Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
You’re late, minister!
Forget about funding scandals, budget debate or rifts over foreign policy: the big to-do in Japan’s parliament this morning was over three tardy cabinet ministers.
The upper house budget committee meeting had been scheduled to begin at 8:50 a.m. but had to be delayed until the three showed up, leading to an uproar from the opposition and a short recess.
When the trio – transport minister Seiji Maehara, internal affairs minister Kazuhiro Haraguchi and national strategy minister Yoshito Sengoku — arrived, they bowed before the committee and apologised.
Haraguchi, who media say was tweeting at 8:52 when he should have been in parliament, blamed his assistants for a scheduling error.
“I was following my schedule, like this,” he said, removing a crumpled sheet of paper in front of reporters and TV cameras and pointing at the 9 a.m. entry. “It said nine o’clock so that’s when I came … However, even if it is an administrative error, in the end it is the minister’s mistake.”
All three were later reprimanded by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano.
Japan’s election allergy on the Internet
Tech-savvy Japan is home to many high-tech companies and more than 70 percent of its people use the Internet. But politics on the Web falls far behind.
Both politicians and voters can be found online. Lawmakers have their own blogs and channels on sites such as niconico and youtube, and political parties such as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and main opposition Democratic Party of Japan have websites. A couple of politicians are even tweeting on ”Twitter“.
But now that the election looks set to be called for late August, Japanese politics will fall off the ‘Net, rather than ramping up in volume like it does in other countries.
Japan’s 59-year-old election law bans campaigns using visual images that can reach large numbers of readers during an election campaign. While written in the age of posters and pamphlets, the law has been interpreted as preventing Internet advertising.
Opposition lawmaker Seiji Ohsaka is one of the “tweeting” politicians but he has been told he must stop for the 12 days of official campaigning ahead of the election.
“With Twitter, I can send out information in a short, small, and compact way… It’s possible for those that do not seriously face politics on a regular basis to touch on it in a casual way,” Ohsaka told me, after sending 50 tweets during a debate between the prime minister and opposition leader in parliament.
While this new win definitely brings about “change” in Japan’s leadership, it’s still too early to say whether Japan will move away from it’s strong U.S. ties, and towards stronger Asia regionalism. Asia Chronicle actually recently wrote about this historic election, which you can read at (http://asiachroniclenews.com/).
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Resident Raw Japan Expert
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