Japan changed the design and composition of its ¥500 (about US $4.50) coins a few years ago, and a few months ago, it released new bills, too. The Japanese economy being huge and having a fair number of disgruntled unemployed people, it’s a target for counterfeiters, and they’ve sunk to the challenge:

After a large number of counterfeit ¥500 coins were discovered in Postal Savings ATMs, Japan Post announced on 3 January that [its machines] would stop handling all coins at post offices in Tokyo Metro and in Fukuoka and Kumamoto Prefectures.

The fakes they’re finding correctly use an alloy of nickel and zinc (the Sinitic compound for which is 亜鉛 [aen: “sub-lead”], which I’ve always found kind of cute), but the composition is different from that in real coins. They also have misaligned stamping and leave off some marks, but according to the authorities, you do have to look closely to see the problems.



There’s also been a rash of fraudulent withdrawals of cash using faked cash cards. I believe it’s the iC system (comfortingly, the one my JAL card is allied with) that’s had the most problems, though I haven’t paid close enough attention to understand where the chink is that makes it easy to trick. Anyway, they’re still trying to determine whether the legal fault lies with banks or depositors. Koizumi says his financial team is working on it.



As far as the bills go, this is as good an explanation as I’ve seen of the new technology and the reasoning behind it–mostly, as I say, that Japan has a huge consumer economy and is a target for counterfeiters. Of course, counterfeiters have already started making funny-money versions of the new bills–as industrious and clever as these people are, couldn’t they find a way to make their fortunes honestly?–and the fact that the old notes are still in circulation means that the tricky holograms aren’t yet having much effect. After the New Year, it was discovered that large numbers of false bills had been used to buy fortunes and souvenirs at temples.

All right, already. I’m not going to start writing to other people’s specifications, but if the post titles are looking self-consciously cryptic, I’ll knock it off. It’s not as if I were aiming to drive people crazy. : )



I wish I were able to come up with succinct and germane headings the way everyone else is, but…see, I’ve only got, like, three subjects, and I can’t very well start calling things “Japan Post privatization, Part the 1045th,” right? The problem is, whenever I try to squeeze in a little distinguishing information, I end up with something unwieldy: “Koizumi says Japan Post privatization must proceed despite old-guard ninnyism he’s been up against since taking office.” Yes, we learned to write snappy headlines in journalism class in high school. No, the lessons clearly didn’t take. Besides, what I’m doing here isn’t journalism. I also toyed with the idea of using random but faux-profound Japanophile stuff (“A lone crane cries in silhouette against a midnight sky”) to see whether people would get the joke, but there’s no point in getting a joke that’s not very funny, anyway.



So if I feel stuck, I go with whatever comes into my head that I’ll be able to recognize when I’m looking at an MT list later; usually, what comes into my head is some line from a pop song, contrived as they are to stick in the memory.



Oh, yeah, on a different but related issue: I do understand that not everyone reads Japanese. I have a few readers who are studying it, though. When I put a post title in Japanese (always an uninteresting reference to the main topic), it’s usually in the hope that they’ll look up the meaning and reading and then be able to associate it with the post content in their memory. When you’re studying Japanese, every little bit of memory aid helps, trust you me. Anyway, no one has written to say that that‘s getting on his nerves, but if it’s helpful, I can…I don’t know, put the English in a roll-over link, or something. I’m not going out of my way to be obscurantist.



Added in the early hours of 2 February: It seems I can’t even leave the title off a post in a way that makes people happy. (Just kidding, Amritas. Glad you’ve got your energy back.)

Speaking of problems in Japan that need addressing: Japan Post (you know, that agency that sells commemorative stamps, delivers mail and packages, and just happens to control a REALLY HUGE AMOUNT of the household savings of the second-largest economy in the world?) is still in the crosshairs of Prime Minister Koizumi’s privatization gun:

The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September. One of the key planks of the policy is the creation of four entities–mail and parcel delivery, insurance service, savings service and an over-the-counter services network–under a holding company.

“The Fiscal Investment and Loan Program must be reformed because it’s the connection between the entrance of funds, postal savings and kampo postal insurance, and the exit of funds to public corporations. The flow of funds should be shifted from public to private,” Koizumi said. [You know the patronage and revolving-door systems that your econ professors said drive Japan? You’re looking at the monetary engine right in this paragraph. All that’s missing is explicit mention of the federal ministries involved.–SRK]

“The privatization is an indispensable administrative and fiscal reform to realize a smaller government,” Koizumi added.

Regarding opposition to privatization within the Liberal Democratic Party, the prime minister said: “They say the number of public servants should be decreased, but they oppose the privatization. That’s like instructing someone to swim but tying his arms and legs.

For all the bravado of that soundbite, there are critics who say the privatization plan in fact doesn’t go far enough. In my favorite (in a bad way) analogy, it could create the sort of California-electricity fiasco in which bureaucrats still get to make all the rules while the new private owners get all the accountability. In committee, the proposal predictably got bogged down in the usual attempts to shut up everyone with a complaint. But that was December; this Yomiuri piece says, “The prime minister explicitly said he would stick to the basic privatization policy adopted by the Cabinet in September,” which means not the further ground-down version from the very end of last year.

For those who are interested, the Yomiuri article leads with Japan Post privatization but gives a rundown of the issues the Diet hit in its first 2005 session.

Japanese language and culture, as you’ve probably heard many times, are full of nuances as impossible to grasp as the wisps of smoke that curl toward heaven from a bowl of incense in a darkened room. Therefore, it may interest you to know that some concepts translate into and from English with no loss of meaning at all.



Consider, as an example, the reform of government programs undertaken by the Koizumi adminstration and the ruling coalition that supports it. The idea is to deregulate and even privatize certain operations in certain spheres–Japan Post reform has gotten the most attention, but the health-care behemoth is on the list, too:

Ministers attending a Cabinet meeting Tuesday agreed to give the report, presented Friday by the Council for Promotion of Regulatory Reform, an advisory body to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, serious consideration.



In another gesture supporting easing government regulations, one of the prime minister’s key structural reform initiatives, the Cabinet approved a plan to revise in March the three-year deregulation promotion program that has been in force since April.



…



In line with Koizumi’s public pledge to push forward with deregulation as an integral part of his reform agenda, in May the government established the Headquarters for Promotion of Regulatory Reform, made up of all Cabinet members.



One of the top discussions in the regulatory reform council was on the idea of lifting the ban on providing mixed medical services, enabling patients to receive a combination of medical treatment covered by government-backed health insurance plans and medical treatment not so covered.



The mixed medical service system currently is limited to hospitals designated by the government as medical institutions with specially advanced medical technology.

The ban, of course, prevents some patients from having access to the best combination of treatments for whatever ails them. Westerners who have swallowed the entire media diet of stories about the self-abnegating Japanese, and thus think of the place as populated by 125 million potential kamikaze pilots, seem to imagine that everything federal employees do is attuned to the greater good. If you’re one such trusting soul, it may interest you to know that Japanese bureaucrats act like…well, bureaucrats:

Objecting strongly to the council’s argument was the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, bureaucrats of which were anxious about a decline in the role of government-backed health insurance plans that come under the ministry’s jurisdiction.



In defending its position, the ministry claimed that a mixed medical service system would deprive patients of the right to equal treatment.



Major university hospitals, including those attached to Tokyo University and Kyoto University, meanwhile, pushed for a complete lifting of the ban, arguing that progress in advanced medical technology was being hindered by too many regulations around the government-backed health insurance plans.



…



This resulted in a compromise being hammered out that ensured the ban remained, in return for a ministry promise to expand the current system to extend government-backed insurance coverage to exceptional cases currently not covered, such as heart transplants from brain-dead donors.

It’s the sort of thing that belongs in a textbook, huh? Unelected officials find their authority (and thus their source of influence) threatened, and they justify their opposition by claiming that what they’re worried about is, of course, that reforms will infringe on the rights of citizens. Being career civil servants, they’re much better at strategy than their opponents, who, as the people who have to deal with the day-to-day problem being addressed, don’t make their livelihoods by maneuvering. Then, somehow, their territory is actually expanded by the plan ultimately extruded by the chain of committees, compromise proposals, and negotiations.



I think it’s fair to say that most of the people who go into civil service here are as patriotic and idealistic as their counterparts. The problem isn’t really that Japanese bureaucrats are worse than bureaucrats elsewhere; it’s that the system disproportionately favors them. They get used to having their way as a matter of course, but they still get to see themselves as sacrificing personal gain because of the revolving-door system (that is, you take lower-than-private-sector pay through your normal working life, then get a cushy job in a private or semi-public company on retirement so you can spend the next 20 years making good on the connections you’ve built up). The recent economic troubles have made that system shakier, and the various bureaucracies have, understandably, therefore been clinging all the more to the power they’ve got. Reform is, needless to say, difficult in such an environment. Even a slight loosening of restrictions on treatments people can get is a good thing, though.

The LDP has drafted its Postal Service reform proposal, and having been developed by a committee, the thing appears to have fallen prey to all-things-to-all-people syndrome:

Having duly recorded the multiplicity of opinions [Gulp!–SRK], ranging from the argument that the current single-agent handling of mails, postal savings, and insurance functions should be maintained to opposition to privatization in its entirety, the committee hammered out a proposal in which post offices will be arranged as they are currently and will be uniformly charged with providing postal savings and insurance services nationwide. Mindful of opposing voices within the party, the committee also decided to forgo the use of the word privatization in the proposal.

Later in the (brief, as yet) report, the Nikkei explains that “the summary of points for debate released by the committee last month was predicated on privatization; however, because opposition within the party was so strong, the committee retreated into the wording ‘postal reform,’ which does not imply that the organization will be split into separate corporations or changed in other specific ways.” So we’re not privatizing the thing, just…rearranging it. Somehow. How, exactly, we’ll tell you later.



The plan to priva…ACK!…reform Japan Post has been dragging out for a while now, and with this latest development, painful but necessary changes to its operations don’t look as if they’re going to be coming any time soon. Good thing much of the household wealth of the country doesn’t hang in the balance, or anything!

The Japanese government publicized a new defense outline, including a rejiggering of the mission of the SDF, Friday. The Yomiuri‘s English article is ineptly translated but gives good background; the Asahi‘s English article gives more information about the outline itself. The new outline stresses that flexibility and resilience (not to mention missiles, which the LDP’s coalition partner the New Komeito has not been keen on) will be key elements in the portfolio of possible responses to terrorist and military threats from here on. It also breaks new ground by naming names: China and North Korea are referred to as potential threats, and the Middle East is deemed a key strategic region with respect to Japan’s defense. The old assumption that SDF activity would be limited to reactions to threats in or very close to Japanese territory is gone. And a good thing, too. The last time the government updated its SDF mission statement was to deal with the end of the Cold War, nine years ago. The world is a different place–or rather, we now recognize how different it is.



On the other hand, the head of the SDF announced this weekend that if the situation in Iraq becomes too dangerous, the non-combat SDF personnel, whose deployment there has been extended for a year, will be pulled out anyway. That’s fair enough. They are not, after all, on a combat mission.

For anyone who’s been sleeping too soundly, here are two reports from the Asahi that I didn’t get around to mentioning. One relates that, while Japan is pouring money into its spy satellite network, it is still overwhelmingly dependent on information actually picked up by US satellites:

It was only after North Korea lobbed a Taepodong missile over the Japanese archipelago in August 1998 that the government decided to step up monitoring of the reclusive state via satellite.



Almost five years and billions of yen later, Japan launched its own reconnaissance satellites–one optical and one radar–in March 2003.



Two more were planned to go up last November but remain grounded after the H2A rocket No. 6, which was to carry the satellites, failed to launch.



In the past 18 months, a whopping 250 billion yen has been spent on the project. To top that off, annual running costs are in the range of 20 billion yen. In August, the government announced that another optical satellite will be launched next fiscal year. A second radar satellite is slated for fiscal 2006.

As always, my point is not that Japan’s image as technologically advanced is a lie. It’s that Japan, like every other country, is better at some things than at others. And at the moment, rockets are not its strong suit. (Last November is not the first time one has failed to launch or had to be shot down.) As someone who loves both America and Japan, I’m glad as always that we’re helping each other out.



Of course, America is not the only country Japan trades with, and investigators are now trying figure out exactly how measuring instruments (which can be used to make aluminum tubes–we all remember from Colin Powell why those matter, right?) shipped to Malaysia ended up in a Libyan nuclear facility:

Seemingly innocuous but high-tech precision instruments that found their way to a nuclear facility in Libya were rerouted after being shipped directly from a manufacturer in Japan to a company in Malaysia, sources said.



The devices included precision instruments for three-dimensional measurements, which can be used to develop nuclear weapons.



…



Asked for comment, a senior official with the Kanagawa company said it “was beyond imagination” that the equipment ended up in Libya.



A spokesman for the Scomi group, parent company of SCOPE, said it had no idea how the instruments were resold for onward export. It strenuously denied having links to the nuclear black market.

There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the Japanese company knew its instruments were going to be routed illegally to Libya, which is good, of course.

The Yomiuri reports that prefectural governments will be responsible for drawing up new local security procedures to deal with potential attacks, particularly by missile or terrorism. For its part, the federal government is revising its own outdated Cold War-era rulebook, with a choice of model that I find nothing short of thrilling:

The government is following Israel’s example in compiling manuals stipulating these measures and distributing them to the public.



Israel was hit by about 40 missiles from Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. At that time, Israeli authorities distributed manuals that included such measures as having people seal windows and avoid the outer walls when inside a house or building.



It was reported that only two people were killed by the missile attacks as a result of such measures.



The government believes that the public distribution of such manuals will be effective in fully informing people of evacuation and other safety measures, according to the sources.

When the Japanese tendency toward decentralization hits the post-War Japanese tendency toward rigid procedure-worship, the results are often very poor. But there’s an equally strong tradition of initiative at the village level–you can still see it in the organization of parades on festival days, which a fascinating article I read long ago posited was the origin of the Japan, Inc. corporate structure–that at its best combines group loyalty with idiosyncratic local knowledge. The new security plans are still in process, but if they really do succeed in allowing the federal government to expose the nation to the wisdom of Israel’s experience while allowing local authorities to devise the actual protocols that work best for them…well, I’ll be happy as a pig in sh*t.

The LDP’s coalition partner, the New Komei Party, has released a position paper that gingerly revises its former position on the export of weapons. Its new approach may make it easier to relax restrictions on technology transfers to the US.



*******



Koizumi has been somewhat more assertive in ensuring that other proposals by his administration are realized. Or not–the article veers back and forth a lot. It also gives a good indication of the headache-inducing nature of factional politics in the Diet, which you need several flow charts, an almanac, a sextant, and perhaps a rabbit’s foot to navigate through. Suffice it to say that–duh!–the Koizumi administration is hoping that it’s posted enough higher-ups who support its Japan Post privatization plan that there will be pressure on those who don’t to fall in line.



*******



Finally, two consecutively-posted stories over at the English Yomiuri sum up the state of government spending with (surely unintentional?) dark comedy: Most federal ministries are bankrupt by normal accounting standards, but they are eager to maintain the amount they dole out in subsidies. (Note: The River Bureau is part of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport.)



The proposal to cut subsidies is part of the Koizumi administration’s proposals for “three-pronged reform” (which is usually rendered “trinity reform,” but that kind of weirds me out). The idea is to cut federal subsidies to local governments, to lower the amount of money passing through the allocation tax system (whereby federal tax money makes a U-turn and is sent back in specified amounts to local governments), and to make up for the decreased amount of money flowing from federal to local government by localizing more tax collection. Take a wild guess why federal ministries are lukewarm on that idea.

The DPRK’s People’s Army* has a unit of hackers that is operating at a first-world level, says South Korea’s Department of Defense:

こうした専門要員は人民武力省（国防省）の指揮自動化局や偵察局に配属され、ハッカー部隊として韓国や米国、日本などの軍事情報収集、軍の指揮・通信網を混乱させるなどのサイバー戦を担当しているとした。



These specialized personnel are assigned to the Command/Mobilization and Reconnaissance Agencies of the Ministry of the Korean People’s Army (the DPRK’s department of defense) and are believed to be in charge of cyberwar strikes such as disrupting South Korean, US, and Japanese intelligence gathering and armed forces command and communications networks.

You can’t really be shocked by this, but I think it does underscore that North Korea (despite its ineptitude in many areas) is not just sitting there counting its long-range missiles while we natter about “getting back to the negotiating table.” Yet another reason to be thankful that we have resilience and dynamism on our side.

* Is that what they call it in English? I’ll look later…uh, yeah, it is. Well, it’s the Korean People’s Army, to remind us all that those heirs to the Shilla in the South are not real Koreans but stooges who have sold out to the West. Don’t bother bringing up that if we extended the metaphor, we might remember that the Shilla cooperated with the Chinese to take down the northern Koguryô kingdom, and the side that’s allied with China now is…. It’s not the Tang Dynasty anymore.
BTW, have you seen the official DPRK website? Not hours of amusement, but certainly minutes. I notice there’s no link to a Korean Friendship Association in Japan, too.