Here’s a story worth following:

The scheduled launch of a joint Web site by the nation’s three leading newspapers is expected to bolster the quality of their articles as readers will be able to scrutinize different accounts of the same stories from three papers. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, The Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun agreed Monday to cooperate over the Web site and rural delivery services, as well as help each other with newspaper production in the event of a disaster.

Supposedly they have developed a system where these three newspapers can cooperate on the technical side of delivery without compromising the content of their newspapers.

All three newspapers are mainstream. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Yomiuri are fairly conservative, while the Asahi generally leans to the left. There are a lot of questions lingering in my mind after reading the full article about this upcoming service:

1. Will the newspapers continue to maintain their own individual Internet sites as well as participate in the main site?
2. As far as the shared site, who will edit the main entry page and determine which articles get the most notice?

I don’t understand the new system yet, and it certainly could be good, but various alarm bells are sounding in my head about the left and right supposedly blending their papers together … if I learn more about this I’ll forward it here. If Rupert Murdoch is involved in all this, it’ll certainly spoil it for me.

If you can’t answer that question then zip over the TPR and put “Nova” into their search engine.

Or just use this link!

Ken Worsley has apparently been working overtime on this and there is a lot of really useful information there.

Also don’t forget the old standard, Let’s Japan.org. That blog has also been following the issue closely.

Glad to see the people of Okinawa are standing up for themselves.

Tens of thousands of people rallied to protest the government’s decision to cut out references in high school textbooks to the forced mass suicide of thousands of civilians during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Organizers said 110,000 people participated in Saturday’s rally, making it the largest of its kind in this southernmost prefecture in recent history. (link)

From Asahi:

Two farm groups that have received huge amounts of state subsidies spent 33 million yen on tickets to repeated fund-raising parties for a lawmaker, apparently to evade regulations on political donations, sources said.

It’s kind of like the more money you give quasi-government organizations, the more they spend it on getting even more money … not a bad racket — unless you get caught.

From Japan Times:

The report says the LDP’s chapter in Tokyo’s No. 17 electoral district received a donation of ¥200,000 in April 2006 from Abe’s fund management group, but the money was not recorded in the group’s report. Abe’s office said the situation is unclear because the group’s manager is not available for questions.

The group’s manager is not available — he is probably staying in the hospital room next to Abe’s.

Quote of the day:

“If an earthquake occurs in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, the first tremor arrives here in 10 seconds, and then a strong jolt follows in 18 seconds. I want you to use this time as effectively as possible.”

Akira Usui (section head of general affairs of Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi, Chuo Ward, Tokyo) explaining to his staff about the new early warning system for earthquakes the store will soon make use of.

Yomiuri interviewed an eyewitness to Kenji Nagai’s death as a result of a shooting incident in Myanmar (link):

“A troop vehicle arrived from behind. A soldier fired a gun, so I ran away with other people standing nearby…After a while, I looked back toward the direction where Nagai was standing and saw him lying on the street. I assume he was accidentally shot from behind,” the man said. Nagai was left on the street and nobody could approach him while soldiers continued shooting. The man temporarily left the site and came back shortly afterward, but Nagai was still lying on the street. “He looked like he was dead. I couldn’t do anything to help him, so I watched with others from a safe distance until an ambulance arrived,” the man said.

Yomiuri reports in an article this morning that Novartis is “expected to apply to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to have the psychotropic drug Ritalin removed from a list of drugs used to treat intractable and protracted depression that are covered by health insurance.”

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I know of at least three blogs, Japan Probe, Let’s Japan, and Mutantfrog Travelogue that have reported about Nova’s school closings.

For the record there was once a school called Bi-lingual in Japan that was the fourth largest English school in Japan. About 13 years ago, they started paying teachers late, closing branches, and then kaput, they collapsed and went under.

The premise was that they were too big to go under and so somebody would step in and help out or take over or something … nope.

At least for now Nova would seem to be going in Bi-lingual’s footsteps.

[Announcement: I will be traveling for the next week, and do not know to what extent I will be updating my blog during that time, so there might not be any news for a few days.]

Top news in Japan :

DPJ introduce legislation to protect pension funds and to freeze postal privatization for one year. Yesterday the DPJ introduced lots of new legislation into the Upper House that they felt would appeal to the voters and help distinguish them from the LDP. This included legislation that would strictly prohibit the use of pension funds for other political purposes. Also, legislation was introduced to freeze postal privatization for one year. Once through the upper house, this legislation will travel through the lower house where it is expected that it will be ignored by the ruling parties, who oppose it. The legislation will expire on the 10th, when the current session ends, and will be resubmitted when the Diet meets again at the end of this month.
Japanese story: 民主が年金流用禁止法案　野党３党で「郵政」凍結も

More stories follow …

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