Raw Japan

Calling time on Japan’s alcoholics

When Japanese civil servant Yoshiyuki Takeuchi started to lag his colleagues at work, he joined a growing number of his countrymen looking for solace from their problems in the bottom of a glass. 

“People who started after me would go further in their careers just because they finished college. I tried to stop that sense of ‘why always me?’ by drinking,” said the 50-year-old, who quit university as his family couldn’t afford it.

With liquor consumption growing sixfold in the last 50 years in Japan to match the country’s economic affluence, alcoholism has become an increasing — but poorly grasped — problem in a nation where booze is readily available from convenience stores, where evening television is awash with liquor ads and where bonding with workmates is typically done over a few cold ones.

Economic losses from drinking problems top 6.6 trillion yen ($73 billion) a year and some 800,000 people, or 0.6 percent of the population, are estimated to be alcoholics. The rate is smaller than the United States or Europe, but is rising as more women and elderly become addicted to drink.

Despite the growing number suffering from the condition, alcoholism is not seen as a disease and there is no systematic approach to dealing with it. Methods of prevention and intervention are usually viewed as lacking in Japan, and even medical professionals often fail to understand that merely fixing physical ailments caused by alcoholism won’t stop patients from drinking.

Katsuya Maruyama of Kurihama Alcoholism Center, a leading hospital for treating alcohol dependency, said Japan is overly tolerant when it comes to drinking too much. “There is no proper teaching on how alcohol can be dangerous, so no one knows alcoholism as a disease,” he said.

A storm brewing

I watched Japan’s election returns from the rocky Pacific, with the satellite TV reception suprisingly crisp on a ferry heading south.

A typhoon is headed towards mainland Japan and travel and other ways of life have been caught up in its headwinds, while the impact of the apparently changing political climate has only just begun.

Northern Hokkaido, once a stronghold of the Liberal Democratic Party with never-ending highway, tunnel and bridge projects as testament, deserted the long-ruling party with all but three seats going to the Democratic Party, including prime minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama.

LDP losers in Hokkaido included former foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura, head of the party’s largest faction, Tsutomu Takebe, a Koizumi Cabinet loyalist, and former finance Shoichi Nakagawa, whose family had represented the middle of the vast prefecture for almost half a century and whose struggles were chronicled last week in this blog.

In Tohoku, the northern part of Japan’s biggest island, Honshu, and the home of Democrat founder and former leader Ichiro Ozawa, the beating was also fierce, if not quite as emphatic, as the LDP took 9 seats and the Democrats 26.

“Tohoku is generally conservative, with farmers supporting the LDP’s policies. But before the election their attitude had changed,” said Masaki Hara, a retired Sendai resident, who joined me watching results, along with many other captive ferry passengers, some of whom had lost interest in the Yomiuri Giants game on a competing TV screen.

Make mine a milk

Japan’s far north, once home to pet projects of scions of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, looks set to become an even hotter bed of opposition Democratic Party success in this weekend’s Japanese election capped, if polls and analysts are correct, by a local son becoming the nation’s next prime minister.

But while the country decides whether opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama will become premier, voters in Hokkaido will also decide the fate of a certain disgraced former finance, trade and farms minister who is battling for his political life.

Shoichi Nakagawa, who last graced this blog when his antics at February’s G8 finance ministers’ summit in Rome prompted his resignation from the cabinet, is trailing his 36-year-old DPJ rival, Tomohiro Ishikawa, for a seat his family has held for nearly half a century, according to the local Tokachi Mainichi newspaper on  Wednesday.

Nakagawa, once a rising star in the LDP — and still a relatively young hand in the party at 56 — quit the cabinet after having to deny he was was drunk at the summit, which an often replayed video of his departing news conference did little to support, undermining his already weak ally, Prime Minister Taro Aso.

His departure speech cited “careless health management”, which has morphed into potential careless career management, as the LDP prepares for a likely lashing on Sunday.

In the last election in 2005, Nakagawa won his seat by about 23,000 votes, but judging from newspapers and the ample Nakagawa posters in the city of Obihiro this week, confidence is lacking in Hokkaido’s 11th District this time around.

Nakagawa, like DPJ chief Hatoyama, followed a family line into politics, but his entry after a Tokyo upbringing stemmed from the suicide of his then 57-year-old father, a former farms minister who locals say is still revered among the prefecture’s politically strong agricultural community.

Fun and games keeping a finance minister awake

Do you play games on your mobile phone, as millions of Japanese do? Here’s one for you.

A software company has launched a mobile phone game that pokes fun at former Japanese finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who resigned earlier this month after nearly dozing off at a news conference in Rome.

He denied he was drunk, saying he was on cold medicine, but was forced to quit when videotape of his performance at a news conference after the Group of Seven finance ministers meeting triggered an uproar in Japan.

The game, created by Liveware Inc and called “Exhausted Minister Dozing at a News Conference”, challenges the player to keep the minister awake when a reporter asks a question during a spoof press conference.

Players push number 5 to wake the minister up or to put him to sleep so he can rest. The game is over if the minister is sleeping when a reporter asks a question or he runs out of energy.

When that happens, the minister reaches for a glass of red wine.

If the minister stays awake for questions, his support rate rises and the time between the questions grows shorter, increasing the game’s difficulty.

A Clinton jinx on ruling party?

Japan’s ruling coalition could be forgiven for feeling nervous over U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting with the leaders of the powerful main opposition party this week.

The last time a Clinton met Japanese opposition executives, the Liberal Democratic Party lost its grip on power within weeks. That was in 1993, when then U.S. President Bill Clinton attended an embassy reception with politicians including Morihiro Hosokawa, soon to become the first non-LDP premier since 1955.

Hillary Clinton’s Asian tour brought her to Tokyo in the midst of a political storm that could see Prime Minister Taro Aso’s unpopular administration crumble almost as quickly. 

Her lunchtime joint news conference with Japanese foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone on Tuesday, meant to underscore the importance of the bilateral alliance, was overshadowed by a simultaneous event called by Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who announced his resignation after a shambolic performance at a G7 news conference in Rome last weekend forced him to deny that he had been drunk.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called the coincidence “unfortunate”.

Aso is highly unlikely to step down before a scheduled visit to Washington at the invitation of President Barack Obama next week. But once that is over and some stimulus and annual budget bills have been passed, analysts agree pressure on him from within his own party and its junior coalition partner, New Komeito, will mount.

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.”