From an anonymous reader on Slashdot:
“A recently-introduced law in Japan requires all businesses to have mandatory obesity checks (video link) for all their employees and employees’ family members over the age of 40, CNN reports. If the employee or family member is deemed obese, and does not lose the extra fat soon, their employer faces large fines. The legislated upper limit for the waistline is 33.5″ for men, and 35.5″ for women. Should America adopt universal health insurance, could we live to see the same kind of individual health regulations imposed on us by the government? By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women.”
I guess extreme problems call for extreme solutions!
Now, this also worries me. Potentially having to move in Japan soon to follow my love, and me being a bit overweight, will that new law make it impossible for me to find a job?
Lehman Brothers has filed a $350-million damage suit against the Japanese Marubeni trading company for fraud. Lehman claims that Marubeni employees helped secure a Japanese company for a loan.
Marubeni is claming that the employees acted on their own, that they are also victims, and so they should not be held liable for damages.
In early March, Marubeni fired two employees after discovering they had used a meeting room at the company’s office illicitly. Marubeni says the employees were used by the president of the LTT Bio-Pharma subsidiary in the alleged fraud, but were not directly involved in the document forgery. It did not provide details of what had happened in the meeting at its offices.
Any bets on how this will turn out?
Thanks to Vin Alsace
The mayor of Meiwa in Gunma Prefecture and seven other members of the town’s municipal assembly have filed a lawsuit against a female Meiwa Municipal Assembly member for defamation, because she is pressing indecent assault charges against another assembly member. The group says that the 52-year-old women implied that they also were involved in the assault and thereby defamed them.
“We tried to talk to her about it, but couldn’t come to a conclusion so had no option but to take the matter to the courts,” [the mayor] said.
The woman was baffled by the litigation.
“I don’t understand what they’re trying to do by suing me,” she said. “It’s sad.”
According to the suit, the woman gave a press conference at which she claimed to have sexually harrassed. She told reporters that she screamed, but all of the other municipal assembly member who were present acted as if nothing had happened.
The mayor and assembly memebers are demanding 100,000 yen each plus an apoloy to be printed in the newspaper. The woman in the meantime has filed a criminal complaint against the other 49-year-old assemblyman who she says fondled her breast.
Chat Noir, operator of the Caffe Veloce coffee shop in Japan, has sued publisher Kodansha for 11 million yen and an apology to compensate for losses it says it suffered due to a bad review of their coffee.
The October 2007 issue of “The Weekend for Adults” monthly magazine by Kodansha ranked 11 popular cafe chains in an undercover survey, checking them on drinks, food, atmosphere and convenience.
Caffe Veloce — known for signboards with wine-red frames or with the catchphrase, “Good coffee brewed here” — came last, with the accompanying article saying it was sheer luck whether the coffee was any good.
The chain is suing because it says the subjective opinion of a single writer has hurt is brand image. The magazine, on the other hand, claims such a suit, “not only restricts the freedom to criticize but is also disadvantageous for consumers.”
In case you are wondering, the top spot for a cup of Joe in Japan according to the review is Tully’s, followed by Segafredo Zanetti of Italy, and then Starbucks.
The Tokyo District Court has thrown out a suit against Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara and the metropolitan government by a group of French and Japanese citizens who claimed that Ishihara “insulted the French language.”
At the Tokyo District Court, Presiding Judge Katsuhiko Kasai said, “What he said is not true, but it was not targeting any individual either. His remarks surely lack consideration to the feelings of people associated with the French language, but it cannot be immediately concluded that the remarks hurt their sense of honor.”
The remarks in question were uttered by Ishihara in 2004, when he said, “French is disqualified as an international language because it is a language which cannot count numbers.”
Ishihara was pleased with the ruling, pointing out that, “The court made a logical conclusion. People cannot sue me just because they don’t like what I say.”
The group that brought the suit against the gov feels different about the outcome.
Speaking to reporters, Malik Berkane, the operator of a French language school, said, “I am deeply disappointed. Opposition against racial discrimination is stated in the charter for the Olympics, which he is seeking to invite to Tokyo (in 2016), but what he says and what he does are totally different.”
Personally, I cannot understand how remarks about a national language constitute “racial discrimination.”
The Japanese Supreme Court has upheld the dismissal of a post office worker who was fired in 2000, ten years before he was scheduled to retire, when it was discovered that he had received a suspended prison sentence in 1973 for striking a riot cop during a protest against the Vietnam war.
Following the dismissal, he filed a lawsuit claiming that it was unfair for the post office to dismiss him 10 years before retirement, when he could not make a new career start, without paying him a retirement allowance.
Earlier district and high court rulings rejected the man’s claims, saying that the reason the sacking was delayed by 27 years was that he had hidden the fact that he had received a suspended prison sentence.
Only one of the five Supreme Court justices who heard the case felt that man’s dismissal was unwarranted.
The Supreme Court ruling was made by a majority of four out of five judges. Justice Tokuji Izumi had opposed the sacking saying, “He worked for a long time exceeding the (20-year) statue of limitations under the Civil Code without any problems, and under principles of faith and trust, firing him cannot be permitted.”
Japan’s National Public Service Law stipulates that public servants are to be fired if they are sentenced to a prison term, even if it is suspended.
The family of a high school girl who was the victim of molestation at the hands of her track coach is suing for 6.88 million yen for damages saying the school did not handle the case properly.
The girl’s lawsuit says she was a top sprinter who represented Kyoto Prefecture at national championships during her junior high school days. During a camp in August 2006, for three nights straight, her 57-year-old coach said he would give her a massage, but instead fondled her breasts and private parts. The girl complained and during a school investigation the coach admitted he had molested the schoolgirl athletics champ and apologized. He was on the verge of being fired, but died suddenly on Aug. 31, 2006.
After the coach died, other members of the athletics team began blaming the girl for pressuring the coach to quit, causing her severe mental duress, the lawsuit says.
The girl’s parents say they wanted the school to go public with the details of the case, but they refused. The school say they were still in the process of mulling there options, and that the suit came as a surprise.
For some reason, the Japanese government seems to be just as intent as ever in its quest to keep it citizens as ignorant as possible regarding the appearance of their genitals. Once citizen, however, is just as determined to fight for the right to gander.
Publisher Takashi Asai started on his quest eight years ago when customs official confiscated a book of his by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which includes sado-masochistic homosexual images, because they were judged to be obscene
Asai, who heads a film distribution company, translated and published a collection of Mapplethorpe’s works in Japan in 1994, based on imported negatives that customs did not check.
But when Asai carried a copy of his book back from the United States in 1999, it was seized by customs officials and he has battled with courts since to reverse the move.
Japan’s domestic obscenity laws were relaxed in the 1990s to allow pictures of pubic hair, but imported publications are handled by customs and it still bans images of genitals.
“It’s meaningless to have to cover nude photos in this day and age when images are being freely accessed on the Internet,” Asai said in a telephone interview this week.
The book is in the Japanese parliament’s library, he said, and copies were offered for sale on the Web.
Japanese obscenity laws have loosened up a bit over the past couple of years. There once was a time not that long ago when any image that showed any pubic hair was off limits. . . Though there was softcore nudity nightly on TV and hardcore strip joints operating out in the open scattered here and there among the various night spots.
Pubic hair is no longer taboo, but the physical genitals are still officially off limits. Above-board publishers follow the law to the letter, so what is specifically declared off limits by the law (which actually is not that much) is masked. Everything else is presented in its entire glory for the purveyor’s viewing pleasure.
A court in Tokyo has slapped the father of a young child with an order to pay 360,000 yen to a neighbor who complained that the sound of the child’s footsteps constitute noise pollution.
“The footsteps surpassed tolerable limits,” Yasushi Nakamura, judge at the Tokyo District Court, said in handing down the ruling.
The plaintiff, who lives in Tokyo’s Itabashi-ku, filed a suit against the father demanding 2.4 million yen in damages because of disturbances caused by the loud footsteps of the toddler who moved into the second floor of the same condo complex around April 2004. His wife also suffered from insomnia because of the noise.
The plaintiff had complained about the annoying sound to the father of the 3-to-4-year-old toddler, but the father ignored him. The plaintiff then placed a noise meter in his home and recorded that the footsteps upstairs measured 50 to 65 decibels.
Japan Airlines has been hit with a fine by a “city consumer court” for serving a meal containing beef to a devout Hindu.
G.L. Aggarwal, a resident of Palam Enclave, had taken a Japan Airlines flight to San Francisco on September 13, 2004. He had specified he wanted Asian Vegetable meal and also confirmed its availability twice by calling up the airlines.
As he began tucking into his meal, Aggarwal realised that he was chewing something strange. He vomited instantly when the airhostess told him that it was a piece of beef. The unrepentant airhostess told him that she had served a beef-based non-veg meal as Asian Vegetarian meal was “out of stock”.
On reaching San Francisco he complained to Japan Airlines and US consumer protection department. Coming back to India, he dragged the airlines to the Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum. “The hurting of sentiments cannot be measured in terms of money. However, taking into consideration the deficiency of service on the part of Japan Airlines, we have to compensate in terms of money”, said the forum headed by its President K.K. Chopra. The Airlines took the plea that it was a complimentary service and no charges were taken for the meal. But the court rejected the argument saying “it is a matter of common knowledge that meals are covered in the ticket and nothing is served free”.
Thanks to Mr. Pink
The Tokyo District Court recently ordered two homepage owners and two Internet companies to pay 11 manga artists a total of 20.32 million yen for unauthorized uploading of the artists’ works.
According to the ruling, the two homepage maintainers scanned volumes of 45 titles, including [Tetsuya] Chiba’s Ashita no Joe, [Takehiko] Inoue’s Slam Dunk, [Hiroshi] Motomiya’s Salaryman Kintaro, [Go] Nagai’s Devilman, and [Takao] Saito’s Golgo 13, and uploaded them onto the Internet without authorization from September of 2005 to January of 2006.
The ruling calculated the compensation by taking 35% of the average 300-yen (US$2.60) price of the volumes’ e-book versions and multiplying that by the number of times the files were browsed for a total of 18.8 million yen (US$165,000). Ten of the plaintiffs were awarded an additional 200,000 yen (US$2,000) each for costs, and the 11th plaintiff was awarded an additional 320,000 yen (US$2,800) for costs.
The Japanese Supreme Court has declared constitutional a Hiroshima municipal ordinace (aimed at fighting a serious bosozoku problem) that bans assembly by people who, “wear unusual clothes, mask their faces and gather in a huddle” in public places without approval from authorities.
The top court upheld lower court rulings to give Ryusuke Osada, 27, a former member of such a group, a suspended prison term for violating the ordinance. In doing so, it rejected his claim that the ordinance violates the Constitution’s guaranteed freedom of assembly and association.
Osada, in conspiracy with some 40 others, staged a gathering wearing kamikaze pilot uniforms at a plaza in Hiroshima on Nov. 23, 2002, according to lower court rulings.
Presiding Justice Yukio Horigome ruled the ordinance is inadequate, as it could possibly cover a broad range of meetings if it is applied literally, “but it can be interpreted from its context that it mainly aims at cracking down on members of motorcycle gangs.”
The Japanese government is getting set to revise its guidelines on hostile takeover defenses by companies. They say the revision has been necessitated due to the recent takeover battle between the Steel Partners’ hedge fund and Bull-Dog Sauce Co.
“We must re-examine the guidelines as soon as possible, most likely starting this fall,” said Hiroaki Niihara, a director at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Niihara protested a court decision to uphold Bull-Dog’s measures to repel a hostile takeover by Warren Lichtenstein’s Steel Partners fund. Bull-Dog paid Steel Partners ¥2.3 billion in cash in exchange for having its stake diluted by two-thirds — four times the company’s net income in the latest fiscal year.
Niihara said that the decision by the court virtually legalized greenmail in Japan.
In order to defend itself against takeover, Bull-Dog allowed all shareholders except Steel Partners to convert warrants into common shares, which cut the percentage of stock owned by Steel Partners stake to less than 3 percent from 10 percent. Other stockholders voted in favor of the poison pill.
Yes, my friends, that in a nutshell is exactly what happened between ex-Mitsubishi executive James Bonomo and his former employer.
The suit [says] that during a trip to Beijing, Bonomo and his Tokyo-based superior, Tetsuya Furuichi, and a China-based Mitsubishi exec had dinner with a potential customer.
Afterward, Furuichi took everyone to a bar for some liquor-fueled karaoke, telling Bonomo beforehand, “You will be the target tonight,” the suit charges.
Later that same night, Furuichi allegedly pressured Bonomo into visiting a bathhouse for what he said would be “a non-sexual massage” with the clients. En route, Bonomo’s boss regaled him with an analysis of his admiration for the purported genital size of Italian-Americans, he said.
Despite Bonomo’s discomfort, Furuichi continued on in that vein, allegedly saying, “Italian men have penises ‘down to here,’ gesturing to his knees.” The suit noted that Bonomo is both Italian-American and gay.
At the bathhouse, a colleague from Mitsubishi’s Beijing office, Yue Zhibo, took a picture of Bonomo’s penis on his cellphone and then “refused to delete the picture” when Bonomo demanded he do so, the suit states.
After the incident, Bonomo’s boss, Furuichi, compared Bonomo’s penis to an “Italian sausage,” the plaintiff said.
The suit claims that Bonomo was subjected to a hostile work environment after the trip, but it does not state exactly why he was suddenly targeted for harassment.
Mitsubishi denies all of the charges.
You probably have heard by now about Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing (Motto: “Disney is too far, so please come to Shijingshan “) and their blatant use of unlicensed characters, such as Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, and others.
Though the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to correct the situation, I couldn’t help but laughing at a comment by the park’s management, in which they denied copying Disney characters, and that the Cinderella figure actually was that of a “Chinese country girl.
What do you think?
The Nagoya District Court recently ruled that a company must reinstate a Japanese-Brazilian employee it has fired for “disrupting the order in the workplace” by calling his boss an idiot. In the ruling, the court said that the company had “abused its right of dismissal.”
“The firing is not acceptable under current social standards, and it was an abuse of the right of dismissal,” Judge Toshiro Tamiya said as the ruling was handed down.
I wonder if the guy who was fired had to present evidence that his boss is, in fact, an idiot.
When I first moved to New York, I was fascinated by all the ads in the subway: doctors specializing in perfect skin, wart removal and podiatry. I was also sort of intrigued by all the “stop domestic abuse” posters featuring either very beaten looking women, or somber teenage girls. Fast forward to today, and it’s part of the visual language of New York’s “openness” that I’ve come to accept and, for the most part, admire.
I’ve been critical in the past of Japan’s inability to address mental health issues. So I was really pleased if somewhat stunned to see this anti-abuse campaign poster on a bus. I think that thing that most shocked me was that part of the message was directed a children; a young child wishes that she didn’t have to live in a house where her father hits her mother. There is a number listed below for anyone suffering any kind of abuse to call.
This is interesting because in most anti-domestic abuse (or any anti-abuse poster) I’ve seen in the US is aimed squarely at adults. Kids are advised to stay off drugs, but they aren’t encouraged to report abuse in the home via a public service announcement.
I have the feeling that we will one day soon see a very interesting news story on this subject, and we’ll all have much food for thought on the right way to go about putting an end to any kind of abuse–let alone opening up the door to admitting it exists in so many forms.
A Tokyo courts has ordered the Japanese government and three drug makers to pay damages to people who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood products.
In a story that has been banging around in Tokyo for quite a while but just seems to be coming to a head (just in time for the election), a group of French, Canadian and Japanese people have decided to file suit against the Tokyo metropolitan government over Governor Shintaro Ishihara’s “official” remarks in 2004 the French language.
In the latest suit filed with the Tokyo District Court, the group of 74 plaintiffs is seeking 50,000 yen each in damages as well as an apology advertisement from the capital’s government over Ishihara’s remarks in October 2004 that “French is disqualified as an international language because it is a language which cannot count numbers.”
Ishihara also said, “Tokyo Metropolitan University had eight French lecturers but no student to take their courses,” according to the petition.
Once one of the most popular actresses in Japan, Mariko Ishihara was jailed in the United States in 2003 for violating a restraining order to keep her from stalking an American man.
[Ishihara], who went by the name “Marie Ishihara” during her time Stateside, was in May 2003 jailed by the Justice Court of Las Vegas Township for 125 days on five counts of contempt of court after she ignored an order to stay away from [a man].
Ishihara told her Sunday news conference the second conviction was the result of a misunderstanding where she had been ordered away from the man for 30 days, but approached him “after 29 days and 22 hours, so the period automatically got extended to a year, but I was not aware of such a system when I met him again later.”
Read the whole sorded story here.
