Global News Journal

Remembering Hiro’s gentle smile

As Hiro Muramoto headed out the door of the Tokyo newsroom last week, weighed down with TV equipment on his way to Bangkok to cover demonstrations, he flashed a smile at a Reuters colleague.

It was, she remembers, a “Hiro” smile. It was gentle, rather than a broad grin, and it showed the 43-year-old was pleased once again to take his expertise on the road to do his job telling the world what was going on.

It was doing that job that cost him his life as he was killed, along with 20 others, during a sudden burst of violence during the protests in central Bangkok on Saturday night.

Hiro was not the gung-ho war correspondent of the movies. He was a careful, loving married Dad of two and a gentle mentor for young colleagues and an expert story teller.

He took his concern for those around him beyond the newsroom to complete two 100-km charity walks (with a third planned this month), raising thousands of dollars for Oxfam along with teammates from Thomson Reuters.

At Reuters for more than a decade and a half, Hiro was witness to many of Asia’s biggest stories. His work brought to viewers around the world the sounds and images of events ranging from Asian financial crises to political protests and the 2002 World Cup.

He was trained and experienced in operating in hostile environments, including the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Philippine military operations against insurgents on Jolo island.

The “Japan High School Party”

If ever proof were needed that personal ties can trump policy in Japanese political alliances , a new party being set up by a band of ageing opposition MPs should do the trick.

Former Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano, 71, favours raising taxes to pay for burgeoning social welfare costs in Japan’s greying society and helped push to privatise Japan’s huge postal system back in 2005.

His partner, ex-trade minister Takei Hiranuma, 70, is an ultraconservative who touts “traditional Japanese values” and left the then-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2005 because he staunchly opposed taking Japan Post private.

“Mr Yosano is not opposed to my ideas,” Hiranuma told reporters this week as the two plotted to start their new “Stand Up, Japan” party amid criticism that their policies hardly matched. “We were in the same class at Azabu High School and our seats were next to each other.”

Drafted as a fifth member needed to meet a legal requirement for setting up a new party was upper house lawmaker Yoshio Nakagawa, whose main qualification appears to be that his lawmaker brother, now deceased, was once an aide to Hiranuma.

Hiranuma himself would seem to be a better ideological fit with banking minister Shizuka Kamei, who also left the LDP in 2005 and started the People’s New Party to battle postal privatisation. But cynics say the small party couldn’t accommodate two big egos, and Kamei now belongs to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s coalition, which took power last September after Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) trounced the long-dominant Liberal Democrats.

Confused? Not surprising.

Japan “opens up” to freelancers

Japan, breaking with tradition, has started to open up government news conferences to reporters outside the country’s established media. But have they become genuinely “open”?

After six months on the job, Prime Minister  Yukio Hatoyama  held his first news conference last month accessible to magazine, freelance and online journalists, drawing a packed crowd at the premier’s Kantei office . Other ministers, including those for foreign affairs, banking and environment, have also started news conferences for journalists excluded from so-called ”press clubs”, which are reserved for a small number of mainstream news agencies, newspapers and broadcasters. The elite press clubs have long enjoyed exclusive access to government news conferences, off-the-record briefings and other events. Opening up the news conferences to non-club members has been a big deal, and only came about after Hatoyama’s Democratic Party took power last year with promises for change and more transparent policies.

But for all the hype over equal access and “openness”, freelance and magazine reporters were corralled to one side of the room for the prime minister’s recent news conference, while press  club members took front row seats. Some joked they were being treated like “dangerous people”. At the environment minister’s first “open” news conference, reporters were instructed:  “As professional journalists, please ask dignified questions”. (No plea for dignity at news conferences for press club members.) Reporters were also warned not to spend too much time venting their own opinions.

The press club system will probably continue for now, despite the recent changes and criticism that the clubs have led to reporters getting too cosy with government officials and too cosy amongst themselves.  Many ministers still limit access to press club members and even those who’ve opened up their news conferences hold separate ones exclusively for press clubs. Hatoyama has said that he would talk to his cabinet on the need for more transparency. For Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada , the change has helped not only freelancers but himself.  ”I’ve learned things from the many different views presented here and I’m enjoying these news conferences,” he said last month.

from Raw Japan:

Watching the giants fall

Some elections count more than others, and never more than when a longstanding dominant party is sent packing. I've been lucky enough to witness turning points in four countries on two continents.

France, India, Italy, now Japan -- all have rejected one-party dominance for the rough and tumble of alternating majorities. In each case, I was fortunate to behold history.

Japan's election on Sunday marked the end of an era that started not long after World War Two and saw Japan rise from the ashes of defeat to a global economic power. Japan's revival took root in an iron triangle locking the Liberal Democratic Party, bureaucrats and Japanese industry.

Now the LDP is tasting the same bitter fruit as paramount parties in other countries whose voters decided a few decades in power for one party were enough. The circumstances in each country were different, but the democratic impulse was similar and the result much the same.

In 1981 Francois Mitterand became the first leftist president of France since the Fifth Republic was created in 1957. I watched as ecstatic French voters poured into the streets after Mitterrand's victory. France then trembled as this imperious socialist did the impossible by sharing power with his Gaullist rivals.

The Indian National Congress spearheaded that nation's independence movement and then became the dominant political party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family. Eventually corruption allegations caught up with Congress and it had to yield power first to Hindu nationalists, then to a coalition of upstart leftists and regional parties.

I remember the sight of chastened ex-Congress leader P.V. Narasimha Rao standing in the dock in a Delhi court accused of corruption charges, for which he was later acquitted.

from Raw Japan:

Japan two-party system — long in arriving

Observers of Japanese politics who have long thought the country was ripe for a real two-party system are watching Sunday's election with a dual sense of incredulity -- surprise that it has taken so long to oust the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and surprise that it finally looks like happening.

Media surveys show the decade-old opposition Democratic Party is set to win the poll for parliament's powerful lower house -- and probably by a landslide, ushering in party leader Yukio Hatoyama at the head of a government pledged to spend more on consumers and workers than the companies that benefited most from LDP policies.

That would be only the second time the LDP has lost its grip on government since it was founded in 1955.

"Every one I talk to has that feeling -- they aren't sure it's really going to happen because they thought it would happen before," said Steven Reed, a political scientist at Chuo University who has been analysing Japanese politics for decades. "A lot of people predicted based on hope, and that's not a particularly good variable for predictions."

Those with long memories can't help but recall the only other time the LDP lost power, when heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa and dozens of other lawmakers bolted the party in 1993 and voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against then-premier Kiichi Miyazawa, triggering a political quake that led to the formation of a multiparty, anti-LDP coalition under the telegenic Morihiro Hosokawa.

Hosokawa entranced a public more accustomed to staid, dark-suited and often inarticulate leaders with his media-savvy ways -- striding before cameras at an international leaders' summit with a white scarf around his neck, using a teleprompter at news conferences -- and promising to cut the bureaucratic red-tape that critics said was strangling the world's second-biggest economy.

It’s all the fault of those people who work and save too much

One thing we’ve learnt from the crisis is that if something sounds funny it probably is. All that talk about slicing and dicing subprime debt to turn it into triple-A securities was hard to understand at the time and now we know it was just the 21st century equivalent of alchemy.

The current debate about the responsibility that surplus countries like China, Germany and Japan share for the crisis has a similar ring.

Plenty of people warned that the huge deficits and debts that countries like the United States, Britain and Spain ran up over the past decade were unsustainable. Recently the argument has been made that the countries that sold the Americans and Brits all those things they bought on credit share the blame.

In economic terms, it takes two to tango: if one country has a deficit, there must be a surplus somewhere else. In fact, if you run a big surplus, you are practically forcing someone else to have a deficit.

Well before the crisis broke, in March 2005, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke discussed the “global savings glut” as an explanation for the persistent and rising U.S. current account deficit.

In recent weeks, The Economist has subjected the economies of surplus countries China, Germany and Japan (as well as that of the United States) to critical examination in a series on “rebalancing the world economy”. In its latest edition, for example, it describes the Japanese as “serial exporters”.

from Raw Japan:

G7 drink row adds to Japan government woes

Japan's finance minister denies he was drunk at a G7 news conference but opposition lawmakers sense blood in the water and are demanding he be fired, adding yet more pressure on a deeply unpopular government that faces an election this year.

The story is the Internet phenomenon of the day in Japan as TV stations and newspapers issued stories calling attention to Shoichi Nakagawa's behaviour at the news conference at the G7 gathering in Rome over the weekend.

In Japan, at least, the question of what was wrong with Nakagawa when he appeared in front of the media has completely overshadowed the issue of the financial crisis.

His speech sounded slurred at the media conference and at one point Nakagawa, his head down and eyes closed, mistook a question directed at the BOJ governor as one for him.

The embattled minister attributed his behaviour to having taken too much medicine, including cold medicine and said he had only sipped wine at lunch, ahead of the news conference.

"It is a fact that I didn't conduct myself clearly, and I feel I must put it straight," Nakagawa told reporters on his return to Tokyo. "I did not drink a glassful."

from MacroScope:

Winners in a trade war

Trade protectionism -- or at least the threat of it -- has raised it head as the global economy has declined, bringing with it all the historical fears about the Great Depression. Consider the flurry of concern about a "Buy American" clause in one of the U.S. stimulus bills.

It is traditionally assumed that widespread protectionism would most hurt the biggest economies, the United States and Japan. But Barclays Capital analyst David Woo says this is not so and that Russia, Canada, Australia and Sweden are the most vulnerable.

Woo studied various factors that would play on the effect of protectionism on a country, from openness and flexibility to its dependence on trade and it savings.

Japan turned out to be the least vulnerable. "Its relative closeness, relative flexibility of its labour market, and its terms of trade more than outweigh the negative contribution to its growth from a narrowing of its trade surplus in a global protectionist environment," Woo writes.

As for the United States, "the only reason why it failed to take first place is because of its extremely low saving rate, which will limit the scope for domestic demand to offset falling exports."

Mexico,  India and China took the third, fourth and fifth places, respectively. So it's not all about emerging markets.