People in China and other countries around the world are worried what will become of their own health and the health of their loved ones with revelations of tainted food produced in China hit the news with each passing week.

Meanwhile. . .

While China grapples with its latest tainted food crisis, the political elite are served the choicest, safest delicacies. They get hormone-free beef from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, organic tea from the foothills of Tibet and rice watered by melted mountain snow.

And it’s all supplied by a special government outfit that provides all-organic goods from farms working under the strictest guidelines.

I wonder whether it will be revelations such as these that will lead to revolution in China.

China’ s poison milk scandal is spreading both in China and Japan. A Chinese government food safety agency has announced that 10 per cent of the liquid milk it has tested is contaminated, as well as 14 per cent of the baby formula. Hong Kong is reporting pollutants in ice cream and yogurt from China as well.

More than 6000 babies so far have developed kidney stones as a result of drinking the poisoned powder. Four of them have died.

Hundreds of parents streamed into the offices of the Sanlu dairy company at the heart of the scandal yesterday, demanding refunds and worrying over what was still safe to feed their children. “Now we have no idea what kind of milk to give the baby. They all have problems,” said the mother of a one-year-old who had been drinking Sanlu formula for two months.

I saw a report on the TV today that said powdered milk and other processed food products from China are currently in wide use in Japan.

Each year the organization that publishes the Standardized Kanji Test announces the “kanji of the year,” the character that best sums up the events of the past twelve months.

Previous characters have included inochi (life) in 2005 to mark the terrible young lives lost in suicides that year, tora (tiger) due to the historic Hanshin Tigers’ victory in the Japan pennant, and ikusa (war) in 2001, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The kanji of the year for 2007 was nise, meaning “fake” or “fraud,” due to the large number of food-related scandals that became news, including a famous restaurant caught labeling normal meat as high-grade Kobe beef and serving leftovers to customers, a confectionery company that sprayed water on stale slices of cake so they’d look fresh enough to sell, and Hokkaido-based “Meat Hope,” which despite its awesome name got in trouble for intentionally mis-labeling its products.

So far, 2008 has been more of the same as food scandals continue. The most egregious one so far has been a company called Mikasa Foods, which bought inedible rice that had been contaminated with pesticides and seawater (it said) for use in glue production. In reality, it relabeled the rice and sold it to more than 370 companies, which used it to manufacture everything from food to sake to beer and more — bleah.

And so we say farewell to yet another Minister of Agriculture. It’s often said there’s a revolving door at the Min of Ag., and it’s really been on a spin recently.

The Shinzo Abe administration saw 3 Ministers. You wouldn’t have thought there was time, but surely there was. Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who committed suicide in May of last year, was succeeded by Norihiko Akagi. He lasted all of 60 days but you’ll remember him as the chap who turned up at a press conference with an unshaven and bandaged face, looking like he’d taken the wrong route home.

Masatoshi Wakabayashi then warmed the Ministry seat for about three weeks before Takehiko Endo took over officially. Mr Endo then made Akagi look like a stayer by resigning after a mere 8 days in office. Mr Wakabayashi was called back for his second stint in a fortnight.

Seiichi Ota took over the reins at the beginning of August. And today he’s decided to take responsibility (as is the ministerly tradition) for the tainted rice scandal by buggering off and doing nothing at all to help clear up the mess. Very noble, I’m sure.

That’s 6 ministers in 16 months if you’ve lost count. At this rate, within a few years, we’ll all get a go at being the Agriculture Minister.

The Road to the Deep East is reporting some interesting background on the story the other day about a Japan Foreign Ministry official who is being accused of staying at a Tokyo hotel for 300 days and skipping out on his 15-million-yen tab.

As strange as this story was, people here generally were quick to shrug the whole affair off as just another instance of some corrupt bureaucrat’s sense of self-importance running amok.

According to The Road to the Deep East, however, things are not as simple as they appear.

Former wife to Indonesian leader Sukarno and current Japanese media celebrity Dewi Sukarno is apparently reporting on her Japanese blog that the Foreign Ministry official in question (who is married) had been having an affair with the female president of the hotel in question for the past six or seven years. Apparently the hotel president is very much in love with the official, but he refused to leave his wife and ended up splitting with the hotelier instead.

According to Dewi, the hotel president is using the claim for 115 million yen to punish the official by publicly embarrassing him.

Check out The Road to the Deep East for even more dirt on this story.

The New York Times has a report about Huang Qi, a Chinese human rights advocate who, ironically told National Public Radio recently that there have been great improvements in the human rights situation in China.

BEIJING — Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Mr. Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Mr. Huang soon posted an article on his center’s Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools’ construction and for those responsible for the building’s collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Mr. Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

“They’ve been using this method for a long time,” said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Mr. Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Mr. Zhang said, “It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died.”

There is no official death toll for the children who died in schools during the Shichuan Province earthquake on May 12. According to estimates by the Chinese government, seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting on a yakuza-related story which has recently come to light. Apparently in the early 2000s, four yakuza had liver transplants at UCLA Medical center in Los Angeles, California and then two donated $100,000 afterwards. Of course, paying for transplants of any kind can be illegal and is certainly controversial; especially when the money is tainted by crime.

The transplant recepient was identified by a law enforcement official as one of four Japanese men now barred from entering the United States because of their suspected gang affiliations, criminal records, or both. All four received new livers at UCLA between 2000 and 2004.

The surgeries took place at a time of persistent shortages of donor livers. In the year of Goto’s transplant, 186 patients on the list for livers died while waiting for the operation in the greater Los Angeles region.

The New York Times has an interesting article on whistle-blowing* in Japan.  The article contends that until recently whistle-blowing was unheard of in Japan for a variety of reasons including strong loyalty between employees and employers and a culture of not making waves.

The first high-profile instance of a corporate whistle-blower was in 2000, when an employee at Mitsubishi Motors exposed the company’s cover-up of accident-causing defects, including failing brakes and leaking fluids, generating investigations that led to arrests of executives and near bankruptcy for the automaker.

In one of the biggest recent scandals, a meat processor called Meat Hope collapsed in July after revelations that it had mixed pork, mutton and chicken into products falsely labeled as pure ground beef.  

Recent high-profile cases exposed by whistle-blowers include the cookie maker Ishiya Trading, which admitted to selling expired products, and luxury restaurant chain Senba Kitcho, which closed its four outlets after admitting it served leftover sashimi and expired food to customers.

*Bringing (usually illegal) wrong-doing to the public.

It’s been argued by many that awareness in Japan of AIDS and HIV is nowhere near as high as it should be.

About a year and a half ago, Kyodo reported the results of a survey which revealed that -

Nearly eight out of 10 long-term care and nursing-care facilities surveyed in Japan have refused to accept patients with HIV who wished to receive long-term treatment or care for their ailments and chronic health symptoms, a survey showed Thursday.

A majority of those facilities cited lack of expertise on AIDS and HIV for their refusal, according to the survey conducted by a team of medical experts led by Hideaki Nagai, head of the department of respiratory diseases at the National Hospital Organization Tokyo National Hospital in Kiyose, suburban Tokyo.

At the time, I said, “A lack of expertise? Haven’t HIV and AIDS been under the world health spotlight for a quarter of a century now? You could excuse the general public a certain level of ignorance, but it’s clear that when these facilities say they can’t help, they’re covering the fact that they don’t want to help.”

But perhaps ‘a lack of expertise’ is right on the money. The Mainichi is running a story this morning about a clinic in Shimane prefecture that, it has been revealed, used the same intravenous needle to take blood from 37 patients…

Japan’s criminal justice system is in the international spotlight this week with the release of a film produced by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) entitled ‘Presumed Guilty - Creating False Confessions‘ in which “former defendants talk about how they were forced to confess by investigators during interrogations.”

Tokyo lawyer Shinichiro Koike said “I hope many people [...] will watch this film and realize that confessions are ‘created.’ And I expect it to contribute to improving Japan’s judicial system.”

Koike, the lawyer, who has been working to improve the criminal judicial system for the past 30 years, said, ‘‘I have come to a new realization our system is in a terrible state than I thought through producing the film.’’

Even if a person is summoned by police on a voluntary basis, he or she is sometimes questioned for 14 hours a day without a break, and is scrutinized even when going to the bathroom, according to Koike.

‘‘Under these circumstances, anybody, even me, a lawyer, would be exhorted to make confessions,’’ he said.

More details available at Japan Times, which has the same article.

It’s a situation that almost beggars belief, but a Nagoya man died on Sunday after having doused himself in kerosene and being given a lighter by police.

Police were called to a domestic disturbance on Saturday night in Atsuta.

Six officers were dispatched to the scene and the man walked out onto the road to greet them, carrying an 18-liter jerry can filled with kerosene. He walked about 200 meters along the road, pouring kerosene over his head as he did so on three separate occasions, using about 5 liters of the flammable liquid.

Incredibly, rather than arrange for the man to have a change of clothes, the police interrogated the man while he was still wearing the kerosene-soaked clothes. They then gave him cigarettes and a lighter when he asked them. The report then becomes a little unclear, but it appears he was then left alone in the interrogation room for 15 minutes during which time he smoked several cigarettes, without by some miracle setting himself alight. It was only later being interviewed by three more officers that the fateful spark occurred.

Deputy Chief Michiharu Kondo, in criticising the officers, added rather inappropriately that the man shouldn’t even have been given cigarettes because the police station has a no-smoking policy.

Stories about misbehaving public officials are commonplace - they differ only in the details. But the details usually make interesting reading.

A Wakayama prefecture civil servant has made worldwide headlines with a feat of astonishing dedication.

Tax-payers in Kinokawa wish he could show similar dedication to his job. For it has been revealed in a 9-month period, the horny civil servant clocked up more than three quarters of a million hits on pornographic websites from his work computer.

His superiors were alerted to the problem only when his computer became infected with a virus.

The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, works for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan.

That works out at almost 10,000 pages a day, or more than 20 each minute he was at his desk.

The BBC reports that his habit “reached its peak” last July with more than 177,000 page hits times during office hours.

The man has not been fired.

Many have used it. Some have got away with it. I remember kids at school busting out the “My grandmother died” excuse to explain absences. It never occurred to me they might be lying until it emerged that one lad experienced the loss of three grandmothers in quick succession.

An Osaka tax inspector has resigned after apparently claiming compassionate leave for deaths in his family on 11 occasions, the Mainichi reports.

Each time, he stayed home in order to cure his backache. “It was too much hassle to get a medical certificate for sick leave,” he was quoted as telling his bosses.

His bosses discovered the scam when he told them in September last year that his grandmother’s funeral was being held at a funeral hall, which was found not to exist.

On investigation, his bosses discovered 10 more false claims between 2004 and 2007, in addition to which, “the man also went home on 11 other occasions in 2006 and 2007 by faking business trips.”

The New York Times has a quartet of articles related to Japan.

One article deals with a lawsuit regarding WWII forced suicides. I have not heard much about this issue before and it is quite interesting. The topic of revisionist history is a universal one. In this particular case an author wrote about these suicides and was sued for defamation but the lawsuit was just thrown out.

A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, agreeing with his depiction of deep involvement by the Japanese military in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa toward the end of World War II.

The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister at the time, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.

A little off-topic, but interesting, I think. Let’s hear it for the stereotypes about repressed Asians.

A Chinese official’s wife uses a press conference intended to announce some aspect of the 2008 Olympic Games to instead tell everyone of her husband’s infidelity.

Silda Spitzer stands by her man.

In case you are not aware, there is a big scandal going on in Hong Kong right now due to the public release of sex pics that show movie actor Edison Chen and actress Gillian Chung doing the dirty for the digital.

Though this has been ongoing news for quite a while now, we have chosen not to say anything about it because the main players in the Cantonese version of Sex, Lies and Video Tape had nothing to do with Japan.

Until now. . .

According to a report on the digital gossip rag Hollywood Grind, Chen’s collection of 1,300 dirty pics may include shots of Japanese movie star Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill fame, and other Japanese starlets.

It should be emphasized here that this is only rumor at this stage and as far as I know there is no photographic proof at this time.

Evidently, Edison Chen is a real playboy who likes to shoot trophy photos of his conquests. Judging from the expressions of the girls in the photos that I saw, Chen apparently had no trouble getting well-known young women to perform like porn stars for him and on him in front of the camera.

Trouble struck when Chen took his laptop, photos and all, in for repairs, and a technician copied the hard disk. The photos are now all over the Internet, and you can see a bunch of them here at Hollywood Grind.

A word of warning. . .NSFW!!!

The photos at the other end of the above link are as explicit and raunchy as they get.

Again, there are no Japanese actresses in the current set of Hollywood Grind photos, but they claim they will be posting more in the days to come.

Popular Japanese songstress Kumi Koda has gotten into hot water by commenting on a radio program that she would like to have a child before she turns 35, “when women turn 35, their amniotic fluid goes rotten.” Koda committed the gaffe on the popular late night radio show “All Night Nippon,” when the host asked her if she was planning to have children.

Her remarks sparked an uproar among listeners prompting an apology by Koda, and her production company has canceled a number of her upcoming appearances apparently as punishment.

I guess if Kumi ever loses her job as an entertainer, she probably has a promising future as a Liberal Democratic Part politician.

Via TokyoGraph

Ah, how I’ve missed him. But former Foreign Minister Taro Aso was back in the news yesterday.

Mr Aso has been away from the limelight for a while, after getting shunted aside during the Prime Ministerial changeover from Shinzo Abe to Yasuo Fukuda last autumn.

But you knew he couldn’t stay quiet for long. He usually has a word or two to say on most subjects, well-judged or otherwise. And he seldom disappoints.

Mr Aso added his voice to the tumult over the poisoned Chinese gyoza scandal, by saying in a speech in Kumamoto yesterday -

“I’ve been saying that Japanese agricultural products are expensive but taste good and are clean and safe,” Aso said. “To be blunt, the agricultural cooperatives should thank China. Great value has been added (to Japanese products).”

Now that’s what I call optimism.

With the government looking determined to push through a tax reform bill that JP reported on last week, it might come as something of a surprise to hear that it’s being reported tonight that they have agreed to drop the bill, or at least the clause concerning “road-designated tax revenues”, which has been facing stiff opposition and causing the oft-stated ‘confusion’ in parliament.

That Mainichi article linked above might lead you to believe that consumers in Japan can now look forward to cheaper gasoline at the pump. But I for one won’t be holding my breath.

Kyodo reports rather fuller details, including -

The withdrawal comes after the ruling and opposition camps accepted [House of Representatives Speaker Yohei] Kono’s offer made earlier in the day to resolve the tense confrontation over the bill in the lower house, a senior opposition lawmaker said. The offer calls for withdrawing the stopgap bill and seeking “some kind of conclusion within this fiscal year” through March on a separate bill to maintain the special taxes for 10 years beyond their expiration on March 31.

There’s no suggestion of nixing the gas tax, or lowering the rate. All this does is free up parliamentary time, by postponing a spat that sounds like it was beginning to get out of hand -

Prior to the deliberations at the financial committee, about 50 DPJ members blocked the passage near the committee room, holding up signs which read ”Road interests versus people’s lives.” In the committee meeting, opposition lawmakers protested against holding a vote, seizing the committee head’s microphone and slamming desks.

There’s clearly other pressing business the government wants to get round to (keep your eyes open) and could do without such strident hindrance. But it can only be seen as a postponement - the government will resubmit the issue in a bill in some other form in the near future, and in the face of further opposition, are likely to force it through.

Just when soaring energy costs are sending gasoline prices over the 150-yen-per-liter mark and the economy is beginning to sputter, the Japanese government is faced with a monumental decision about whether to extend “temporary” tax measures meant to finance road construction and maintenance that went into effect 40 years ago, and which have doubled since they were initially implemented.

Of course the smart and logical thing to do would be to let the taxes expire or lower them somewhat to give people some relief and to spur economic activity. But, as we all know, no politician anywhere will ever agree to the elimination of a revenue source, especially in Japan where a docile populace seems to have made “No pain, no gain” the national motto.

That is why the government has submitted a tax reform bill that includes a measure calling for a continuation of special additional gasoline and other auto-related taxes for another 10 years.