Fresh & hot from Japan, 28 Jan. to 3 Feb. 2016

Please enjoy fresh & hot news from Japan with comments by Europe-Japan Dynamics.

28 Jan.  Five prefectures supporting suppliers of the “Rocket industry”

The rocket industry would be added in March to the industries included in the special economic zone to promote the aerospace sector in the Chubu region in Japan. A major incentive is that the Government pays the interests of the debt of vendors that manufacture parts of rockets. It is thus intended to encourage the capital investment and market entry of those vendors.

The special economic zone concerned is “the Asian number one special economic zone of aerospace cluster”, which address companies located in five prefectures of the Chubu region; Aichi, Gifu, Mie, Nagano and Shizuoka.

Comment: Swiss companies having business with the aerospace sector may benefit from this move.

29 Jan. “I’ll be happy if I graduate from a good University” said 78% of the 11 years old, up from 9 years ago

The percent of those school children who think, “I’ll be happy if I graduate from a good University” reached 78 per cent, up from by 17 per cent from 9 years ago, according to a research announced by Benesse Educational Research & Development Institute (BERD) on 28 January. A researcher considers this result as an influence of the heavy emphasis on scholastic achievement on children.

This is a result of the research undertaken last year by BERD addressed to children of primary, junior high and high schools last year. All were public schools and 9,726 children responded.

Comments: It appears that Japan has not changed in the past 50 years. Where is children’s dream?

1 Feb. Bank of Mitsubishi of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, developing own cyber currency expecting cost cutting

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd . is developing own cyber currency. The currency is one of the “Fintech”, new financial services using information technologies (IT). A major expected benefit of the new cyber currency is to largely reduce costs of financial transaction, thus reducing charges of international transfer. While the Bank plans to use the new currency in-house only for the moment, it may issue the currency to customers through the exchange with Yen in the future.

Commets: The cyber currency had rather an unhappy start in Japan due to mismanagement of a major cyber currency dealer. This move by a major Japanese bank is worth watching to see if the public would change their perception and benefits from the cyber currency.

2 Feb.  The desired number of children in proportion to a degree of understanding of your boss, Okayama Prefecture

The more your boss is favorable to raising children, you’d wish to have more number of children — found a research undertaken by Okayama Prefecture. This proves that incentives for bosses to support raising children would be a key to increase the number of children.

The survey was undertaken via the Internet with 2751 men and women who were married and whose age were between 20 to 19 years in August and September last year.

Comments: The result is interesting, though there are a number of other important factors parents would need to have more children, such as assurance to leave the office on time, husbands’ participation in house work, housing for families at an affordable rate, etc.

3 Feb. Monitoring illegal tree felling from satellite, data open to the public

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) begin monitoring of the illegal tree felling of the equator area using an earth observing satellite “Daichi (the earth) 2”. The organisations will make the data available to the public for free from August so that countries concerned will be able to take preventive measures.

Daichi (The earth) 2 was launched in May, 2014 and has ability to monitor status of the ground for 24 hours regardless of the weather.

Comment: I hope many people and organisations will benefit from the data to alleviate illegal tree felling!

  • All the news items are picked up from “Asahi Digital”, and summarized and translated by Europe-Japan Dynamics. The articles are not an official translation by the Asahi Newspaper.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *