Category: Japan

It looks like the mayors of the major Tokyo neighborhoods of Shinjuku and Shibuya are trying to prevent crowd crush like incidents from happening like what happened in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood:

Leaders of this city’s most popular nightlife districts held a news conference Monday and called on revelers to stay away during Halloween. Shinjuku Mayor Kenichi Yoshizumi said his ward saw an increase of about 3,000 visitors during Halloween last year after Shibuya strongly discouraged street parties and banned public drinking.

Shibuya became a popular place to spend Halloween night in the early 2000s. In recent years, many costumed revelers and those who come to see them have crowded the iconic Shibuya Scramble intersection and narrow streets around Shibuya Station.

So many people were drinking and littering last year in Kabukicho, a popular redlight district in Shinjuku, that ward officials were collecting garbage strewn everywhere the next morning. “To leave garbage behind after drinking and eating is not what an educated and rational person would do,” Yoshizumi said during a joint news conference with Shibuya Mayor Ken Hasebe at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Sailors in Japan are beginning to experience the restrictions that were at one time common place for servicemembers stationed in South Korea:

U.S. Navy sailors have one less hour of revelry in Japan’s bars and nightclubs after Navy Region Japan tightened up liberty restrictions recently imposed on all service members in the country. U.S. sailors in Japan must adhere to a midnight-to-5 a.m. ban on drinking in public establishments off base, according to the order from Rear Adm. Ian Johnson. They may not even be in those places during those hours. The order, which took effect Wednesday, was coordinated with U.S. 7th Fleet, Navy Region Command spokesman Cmdr. Paul Macapagal told Stars and Stripes by email Wednesday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

The Japanese are responding to recent Chinese provocations into their ADIZ and EEZ with sailing through the Taiwan Strait:

A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait for the first time on Wednesday, according to a local media report. The destroyer JS Sazanami, along with Australian and New Zealand vessels, sailed south from the East China Sea and through the 110-mile-wide channel separating the island from mainland China, Kyodo News reported, citing an unnamed source who was “familiar with the matter.” The ships were believed to be headed to the South China Sea to participate in exercises, the report said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

The Korean left is of course trying to appeal to anti-Japanese sentiment because Prime Minister Kishida did not give yet again another apology for things that happened 80+ years ago:

The main opposition party slammed President Yoon Suk Yeol of “flattering” his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, accusing him of making consecutive concessions to Tokyo without securing a formal apology or compensation for its historical grievances.

A day after the Japanese prime minister left Seoul, the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea on Sunday pledged to revise rules to stop comfort women statues at home and abroad from being defaced or meddled with, without disclosing details. It also promised to elicit Japan’s formal apology and compensation for its past wrongdoings.

“The Japanese government has been constantly pouring in diplomatic efforts to take down the comfort woman statues in Germany and Italy, but the Yoon administration is merely repeating the disastrous pro-Japan flunkeyism, much less a strong reaction to them,” the women’s club of the party said in a statement.

Korea Herald

Here is what Kishida did say:

Kishida on Friday repeated his remarks from his previous visit to Seoul in March 2023 that he had inherited “all of his predecessors’ recognition of history,” including a declaration between former Korean President Kim Dae-jung and former Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi in 1998 — under which Japan recognized its past suffering inflicted on the South Korean people when Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula.

Kishida also reiterated his 2023 remarks, saying it was “heartbreaking that many South Koreans went through difficult and sad experiences in the past,” in an apparent reference to Japan’s abuse of Korean forced labor, though delivered in an informal and personal tone.

Japan clearly has apology fatigue and what Kishida did was just reemphasize the apologies of previous Japanese leaders instead of making yet another new apology. According to this Joong Ang Ilbo article Japan has made 63 apology statements to Korea. However, according to the same article 85% of Koreans think Japan is not sincere in their apologies. This is why the Korean left continues to jump on this issue because it is good politics for them to bash Japan and attack Korean conservatives on.

The fear is with these territorial incursions is that one day a lower level commander may take action against one of these provocations which leads to a larger conflict:

Recent incursions by China into Japan’s territorial waters and airspace showcase a deliberate effort by Beijing to normalize its increasingly assertive actions against its regional neighbors, according to two defense experts. A Chinese survey vessel on Saturday briefly entered territorial waters off Kagoshima prefecture on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. Five days earlier, on Aug. 26, a Chinese Y-9 surveillance aircraft breached Japanese airspace over a small island off Kyushu, an unprecedented action by a Chinese military aircraft.

The incidents add to an already tense relationship between China and Japan, whose claims in the Senkaku Islands are repeatedly tested by the Chinese coast guard. China’s coast guard is even more aggressive against the Philippine coast guard, bumping hulls and employing water cannons and other measures in territorial disputes in the Philippine exclusive economic zone of the South China Sea.

The two incursions of Japanese territory were “provocative and risked flaming tensions in the region,” according to Brian Hart, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ China Power Project. “The greater long-term implication is that Beijing is employing its military forces in increasingly provocative ways, which heightens the risks of misperceptions, miscalculations, and dangerous accidents,” Hart told Stars and Stripes by email Wednesday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.