children and are thus “unproductive” as members of society. Although the media have covered her remarks and the backlash, they’ve avoided the elephant in the room — the fact that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Sugita’s mentor, has no offspring himself. It’s nobody’s business why Abe and his wife are childless but, as political science professor Jiro Yamaguchi asked in a July 29 Tokyo Shimbun column, can Sugita say to Abe’s face that his administration should withhold support for childless citizens?

JAPAN / History / Defining the Heisei Era

Jul 28, 2018

Defining the Heisei Era: Japan embraces insularity

The third installment of a monthly 12-part series that looks back at the leading issues of the past three decades.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jul 28, 2018

Aum executions fail to end debate over cult's motives

The execution of 13 members of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo in two rounds on July 6 and 26, including the group’s 63-year-old leader, Shoko Asahara (whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto), for the 1995 subway sarin attack and other crimes, was hardly a shock. Several months ago, after exhausting their appeals, some of the Aum members on death row were moved, thus suggesting that executions were imminent.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jul 21, 2018

News outlets in Japan question belated flood response

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe probably regrets attending a drinking party thrown by some Liberal Democratic Party colleagues on July 5. Even if he didn’t suffer a hangover, as some reports implied, he was forced to dodge media brickbats over his colleagues’ seeming inability to “read the air,” as the Japanese say.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jul 14, 2018

Dementia is pushing cancer out of the medical spotlight

The media love cancer — what causes it, how to prevent it, who has it. Cancer is something that potentially touches everybody in a dramatic way, and therefore public interest is keen.

BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING

Jul 13, 2018

Poverty in Japan: Underclass struggles to achieve upward mobility

Last month, Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai said during an LDP gathering in Tokyo that people who opt not to have children are "selfish" given the country's demographic crisis.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jul 7, 2018

Rose-tinted views of elderly workers' plight

The media has been conscientious in its coverage of the need for foreign workers in Japan. A May 20 NHK Special was particularly thorough in its portrayal of Mimasaka, Okayama Prefecture, which is encouraging Vietnamese laborers to move to the city. Several news outlets have covered Mimasaka's statue of former Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, which was presented to the city by Hanoi last November at the request of Mimasaka's mayor.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jun 30, 2018

Shinzo Abe's Kake Gakuen scandal refuses to lie down and die

Most people believe politicians lie, though the reflexive skepticism with which the current U.S. president’s pronouncements are met is probably exceptional. The secret to successful lying is to never admit to it in the slightest way.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jun 23, 2018

Public remains ignorant of the hazards associated with smoking

“Secondhand smoke” describes the fumes in the air that result from someone smoking tobacco. “Sidestream smoke” (fukuryūen) comes off the tip of the cigarette itself rather than out of the mouth of the person smoking it. Since sidestream smoke is estimated to make up about 85 percent of environmental tobacco smoke, it is the main component of secondhand smoke and, therefore, deserves greater scrutiny.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jun 16, 2018

Should the elderly be stopped from driving?

On June 10, a car crashed into a supermarket in Shibukawa, Gunma Prefecture, injuring 14 people. At first the incident sounded like yet another elderly person losing control of a vehicle and causing destruction, but then it transpires that the driver was a 55-year-old man.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jun 9, 2018

Undocumented workers in Japan in a constant state of uncertainty

People who live in a state of daily desperation sometimes react to their circumstances with violence against others or themselves and, while such actions are a manifestation of frustration, they can also alert the larger world to that frustration, even if it wasn't intended.

BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING

Jun 8, 2018

Days are numbered for ATMs in Japan's banking system

On May 2, Shinsei Bank announced that starting from October it will impose fees for automatic teller machine (ATM) transactions. Shinsei's main sales point has always been its lack of ATM fees, but the bank will start charging ¥108 per ATM withdrawal unless the customer's account satisfies certain conditions.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jun 2, 2018

Market forces in Japan failing to tackle growing plastics problem

Last month, news outlets all over the world reported on the discovery of a plastic shopping bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench near the Philippines, the deepest point in the Earth’s oceans. The discovery was made by a group of Japanese researchers studying images from deep-sea exploration projects, and what’s chilling about the finding is that it was from footage recorded in 1998, which likely means even more plastic has accumulated at the bottom of the sea in the meantime. In spite of the Japanese angle, the story wasn’t picked up domestically with the same measure of alarm as it was overseas.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

May 26, 2018

Commenting on the debate over hate speech on government websites

On May 2, the Cabinet Office removed the posts on its Government Monitor System (GMS) website, a place where citizens offered comments on government policy. The system was established in 1962 to solicit opinions from the public about government policy, but until 2012 it was a snail mail operation. Thereafter, business was carried out over the internet, that is until April of last year, when the site stopped accepting new comments but kept the older ones up. Then, a few weeks ago, a blog called Logi Report claimed that many of the posts qualified as hate speech, and the internet lit up, attracting the attention of the mainstream media, which didn’t seem to know about the GMS prior to Logi Report’s article.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

May 19, 2018

Japan's courts are being asked to define the role of the SDF

As discussed in Media Mix last week, news organizations are on the lookout for signs of whether the country’s Self-Defense Forces are becoming politically active. There have been indications the SDF wants to be the conventional military that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has in mind, but that doesn’t mean the entire organization agrees with this direction.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

May 12, 2018

Lawmaker Hiroyuki Konishi's encounter with an irate SDF officer stirs debate on military

On April 16, opposition lawmaker Hiroyuki Konishi was walking by the Upper House members’ office building in Tokyo when he encountered a man jogging. The man recognized Konishi and started talking to him. His manner soon turned belligerent. An officer in the Self-Defense Forces, he objected to what he felt was the politician's negative opinion of the SDF, saying that Konishi's work as a lawmaker was "disgusting" and that he was an "enemy of the people." The tirade reportedly went on for as long as 30 minutes.

BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING

May 11, 2018

Secondhand retail redefined in Japan as online flea markets rise in value

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

May 5, 2018

Japan is struggling to deal with the foreign tourism boom

With the population shrinking and the government leery of allowing more immigrants into the country, foreign tourism has become an effective economic stimulus. In fact, its success has exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams. More than 28 million tourists from abroad visited Japan last year, and it seems for sure that the stated goal of reaching 40 million tourists a year by 2020 will be achieved if not surpassed, with or without legalized casino gambling, which is part of the official tourism plan.

author

Meta

Twitter

Podcast

Longform

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

In your social network

In your inbox

In your social network

In your inbox