Category: Japan

It will be interesting to see if local fans includes expats and military that are living in Japan:

The Tokyo Olympics will allow some local fans to attend when the games open in just over a month, organizing committee officials and the IOC said on Monday.

Organizers set a limit of 50% of capacity up to a maximum of 10,000 fans for all Olympic venues.

The decision was announced after so-called Five Party talks online with local organizers, the International Olympic Committee, the International Paralympic Committee, the Japanese government and the government of metropolitan Tokyo.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

This is pretty unusual to see a brown bear go into a major city and just start attacking people:

Chased by a car after going on a rampage that injured three people, a wild brown bear crossed a busy road, forced its way onto a military camp in northern Japan and attacked a Japanese soldier on guard duty.

Footage on local television showed the bear wandering a street in Sapporo. After a car began to speed after it, the bear crossed a busy road and forced its way into the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Okadama. The bear knocked down a uniformed soldier on duty at the gate.

The soldier suffered cuts to his chest and stomach, but his injuries were not life threatening, according to the Defense Ministry.

The bear, on the the loose all night in a city in northern Japan, also disrupted flights at the airport Friday before being shot and killed by authorities.

Army Times

You can read more at the link.

Considering Japan’s pacifist Constitution, I am not sure legally how they would be allowed to respond if just Taiwan was attacked. Additionally the Chinese would more likely blockade Taiwan prior to any attack which makes Japanese involvement even more Constitutionally difficult:

Tokyo would step up militarily to defend Taiwan if Beijing moved to reunify the island with mainland China by force, former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger said in a panel discussion on Tuesday with other top Trump administration officials.

Pottinger, considered one of the key architects of the Trump administration’s hardline China policies, said Japan first suggested a quadrilateral alliance with the US, India and Australia – now known as the “Quad” – as a defense strategy against China. He also pushed back on assertions that the former administration strained ties with Japan and other allies in the region. (…….)

“There’s a saying in the Japanese military: ‘Taiwan’s defense is Japan’s defense.’ And, and I think that Japan will act accordingly,” Pottinger added.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

According to this article Japanese citizens that worked even decades ago in the U.S. are receiving U.S. government sponsored coronavirus stimulus checks:

A 79-year-old man in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, received an official-looking piece of mail printed in English in late April. 

The addresser was the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Inside the envelope, he found a check for $1,400 (153,000 yen).

His wife also received a check for the same amount.

They are among the Japanese recipients of U.S. stimulus checks to boost the economy during the pandemic, who are at a loss of what to do with the surprise payments. 

According to a person who is related to a major bank, the bank’s call center has been inundated with inquiries about U.S. stimulus checks since May 11.

“As far as the bank is concerned, if a person wants to cash a check and the person’s identity is verified, we have to ask the U.S. side to pay,” the person said. “We don’t have a way to examine if the person is eligible to receive the check.” (…….) The man entertained the idea of pocketing the $2,800 and said to himself, “The United States has so much money to spare that it gives out (the checks) to foreigners like me who lived there about 40 years ago.”

Asahi Shimbun

You can read more at the link.

There has been an uptick in COVID cases in Okinawa with five of them being US military personnel:

Okinawa prefecture on Sunday reported 231 newly infected people, a pandemic one-day high for the prefecture, according to its coronavirus tracking website. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suge declared a state of emergency there starting Sunday until June 20, according to public broadcaster NHK.

The Okinawa prefectural government is asking individuals traveling to Okinawa to have a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of their arrival, according to a Monday post on Yokota Air Base’s Facebook page.

“This is not a requirement, but travelers are advised to check with their airlines prior to any scheduled departures for any airline specific changes,” the message said.

Okinawa expects bars and restaurants that serve alcohol to close and shopping malls and sport clubs to close at 8 p.m., according to NHK.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but total COVID deaths on Okinawa rose to 146 since the pandemic started with 5 in the last seven days.

President Biden is sending one of his buddies to Japan:

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, according to a person familiar with the president’s decision.

The person, who was not authorized to comment publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity Tuesday, said the White House plans to announce Emanuel’s nomination later this month.

Emanuel is a former three-term congressman who served as Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff and was a senior adviser in Bill Clinton’s administration. Biden had considered naming Emanuel to serve as his transportation secretary but ultimately passed him over in the face of fierce opposition from some in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and liberal activists.

Asahi Shimbun

You can read more at the link, but a good thing about being an ambassador to Japan is that if he needs to send a dead fish to anyone they will be easy find.

I wonder if anyone on the Korean left is going to claim this is training to assault Dokdo:

French forces are training on Japanese soil for the first time during drills this week that will include beach raids alongside U.S. Marines and Japanese amphibious troops supported by an Australian frigate.

The Jeanne D’Arc 21 exercise began Tuesday at Camp Ainoura, home of Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade at Sasebo in Nagasaki prefecture, III Marine Expeditionary Force said in a statement Wednesday.

The brigade, modeled on U.S. Marines, has about 100 people in the exercise, including infantry, engineers and command and control troops, according to Marine Capt. Thomas Delaney, a firepower control team leader on Kyushu.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Japan’s has seen a recent surge in coronavirus cases which includes USFJ personnel:

U.S. Forces Japan reported 47 COVID-19 patients at 10 installations across Japan on April 27.

Sasebo Naval Base, on the southern island of Kyushu, reported via Facebook on Sunday that two people tested positive during a medical screening and were quarantined.

The Marine Corps had three new COVID-19 patients between Saturday and Monday, one each at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma and Camps Hansen and Courtney, according to a Facebook post by Marine Corps Installations Pacific on Monday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Like other places in the world there has been a spring time surge in the coronavirus in Japan that has effected the US military troops as well:

U.S. bases in Japan reported another 26 people had contracted the coronavirus between April 7 and 6 p.m. Tuesday.

The Marine Corps announced 16 new cases on Okinawa and one at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni near Hiroshima. Kadena Air Base reported another eight patients between April 7 and Monday. Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo said one person tested positive sometime between Saturday and Tuesday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Via a reader tip comes this interesting read about Lee Hak-rae who was a convicted war criminal from World War II who served as a prison guard during the construction of the Thai-Burma railway line:

The last Korean to be convicted of war crimes after serving in the Japanese military during World War II has died without receiving the apology and compensation he insisted Tokyo owed him for his suffering. Lee Hak-rae, 96, died on Sunday.  (…….)

Interviewed in 1988, Lee said he had never abused prisoners in his charge and that he had been frightened of them because of their stature. 

That claim was undermined by the diaries of Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, the Australian army colonel who served in the Medical Corps and was captured at Java in 1942. In one passage, Dunlop wrote that he had become so incensed at the brutal treatment by “The Lizard” – the nickname the POWs gave to Lee – that he found a length of wood and hid alongside a jungle path he knew Lee would be taking. His intention was to kill Lee and conceal the body in the undergrowth, but he changed his mind after realising that he and other POWs would be held accountable for Lee’s death. (……)

“The Japanese guards were bad, but the Koreans and the Formosans were the worst,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “These were men who the Japanese looked down on as colonials, so they needed to show they were as good as the Japanese. And they had no one else to take it out on other than us POWs.”

South China Morning Post

You can read more at the link, but Lee after the war was originally sentenced to death for abusing prisoners and on appeal it was reduced to jail time. He ended up serving 11 years in prison and was released in 1956.