2013 - Land Price Rises in Big Cities and also Disaster Areas

Residential land prices in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya rose by an average of 0.5 percent in the 12 months to Jan. 1, while commercial land prices increased by an average of 1.6 percent, both rising for the first time in six years, the government said Tuesday.

While average residential prices nationwide edged down 0.6 percent, and commercial property dropped 0.5 percent, the number of survey locations seeing land price increases jumped to around 7,000 from about 2,000 in 2012, the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry said in an annual report.

The highest land price was ¥29.6 million per square meter at Yamano Music Co.’s head office in Tokyo’s Ginza district.

The survey showed that land prices are recovering not only in the major metropolitan areas but in other locations as well.

A ministry official attributed the recovery to rising demand for condos and offices due to the Abe administration’s aggressive economic policies and low interest rates.

Some survey locations, including in Tokyo, saw price increases of more than 10 percent, but the official denied the possibility of an economic bubble backed by speculative purchases.

While commercial prices rose in all three major metropolitan areas, residential prices edged down 0.1 percent in Osaka.

Both residential and commercial land prices increased in Sapporo, Sendai, Fukuoka, Kusatsu in Shiga Prefecture and Naha in Okinawa. However, land prices declined at more than 70 percent of the survey locations in non-metropolitan areas.

In Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, the three prefectures hit hardest by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the number of survey locations that saw price rises increased due to growing demand for land amid reconstruction work.
Residential land prices rose 2.5 percent in Miyagi while Fukushima saw a 1.2 percent increase.

A residential location in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, saw a 15.1 percent increase, the highest among residential locations.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/18/business/land-prices-rise-in-big-metro-areas/#.UyjvP1GSx1M

TEPCO returns to profits on 8.5% higher electricity charges

TEPCO operator of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station, returned to profit in the first nine months of its fiscal year after raising customers’ electricity rates and cutting costs.

Operating profit was 231.3 billion yen ($2.25 billion) in the nine months ended Dec. 31, compared with an operating loss of 114.5 billion yen a year earlier, according to a statement today from the company known as Tepco.

The return to profit was led by increased revenues after the utility, which serves 29 million customers in the Tokyo metropolitan area, raised electricity rates for households by 8.5 percent in September 2012. The increase boosted electricity sales by 9.9 percent to 4.3 trillion yen.

Net income was 772.9 billion yen after a government injection into the utility’s fund for payouts to people and companies affected by the Fukushima disaster in March 2011.

Tepco’s operating profit target for the year ending March is 134 billion yen, compared with an operating loss of 222 billion yen the previous year.

Tepco cut staff and deferred repair work to keep expenses from ballooning, despite increased fossil fuel purchases to make up for lost nuclear capacity amid a depreciating Japanese currency, the utility said. Ordinary expenses rose 1.9 percent to 4.67 trillion yen, compared with a 12.3 percent increase the previous year.

The company expects to pay a record 2.9 trillion yen for fuel in the current fiscal year, during which all of its nuclear reactors were offline for safety checks after the Fukushima disaster, up from 2.7 trillion yen a year ago, Managing Executive Officer Katsuyuki Sumiyoshi said today at a press conference.

Bloomberg

How the Japanese Media Works

It was perhaps the biggest financial story of postwar Japan — or it should have been.Yamaichi Securities, one of the nation's four top brokerages, which was among the world's six largest in the 1980s, had in 1992 started to illegally bury millions of dollars in red ink off the books, setting up dummy foreign companies to absorb the losses. For good measure, its bosses were paying off sōkaiya (corporate extortionists) to stop them blowing the whistle on this practice.

In 1994, though, after weeks of old-fashioned digging and trawling through financial statements, journalist Shigeo Abe had the scoop of a lifetime — he and a team of reporters uncovered the entire mess.

But instead of running the story with banner headlines, Abe says his bosses at the Nikkei newspaper spiked it, sent him out of the country and allowed Yamaichi to stagger on for another three years.

Yamaichi would eventually collapse in 1997, leaving creditors and taxpayers saddled with more than ¥300 billion in debt. Live on television, President Shohei Nozawa famously made a tearful apology to the nation for the company's losses. There was no mea culpa from the Nikkei.

"If we had published the story, the result for Yamaichi shareholders and people connected with the company might have been very different," says Abe today, a quietly spoken, casually dressed 63-year-old. He recalls his bewilderment, then anger, as he watched his painstakingly built story buried by a single phone call.

"The story was ready to go when it was stopped. The Yamaichi president had called the Nikkei president and pressured him to not run it. He said: 'If we go bankrupt it will cause chaos in the economy.' And that was that."

A few months later, Abe was sent to the Nikkei's office in London, a kind of five-star exile, he believes, likening it to shimanagashi, the feudal practice of sending political troublemakers away to live on remote islands. During his three years abroad, he pondered his chosen profession.

"There are no real scoops in Japanese newspapers," he says. "They are almost always authorized leaks. I wondered about whether I wanted to work for a company that only reported problems that didn't damage its business."

When he returned to Tokyo in 1997, the 25-year veteran quit and began working for the weekly press, eventually founding the monthly investigative magazine Facta, which last year out-scooped Japan's richest media to reveal the Olympus Corp. scandal.

The Olympus story must have felt like history repeating itself. Again, an elite company was involved in the same illegal practice of burying losses, known in Japan as tobashi.

And again the Nikkei, Japan's leading business daily, initially declined to report it — even after Facta published it in July, along with diagrams and alarming accusations.

It wasn't until the story made the front pages of the business press in Europe and America months later that the Nikkei and other leading vernacular newspapers began catching up.

Soon after the article appeared in Facta, and Olympus' newly appointed President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Woodford was sent a copy of the magazine's five-page story, he confronted Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa about its claims. Those included one that Olympus had paid $800 million for what Woodford called "Mickey Mouse companies," and another that it had spent $687 million on advisory fees in a $2 billion deal for a British medical equipment firm named Gyrus.

"Kikukawa said I'd not been told because I was so busy, but that was ridiculous to me," Woodford said in December.

After that meeting with Kikukawa, he has described how he waited weeks for the scandal — openly published in Facta — to break in the local media, before realizing he was on his own.

Facta's claims of "bizarre acquisitions" by Olympus included a pet-food company and a face-cream maker — neither of which had turned a profit. Exactly why a camera- and optical machinery-maker had spent so much money on 100 firms with "zero synergistic" value to it is still unclear.

However, in a second exclusive article, published in August 2011, Facta offered one possible reason: payoffs to "antisocial forces," the Japanese euphemism for yakuza gangsters.

An increasingly nervous Woodford again faced off with Kikukawa — and was fired on Oct. 14, 2011.

As he walked out of the Olympus office in Shinjuku, central Tokyo, after surrendering his mobile phone and company car, Woodford reportedly said his "hands were clammy" and he feared for his safety.

He did the only thing he could think of, which was to call a foreign reporter — Jonathan Soble of The Financial Times — and met him in a public place with lots of people around. By the time Woodford arrived in London a day later, the tale was on the FT's front page.

Woodford later noted that even then it still took the mainstream Japanese media a full week to pick up the story, trailing most of the world's major news outlets in the process.

Abe says the reason is simple: Facta was able to write about Olympus because the magazine has no advertisements or commercial ties to anyone. It survives on fees from roughly 20,000 subscribers and the initial funding of anonymous donors.

"Running even a small magazine costs ¥100 million a year and most operate at a loss for the first few years," he says, recalling how one wealthy elderly woman from the Kansai region of western Japan had parted with her cash to the as-yet-unfounded magazine in 2005. "She told me, 'all this money is no good to me if our society is in danger.' "

Facta is not sold in bookstores either because, Abe explains, he would have to pay the stores to stock it.

The Olympus story was the product of the same ferreting techniques he used to dig out his Yamaichi story. "Our approach is to use the skills we've built up as financial experts over the years to follow irregularities. If you study corporate accounts long enough, something odd often pops up and you follow that trail till you find the reason."

He says a Facta freelancer — another ex-Nikkei journalist — was tipped off to the Olympus problems a year ago by a whistleblower. "It was absolutely clear something was odd," Abe explains. "They were making acquisitions and not making them public. The company's cash flow was extraordinarily high but its capital was shrinking year by year. It didn't add up."

The story was shopped around several disbelieving editors until Abe agreed to check it out and publish.

And he believes the Olympus scandal has yet to bottom out, pointing to the likely involvement of "criminal elements" — though he is careful to distinguish those from organized crime, saying, "I don't see evidence of that yet." He suspects the dummy Olympus companies were part of a money-laundering network, but that's as much as he will say for now.

He predicts, however, that other Olympus-type scandals are being protected by a wall of silence in the press. "The lack of disclosure at poorly performing Japanese companies is a key reason for the poor economy of the last 20 years. Many more should be scrutinized," he declares.

Among the many stories Abe points to as not being properly covered by the big Japanese media are the Fukushima nuclear crisis (see accompanying story) and the tremendous influence that a handful of advertising agencies and talent agencies wield over Japanese society.

"Have you ever seen an article about those agencies?" Abe inquires. "It's almost impossible to cover them or their influence in Japan. They represent a lot of clients in Japan who naturally don't want any negative publicity, so their influence on what the public reads and sees is immense. And that is largely unknown — it's terribly difficult to show their influence. I believe that kind of opacity is one of the scariest aspects of life in Japan."

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20120108x1.html?

A similar story but covering the Japanese media coverage of Fukushima - http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20120108x3.html

Other stories - http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20120108x2.html

45% of Kids tested around Fukushima Show traces of radiation in Thyroid

In a terrible piece of news - but of course, the Government is not alarmed - levels "not problematic" and that they wouldnt be telling the parents.....

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Forty-five percent of children tested in the region around Japan's stricken nuclear plant were found to have traces of radioactive elements in their thyroid glands, an official said Thursday.

The official said that the iodine concentrations -- found in tests that the government carried out about five months ago in Fukushima prefecture -- were not considered alarming in terms of their health impact.

"The government's official position is that none of the children showed radiation levels that would be problematic," he told AFP.

The government's nuclear accident taskforce tested 1,149 children aged up to 15 about two weeks after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns, blasts and fires at the Fukushima plant.
Radioactive iodine tends to gather in the thyroid glands of minors in particular, increasing the risk of developing cancer later in life.

Of the valid test results collected for 1,080 children, 482 or 44.6 percent were confirmed to have some level of radioactive contamination in their thyroid glands, the government official told AFP.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said none of the children suffered contamination beyond the equivalent of 0.2 microsieverts (mSv) per hour, the standard set by Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission.

"Only one child showed a contamination level of 0.1 mSv per hour, the highest of the group," the official said without giving the child's sex or age.

The commission recommends that children, especially young ones, whose thyroid gland is contaminated beyond the 0.2 mSv limit undergo an in-depth physical checkup, citing international standards.

The commission is considering tightening its safety standard to 0.1 mSv.

The children tested came from three municipalities -- Iwaki city, Kawamata town and Iitate village -- where especially high levels of radiation had been estimated after the accident, the official said.

The Fukushima government plans to conduct life-time medical checks for the estimated 360,000 people aged 18 or younger who were in the prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident.

The taskforce medical team began sending test results to the families of the children last week and gave a briefing on Wednesday to a group of parents and guardians in Iwaki city.

Some participants complained that the team took months to inform them of the detailed results despite the gravity of the nuclear accident, the world's worst since Chernobyl 25 years ago, the Asahi Shimbun daily reported.

The government official said the taskforce did not consider informing the families of the details results as a priority since no child had shown contamination levels beyond the safety limit
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jn5dpQ-4-LeFD6NZ_yzv2njTZ5aA?docId=CNG.de226b3f8ca77186559071adc6e480e0.4c1

Fukushima Evacuation Area to be off limits for years

Radioactive contamination may keep some areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex off limits for years, Japan's government said Monday.

In its first detailed survey of the evacuation zone around the plant, the education ministry said it found spots—mostly within three kilometers (nearly two miles) of the plant—where annual radiation exposure could reach 200 to 500 millisieverts. The government requires people to evacuate if the cumulative dosage is likely to exceed 20 millisieverts per year. The annual limit for nuclear-plant workers in normal circumstances is 50 millisieverts (250 millisieverts in emergency conditions).
"Some places may have to be kept off-limits to residents for a long period of time even after clean-up operations are undertaken," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a news conference. His comments followed Friday's announcement that levels of radioactive contamination were higher in some areas in the 20-kilometer evacuation zone than were found in the plant compound itself.
Mr. Edano said various options are under consideration to help people who may be displaced for a long time, including government purchase or rental of their land. Policy details will be determined in consultation with local authorities based on the results of a further radiation survey and decontamination programs, he said.

On Sunday, reconstruction minister Tatsuo Hirano said the government also is considering providing long-term housing for evacuees rather than the prefabricated temporary homes the government currently is building.

Other government officials noted that decontamination is possible but will take time. Goshi Hosono, minister in charge of the Fukushima crisis, stressed that "nothing has been decided on the evacuation policy, and the desires of local residents will come first in any decision."

The government had hoped to narrow the evacuation zone gradually after January, the target date for Tokyo Electric Power Co. to bring the damaged reactors fully under control and stop deadly radiation emissions. But the education ministry's measurements of radiation levels at 50 locations within the 20-kilometer radius showed annual exposure could exceed 100 millisieverts in 15 locations, including one where it could reach 508 millisieverts, compared with the government 20 millisieverts per year standard for evacuation.

The discovery of elevated radiation came as Tepco reported a sharp drop in levels inside the plant. Tepco has said the level stands at just 0.4 millisievert per year along the boundary of the plant compound, well below the normal limit of one millisievert for ordinary citizens.

"Radiation spreads like a typhoon," said an official with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the main nuclear regulator. "The amount of radioactive substance can be small at the eye of the typhoon, but very large outside."



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903327904576524122257910948.html

Yakuza Trying to Get Post EQ Fukushima Contracts

The government and law enforcement authorities appear to be fighting an uphill battle to prevent gangsters and other "antisocial" groups from cashing in on disposing of huge amounts of debris generated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which played havoc with large areas along the Pacific coast of northeastern Japan.

These groups, including not only Japan's indigenous organized crime syndicates known as "yakuza" but a mafia based in China, are seeking to win a chunk of more than ¥15 trillion estimated to be poured into reconstruction of the areas.

On May 5, in the midst of an annual holiday season in Japan, an officer of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, on his visit to Minami-Soma City in Fukushima Prefecture, which was hard hit by the calamities, was flabbergasted to find a Chinese man known as a leading figure in the "China mafia."

This man (who will be referred to as "Mr. X" in this article) is a naturalized citizen of Japan, and is engaged in the business of treating industrial waste in both Japan and China. He was giving gyoza dumplings to evacuees in shelters in an apparent bid to impress the local people with his benevolence.

But his ulterior motive is to win a contract for collecting and disposing of mountains of debris that local authorities are finding difficult to handle. Making matters worse for local residents, some of the debris near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power station are contaminated with radioactive substances and therefore cannot be moved to other prefectures.

Indeed, on April 17, the municipal government of Koriyama City, Fukushima, removed contaminated surface soil from the grounds of a public school but was prevented from dumping the radioactive soil at a disposal site by local residents.

According to the Tokyo police officer, Mr. X recently visited the mayor of Minami-Soma with a DPJ Diet member apparently in a bid to win business contracts. The mayor is said to have been unaware of Mr. X's background. The same police officer says Mr. X has sites in inland China where he can dump waste. This means that should he be awarded a contract, debris, including materials contaminated with radioactive substances would be shipped to China.

The China mafia is not the only group seeking to win a deal in the debris disposal projects. On April 21, a member of the yakuza group Kodo-kai was found to be distributing cash to earthquake victims in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, and the police believe this was part of an attempt to get a contract for debris disposal. Kodo-kai is the largest group under the umbrella of Yamaguchi-gumi, which is the largest of Japan's "Big Three" organized crime syndicates.

The other two Big Three members — Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-gumi — are also stepping up their activities in the disaster region, which gives rise to the difficult question of how the three groups would split the pie in the event they win contracts, according to a newspaper reporter well versed in their actions.

Another category of "antisocial" groups is groups of people known as sokai-ya, which are corporate blackmailers unique to Japan. They extort money by threatening to publicly humiliate or embarrass companies and their executives at annual meetings of stockholders (kabunushi sokai).

One such group is said to have dispatched more than 30 workers to the stricken nuclear power station in Fukushima to work on disposal of contaminated debris. Each worker carries a Geiger counter to measure and records the levels of radiation. The group's aim, of course, is to threaten Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the nuclear station, and win compensatory money by proving that these workers have were over-exposed to radiation.

The government and the police have already launched steps to counter these antisocial forces, but their task is not easy to say the least. In late March, the National Police Agency instructed the police departments in the earthquake-hit prefectures to take measures to prevent yakuza and other antisocial groups from taking part in reconstruction projects.

On May 8, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku said in an NHK-TV program that disposal of debris, which he noted was primarily the task of the municipalities, would not work unless the central government takes direct control.

But even these steps taken by the government and the police might not prove sufficient because the sheer size of the debris and the work required could enable the yakuza to edge their way in.

One case to illustrate this point is found in a construction company in Iwate Prefecture, which was on the verge of bankruptcy prior to the March 11 disasters due to insufficient work. Although the company is now getting more work than it can possibly handle, it knows that the boom is temporary, and that, therefore, it is refraining from hiring more workers. Other construction companies are in a similar position, and, as a result, each has more work than they can handle.

In this kind of situation, the national and municipal governments cannot devote much time to carefully choosing contractors to undertake debris disposal.

The police authorities are also facing difficulties in clamping down on the yakuza groups because many of them take the form of normal business entities engaged in legitimate enterprises.

The National Police Agency is said to have distributed to prefectural police departments a list of antisocial individuals but it is not clear if the police department can fully make use of the lists in their efforts to exclude gangsters from contracts.

It appears to be an uphill battle to prevent yakuza and other crime syndicates from benefiting from the multitrillion yen reconstruction-related projects.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20110615a3.html

TEPCO Gets More Fuzzy with timetable to Cold Shutdown

On 17 April they talked about a nine month timetable to cold shutdown at Fukushima - now it sounds like thats getting pushed out by another couple of months - so, shutdown wont be achieved within 2011 and it may be well into 2012 before this can happen

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110530a2.html

TEPCO Confirms 3 Reactor Meltdowns

The operator of the nuclear power plant at the center of a radiation scare after being disabled by Japan's earthquake and tsunami confirmed Tuesday that there had been meltdowns of fuel rods at three of its reactors.


Tokyo Electric Power Co said meltdowns of fuel rods at three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant occurred early in the crisis triggered by the March 11 disaster.

The government and outside experts had said previously that fuel rods at three of the plant's six reactors had likely melted early in the crisis, but the utility, also known as Tepco, had only confirmed a meltdown at the No.1 reactor.

Tepco officials said a review since early May of data from the plant concluded the same happened to reactors No.2 and 3.

The preliminary finding, which was reported to Japan's nuclear safety agency, represents part of an initial effort to explain how events at Fukushima spiraled out of control early in the crisis.
Also Tuesday, the government appointed Yotaro Hatamura, a Tokyo University professor of engineering who has studied how complex systems and designs fail, to head a committee that will investigate the cause and handling of the nuclear crisis.

The moves came as a team of investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency began a two-week visit to Japan to prepare a report on the accident to be submitted to the United Nations agency in June.

Some analysts said the delay in confirming the meltdowns at Fukushima suggested the utility feared touching off a panic by disclosing the severity of the accident earlier.

"Now people are used to the situation. Nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Tokyo's Sophia University.

Nakano said that by confirming the meltdowns now, Tepco may be hoping the news will have less impact. The word "meltdown" has such a strong connotation that when the situation was more uncertain more people would likely have fled Tokyo, he said.

Engineers are battling to plug radiation leaks and bring the plant 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo under control more than two months after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and deadly tsunami that devastated a vast swathe of Japan's northeast coastline and tipped the economy into recession.

The disaster has triggered a drop of more than 80 percent in Tepco's share price and forced the company to seek government aid as it faces compensation liabilities that some analysts say could top $100 billion.

Japanese trade minister Banri Kaieda said the government would approve the formation of a committee later Tuesday that will make sure Tepco follows through with restructuring plans.
Tepco officials said damage to the No.2 reactor fuel rods had begun three days after the quake, with much of the fuel rods eventually melting and collecting at the bottom of the pressure vessel containing them.

Fuel rods in the No.3 reactor were damaged by the afternoon of March 13, they said.
TSUNAMI

The Tepco officials repeated that the tsunami had disabled power to the reactors and knocked out their cooling capability.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, expressed a similar view.

"We don't think the quake affected the important parts of the plant, such as its cooling capacity," Nishiyama told reporters Tuesday, although he added there were still some aspects that needed to be clarified by inspecting the site directly.

That process is likely to make months because of the high radiation readings in areas of the plant, experts have said.

"It could very well be that Tepco is rushing to conclude that the tsunami is to blame to prevent further questions and give more momentum to the nuclear camp. It's not just Tepco, it's the whole nuclear industry, maybe business circles as a whole. It's highly political," said Sophia University's Nakano.
Others said that from a very early stage the tsunami, not the quake, was the likely cause of the overheating and subsequent damage of the reactors at Daiichi.

"As with the other nuclear reactors, such as Onagawa (in northeastern Japan), those at Daiichi deactivated after the quake. It is our belief that it was the tsunami that knocked out power and took out the systems and pumps that cool the reactors, resulting in their damage and radiation leakage," said Kazuhiko Kudo, a Kyushu University professor who specializes in nuclear engineering.

Despite a steady flow of information on how the clean-up is proceeding -- Tepco and the government's nuclear watchdog hold news conferences twice a day on most weekdays -- the authorities have faced criticism for what some have said is a lack of timely disclosure.

"I am very sorry that the public is mistrustful of the various disclosures made by the government on the accident," Prime Minister Naoto Kan said in parliament Monday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110524/wl_nm/us_japan_tepco_reactors