Update: This entry was first posted on June 26. In early June about 10,000 police files were leaked onto the Internet. This included many violations of individual privacy, for example the names of rape victims and so on. According to the Yomiuri, the officer who leaked the files has been fired:

Cop who leaked data via Winny dismissed
The Metropolitan Police Department dismissed a 26-year-old senior policeman at Kitazawa Police Station on Friday for leaking MPD investigative data on about 10,000 cases to the Internet via Winny file-sharing software on his private computer.The MPD also reprimanded a 33-year-old police sergeant who supervised the fired officer with a 10 percent pay-cut for one month for letting him copy the data …      

While I am glad to see strong actions taken in this area, I want to point out that so long as actions like this are ad hoc and arbitrary, they will not solve the problem. There needs to be a system set up of random audits to check individual computers along and with pre-determined punishments for those who don’t respect the relevant privacy rules.
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Gadzooks! This sounds awful. Campaigners can’t use the Internet to communicate with voters?

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What do we know about the comfort women issue?

How many interviews do we have with actual comfort women, soldiers and ex-doctors? To what degree are these interviews accepted at face value as opposed to being scrutinized in some sense?

What documents do we possess that provide a historical record?

It is generally argued that the following problems exist:

1. Comfort women are resistant to come forward because of the shame and humiliation they are afraid they might experience.
2. Soldiers are reluctant to reveal what part they took in the program.
3. Many documents were burned immediately after Japan surrendered in WWII.
4. Information that would probably implicate the relevant authorities is not being made available to the public, even though some of it still exists.

These are claims that each need to be examined in turn.

In this entry, I want to focus on the last one.

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While nobody was watching, an interim report drafted by a study group under the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has set down guidelines for regulation of the Internet in Japan which, according to one blogger, would extend as far as personal blogs and homepages.

This sounds serious; here is the link.

The Yomiuri has an interesting article about copyright piracy. I want to comment on this but am pressed for time, so will update this entry later today or tomorrow with some comments! Below is a small excerpt …

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Tokyo air pollution victims lawsuit …

There are four new articles here. The lawsuit filed 11 years ago by plaintiffs suffering asthma as a result of car exhaust has been settled. The most important thing to note for now is that the car companies paid as a matter of goodwill and were not found liable.

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If you haven’t checked out the comparative consumer law blog yet then you really should.

Take for example the neat story they had a couple of days ago.

Here’s what happened …

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This entry has my comment on this, some recent news links, and links to the topic in general.

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The following entry is to address the following problem. I was trying get some English information explaining State Redress Law in Japan. There was nothing useful on the Internet about this.

There will be now.

What is State Redress Law in Japan?
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There was an article this morning in the Yomiuri Shimbun about abused children being separated from their parents:

• 2007/06/21 Abused kids increasingly placed in care, The Yomiuri Shimbun.

At first I couldn’t make sense of certain parts of the article.
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