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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

JAPAN: Japanese gaming to profit from child subsidies

<CW-2>Japan?s popular pachinko parlours are looking forward to a boost from fathers enriched by government benefits for their children

(Sinopix/Rex Features)

March 11, 2010

Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent, From The Times

Japan's popular pachinko parlours are looking forward to a boost from fathers enriched by government benefits for their children

Japan's gambling industry is expected to be an unlikely beneficiary of a national child subsidy scheme, which aims to shower parents with cash and encourage young couples to start families.

Pachinko parlours — the cacophonous pinball arcades that claim about 23 trillion yen (£171 billion) in illegal gambling revenues every year — are expected to perform especially well. The monthly family benefit payments are perfectly suited to fuel a couple of hours' play.

Several sectors of the Japanese economy are tipped to benefit from the Y2.2 trillion programme, through which families will receive payments of Y13,000 (£97) every month for each child if the new Government is able to push its much-vaunted programme through parliament.

Payments will rise to Y23,000 a month in the second year of the scheme as part of the Government’s effort to demonstrate that the State will permanently be on the side of families and childrearing.

The past two decades have witnessed relentless declines in the Japanese birth rate, prompting a range of demographic concerns, from a lack of elderly care provision to long-term fiscal catastrophe.

The sectors associated with the child subsidy scheme that have already attracted investors' attention include obvious beneficiaries, such as makers of children’s clothes, baby goods and private educational establishments.

Theme park operators, Nintendo and other toy and videogame makers also appear in the “benefit basket” of stocks that could gain as parents finally have the cash to succumb to their children’s nagging.

However, in a note to investors, Daiwa Securities analysts also point out the reality of what happens when governments suddenly make generous cash payments, especially if the subsidy money is paid into the father’s bank account. Because the money is not disbursed in the form of vouchers, Daiwa says, the child allowance represents a “hidden” bonus for the gambling industry.

Largely because of the legal grey zone in which they thrive, pachinko parlour operators are not listed on the stock exchange. The producers of the machines, however, are tipped to perform strongly. Stocks of Heiwa, Sankyo, SegaSammy and Aruze all appear on Daiwa’s list of “stocks to watch”.

The filter-through of stimulus cash to the pachinko parlours has historical precedent. Last April, the Government’s wider stimulus programme involved £140 cash handouts to families and was intended to trigger general spending across the retail and services sector in Japan. Pachinko stocks were the best-performing equities in the market over the following six months. In 2007, pachinko revenues are thought to have surpassed those of the entire Japanese restaurant industry.

Other analysts have questioned the wisdom of the child subsidy proposal. Research by the Kansai Institute of Social and Economic research found that only slightly more than half of Japanese were positive about the idea and more than a third intended simply to churn any cash they received into savings or paying-off loans. Of those who said they would save the money, 37 per cent said they would actively save it for their children’s future.

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JAPAN: Japan opens 98th national airport

Page last updated at 06:50 GMT, Thursday, 11 March 2010

By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Tokyo

Map

Japan's 98th airport has begun operations - offering just one flight a day.

Ibaraki airport cost 22bn Yen ($220m, £147m) to build and is being seen in Japan as a prime example of wasteful public expenditure.

It is located 80km (50 miles) and a long bus ride north of Tokyo.

The airport was conceived as a hub for budget carriers but the check-in counters were almost deserted as operations began.

There is just one plane a day, to South Korea. Another flight, to the Japanese city of Kobe, will begin next month.

The airport has become a symbol of decades of public spending to prop up the economy that has left Japan studded with bridges to nowhere and unneeded dams.

The new centre-left government, which came to power last year, has criticised the links between previous conservative administrations and the construction industry, and vowed to cut waste.

International travellers tired of long queues and crowded departure lounges should perhaps consider flying to Ibaraki.

But Ibaraki itself has little to commend it to Korean tourists who might be thinking of catching the single daily flight from Seoul.

Apart from one well-known Japanese garden the prefecture's main claim to fame is the locals' skill in making natto, a fermented soy bean dish that many consider an acquired taste.

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JAPAN: 65 years after the war, Japan needs convincing of the need for US bases

A family in the city of Ginowan looks over the controversial Futenma airbase

A family in the city of Ginowan looks over the controversial Futenma airbase

March 11, 2010

Bronwen Maddox, Okinawa; From The Times

On a humid March evening in Okinawa young American men with crewcuts and thick necks sprawl out from the bars and lap-dancing clubs that cluster near US military bases across the island.

“Marijuana — it’s like alcohol, but . . .” reads one T-shirt. A young white man weaves his Honda Saloon at speed through cars heading for a junction. “We all pull clear,” one Japanese driver says. “There are so many accidents.”

The US has slapped tough rules on the 22,000 Marines and 24,000 other personnel on its vast bases on Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, after the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three servicemen in 1995 brought tens of thousands of people on to the streets in protest.

Two other alleged rapes in 2008, a rash of robberies and assaults and cases of drink-driving and trespassing brought an apology from Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State.

But Washington has been slow to wake up to the mounting local anger about the sheer scale of its operations, which take up a tenth of the island, and to the new Japanese Government’s intention to take a cold, hard look at the 50-year-old security treaty between the two nations.

US forces “still have the mentality of conquerors”, said Kuniko Tamioka, a government expert on Okinawa and member of the lower house of parliament. “They train when they like, never mind the rules, so that, for some people, the morning alarm call is the sound of a helicopter.” Yoshiyuki Uehara, the director of the governor’s secretariat in the Okinawa administration, called it a “vast presence — too many, too much”.

On Monday senior government officials convened to try to find a new site for Futenma, the most controversial airbase, which lies in the centre of Ginowan, one of Okinawa’s busiest cities. In 2004 a helicopter crashed in the grounds of the university; two years later Japan and the US struck a deal to shift the base to Henoko, a tiny fishing village on the pristine east coast.

After the election last August, in which the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) overturned decades of one-party rule, Yukio Hatoyama, the new Prime Minister, scrapped parts of the 2006 pact on the status of US forces, acknowledging local passions and hinting that Futenma could be moved off Okinawa altogether.

Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ’s secretary-general and the power behind the Hatoyama throne, said this week that the party could lose crucial elections in July if it tried forcibly to rebuild the base anywhere else on the island.

“Even if the Government in Tokyo now decides to relocate the base within Okinawa, people will stop it physically, with boats, with protests,” said Hiromori Maedomari, an editorial writer at Okinawa’s Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper.

Adding to the internal pressures to resolve the issue quickly, Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, arrives in the region on Sunday. He has already warned that if Futenma’s fate is not decided by May relations with Washington could worsen sharply. For Mr Hatoyama, who campaigned with a call for “more equal” relations with the US, decision time is looming.

The American presence on Okinawa dates back to the spring of 1945 when US forces used it as a foothold for invading the mainland. Photographs of the 89-day Battle of Okinawa, the last major Pacific War campaign, show the bays filled with US ships and the explosions of kamikaze pilots. Of the 200,000 people killed, more than half were civilians.

In an episode still vivid to Okinawans, although absent for years from mainland textbooks, the Japanese Army slaughtered many locals, throwing grenades into the caves where they were hiding or forcing them to commit suicide rather than surrender.

Masako Nakazato, 82, one of a famous group of schoolgirl nurses during the battle, echoed the widespread anti-war sentiment on Okinawa. She said: “I don’t think badly of Americans but all military attracts war to itself, and war is disaster.”

The islanders have a strong separate identity and like to remind you that they have been part of Japan for only 400 years.

Mr Uehara, of the Okinawa government, said: “If you had taken a poll after the war most Okinawans would have preferred to join the US.”

If American rule was their wish, they got it — more than they wanted. The US occupied Japan until 1952 but refused to hand over Okinawa until 1972. Those extra two decades brought the Korean and Vietnam wars, along with a huge expansion of the bases to more than 30.

The bases, as set out in the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty, support the US commitment to protect Japan, as well as giving the US access to much of the Pacific. Officials argue that the distant US territory of Guam is no substitute as a deterrent to North Korea or to China’s ambitions towards Taiwan.

Futenma is not the biggest base but it is a key cause of tension, embedded as it is in the city of Ginowan. The larger Kadena airbase is only slightly to the north. Military air traffic is constant, even on weekends, and the signs of US expat life are everywhere, from the fleets of yellow school buses to the shops proclaiming: “We buy second-hand American furniture,” to the 30ft (9m) declaration on the side of the United Christian nursery that “Jesus is Lord”.

The Marine Corps handbook for new arrivals, written with some wit, warns those with tattoos that they might be mistaken for yakuza, or Japanese gangsters, if they strip off their shirts. However, given the 20-odd traffic offences a month, it stretches the joke too far with its advice that “unlike the US, people drive on the left side of the road, which requires some getting used to. The slow lane is on the left, and the fast lane is on the right, although there usually isn’t a significant difference between either”.

“It’s a long, long time since the war ended,” said Michiko, 77. “Personally, I like the Americans, and when I graduated from school — which the US paid for, not my parents — I felt the US had helped me, like a rich person helps a poor person. But younger people might not have any relationship with the American people.”

Mr Maedomari agreed that “there is a huge generational gap, and while older people think that Okinawa cannot survive without the US, the younger ones think we can be self-sufficient”.

Apart from the emotions roused by the US presence on Okinawa, the 2006 plan to move Futenma to Henoko and to build two airstrips out into the bay, has also provoked a rare thing — a Japanese environmental campaign in defence of stunning coral reefs and the dugong, a sea mammal akin to the manatee.

Mr Hatoyama, who badly needs to win a majority in the parliament’s upper house in July, has responded with a flurry of conflicting statements. He has led the citizens of Ginowan to assume that Futenma will close while alarming other islanders by keeping alive the possibility of other sites, such as Kadena or Camp Schwab, inland from Henoko.

He has promised the US that Japan is committed to the alliance, but caused concern with his talk of seeking warmer relations with China. US officials dismiss calls for “equality”, noting that Japan, barred by its Constitution from anything but self-defence, is not offering to defend America.

In the coming months they may be able to agree a fudge, probably merging Futenma with another base. But the US has a job to convince Japan that, 65 years after the end of the war, it is not taking its support — or its territory — for granted.

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S. KOREA: BOK Keeps Interest Rate At Record Low

03.10.10, 10:18 PM EST

By KELLY OLSEN, Associated Press 

SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea's central bank left its key interest rate at a record low Thursday amid international sovereign debt concerns and as the institution prepares for a leadership change.

The Bank of Korea said it kept the benchmark seven-day repurchase rate at 2 percent. The decision came at the last monetary policy meeting chaired by outgoing Gov. Lee Seong-tae.

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VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIA: Ice breaker Boat Vladivostok - Russia

In the winter, the port of Vladivostok is kept open by icebreakers like this.

DALIAN, CHINA: Dalian Train Station

 

Dalian Railway Station (Dalian Zhan) is in the center of town, opposite Shengli Guangchang (Victory Square).  located in the bustling commercial center near Qingniwaqiao.

RUSSIA: On this day: 11 March

Portrait of Paul I by Borovikovsky Vladimir
Portrait of Paul I by Borovikovsky Vladimir

Throughout his life, Russian Emperor Paul I was afraid of being poisoned, particularly during the time he was still a successor to the throne. Disfavored by his mother Catherine the Great to be the one to take the crown, Paul even had a chef from England preparing his meals. But it was not poisoning that ended his life on the night of 11 March 1801.

It was Russia’s high society; Counts Palen and Benigsen, Dukes Zubov and Volkonsky, and General Uvarov did not accept Paul as the ruler of the country and planned a coup. At first their plan was to arrest Paul and force him to give up the throne in favor of his son, but things took a different turn.

Drunk on champagne, the conspirators arrived at St. Michael’s Palace, where the emperor resided, knocking down objects and servants on their way. Paul had heard them coming down the corridor to his rooms and tried to escape through the door that lead to his wife’s private rooms, but it was locked. So he dashed for the window and hid behind the curtain.

Not finding the emperor in his bed, the conspirators panicked. They thought their plot has been discovered and this could be a trap, but Count Palen approached the bed and as he touched the sheets, exclaimed “the nest is still warm, the bird cannot be far.” They searched the room and found Paul helpless in his nightgown.

After a short argument, a struggle began and Paul was hit in the head and fell to the floor. He was then beaten and choked with a scarf. For the rest of the night, a medic worked on Paul’s body to cover the bruises and make it look like a natural death. But despite the make up, the black and blue marks on Paul’s face could still be seen as he lay in his coffin. He was succeeded by his son Alexander I. It is believed that Alexander gave the conspirators his approval to carry out their plot to kill his father.

Russiapedia: Alexander I of Russia.

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