Tomoko Mori's Killer Took Pictures Of Death

Investigators at suspect's apartment

A 19-year-old female student of Nagoya University who confessed to killing a 77-year-old woman, Tomoko Mori, last month has told police that she felt fulfilled after the killing.

Japan Times reports that the student (name must be withheld - accused under 20) was arrested on Tuesday for killing Mori with a hatchet on the 7th of December, 2014.

The Aichi Prefectural Police on Friday said the student used her phone to take pictures of the victim's corpse.  Investigators discovered the pictures in a secret data file on the phone needing a code to unlock.

During investigations, police found Mori’s body in the student's house in Showa Ku, a ward here in Nagoya.

The suspect told investigators that she felt 'fulfilled' after killing Mori because she had owned the hatchet since she was in Junior Secondary School and had always wanted to kill someone.

She also revealed that she had once poisoned her classmates while studying at a private high school in Miyagi Prefecture.

The victim did not die but lost his sight permanently.

Investigations have revealed that Mori met her killer at a religious gathering on the same day she was murdered.

According to a member of the religious group, the student left the venue with Mori who was trying to persuade her to join them.

The suspect however told police that she was annoyed by the deceased who tried to convert her.

Investigations led officers to her apartment where they found the deceased’s corpse.

Air Asia X Ends Nagoya Flights

Nagoya has been removed from locations on planes

Flights to Nagoya from Malaysia will be scrubbed and Sydney trips will be less frequent as the airline slows its expansion to end losses in 2015, Group Chief Executive Officer Kamarudin Meranun said in an interview Wednesday. The long-haul budget airline racked up net losses of more than 650 million ringgit (18 billion yen) since the last quarter of 2013 after “massive” capacity growth, he said. 

The airline, whose shares sank to a record low yesterday, was hemorrhaging cash even before Malaysia-related carriers lost three aircraft in accidents last year, emptying seats and denting the confidence of travelers. A plane belonging to a unit of AirAsia Bhd., AirAsia X’s second-largest shareholder, crashed in Indonesia in December killing 162 people. 

“The timing wasn’t right,” said Kamarudin, referring to the company’s expansion. “Who can tell the challenges that we had in 2014. For now, we are managing it by cutting some of these routes so we will be able to handle that growth.” 

AirAsia X has announced plans to replenish capital and Kamarudin, co-founder of the broader AirAsia group, is bringing in a new set of managers to aid the turnaround. He said he is “fairly confident” of returning the Kuala Lumpur-based carrier to profit in 2015. 

Malaysian Airline System Bhd. lost two aircraft last year - - MH370 in March and MH17 in July -- and an AirAsia Indonesia single-aisle jet plunged into the sea on Dec. 28 in the worst year for Asian aviation in decades. 

Bloomberg Business Weekly

Grisly Murders By Juveniles Say Something About Society

Aichi Police Gather Evidence Bags Outside Station

 

A spate of grisly murders by teenage girls has galvanized public attention. In December, a first-year university student was taken into custody over the slaying of a 77-year-old woman in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture. The two cases are under investigation. Last summer, a first-year senior high school student in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, killed a classmate. 

Both girls reportedly told police they "wanted to know what it feels like to kill someone." Their stated motive brings to mind a 1997 case in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, where a 14-year-old boy murdered two elementary school pupils.

In all these killings, I glimpse "the darkness of the human heart," if you will forgive the cliche.

Obviously, one would be extremely naive to lament a loss of sanity among teenage girls today based only on what those two have done.

In fact, statistics show that crimes by juveniles have been on the decline in recent years. Specific cases should always be distinguished from the overall trend.

In the Sasebo case, a local child guidance center was blamed for not dealing properly with the girl, who has since undergone psychiatric evaluation. Her trial is scheduled to start soon in juvenile court. The Nagoya girl was placed in confinement recently for psychiatric evaluation. To prevent similar tragedies from occurring, we must not think these girls are merely aberrations who have nothing to do with us.

Retired judge Yasuhiro Igaki, who presided over the 1997 Kobe case, commented last October in The Asahi Shimbun's opinion section that the public should be fully informed about the reasons some young people are driven to murder. No child must be made to feel abandoned, he emphasized.

This is the hard lesson he learned from the about 6,000 cases he handled during his career.

Illegal Casino In Sakae Raided

 

Aichi Prefectural Police on Wednesday busted a baccarat casino operating illegally in Naka Ward, reports the Mainichi Shimbun. 

In the morning, officers raided casino Daikichi, located in the Nishiki entertainment district, and arrested Satoru Ogura, the 33-year-old manager, and nine male and female dealers for operating a wagering facility for profit. 

Police also seized six baccarat tables, an unspecified number of slot machines and four million yen in cash, according to Chunichi Shimbun. Six customers were also taken into custody on charges of illegal gambling. 

Ogura has refused to comment on the allegations.

A memo found on the premises by police at the time of the raid revealed that Daikichi collects approximately 70 million yen in revenue every 15 days. Police suspect that the operation is being used to fund organized crime. 

Tokyo Reporter

Local Teenager Exploited For Fukushima Clean Up

Clean up work in Fukushima Prefecture

Police arrested a businessman on Wednesday for sending a 15-year-old boy to help clean up radioactive waste outside the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Aichi prefectural police said the boy, from Kita-Nagoya, was sent to Fukushima to cut contaminated leaves and scrape up dirt in the disaster zone last July.

Japan’s labor law prohibits people under 18 from working in radioactive areas.

The boy told the Asahi newspaper that he was introduced to his former boss through a government-run employment agency and ordered to lie about his age.

He said his former employer eventually lowered his wages to just 3,000 yen a day and hit him when he did not do well at his job.

Workers cleaning up villages in Fukushima are supposed to receive a special hazard allowance equivalent to about 10,000 yen a day from the government in addition to their wages.

An earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant,  sparking triple nuclear meltdowns, forcing more than 160,000 residents to flee nearby towns and contaminating water, food and air.

Thousands of workers have been clearing waste from towns closest to the plant in the past four years.

A Reuters investigation showed how Japan’s traditional subcontracting structure in the construction industry opened up lucrative clean-up contracts in Fukushima to multiple layers of small companies that regularly skim workers’ pay. 

Thomson Reuters 

Standing With Freedom

JR Tokai Starts Maglev Station Construction

 

Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) has started building underground stations at terminals in Tokyo and Nagoya for the magnetically levitated train line scheduled to start running between the two cities in 2027.

A ceremony to pray for the safe completion of the project was held at both stations on Wednesday. Traveling at speeds of up to 500 kph, the linear Chuo Shinkansen line will cover the 286 kilometers between Nagoya and Tokyo’s Shinagawa area in just 40 minutes.

JR Tokai plans to extend the line further west to Osaka by 2045. The maglev train will zip between Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes.

About 20 people attended the ceremony at Nagoya Station, including representatives of residents from areas through which the new line will pass.

“We are finally starting construction,” JR Tokai President Koei Tsuge said at the ceremony. “I am sure there will be many difficulties during this major project, which will take more than a decade. We want to press ahead with construction safely, while giving proper consideration to the preservation of the environment and working closely with the regions the line will pass through.”

JR Tokai will start preparatory construction for building the linear terminal station under the existing station on company-owned land.

The rail operator plans to begin construction on land that it does not own from next fiscal year at the earliest. The first major hurdle will be whether negotiations for acquiring building sites go smoothly with local authorities along the line, which are handling talks with the landowners.

JR Tokai reached a basic agreement Thursday with the Aichi prefectural government and the Nagoya city government to help with the development of areas around Nagoya Station, the acquisition of land and other issues. JR Tokai is continuing to arrange a similar partnership with the Gifu prefectural government.

Toyota Museum A Success For Toyota - And Aichi

 

The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology opened in 1994 on the 100th birthday of Toyota Motor Corp. founder Kiichiro Toyoda (1894-1952). The facility's attractions include textile machinery that chronicle the development of the automatic loom by Kiichiro's father, Sakichi (1867-1930), known as the "king of Japanese inventors," as well as automotive technology that began with the capital created by Sakichi's enterprise.

"If the warp yarn breaks, the machine will come to a halt." This explanation in English was given as the 90-year-old loom, operating with quite a ruckus, came to a stop to the gasp of foreign visitors. One of them, 23-year-old Michelle Wheat from the United States, said she got a real sense of Japanese technology at the museum, and that she was impressed by it more than any other museum.

The number of visitors to the museum during its first 10 years was steady at about 100,000 people annually. The figure jumped to 304,000 in 2005 as a result of the Aichi Expo, but fell thereafter. Last year, however, a record 309,000 people visited the museum, establishing a new record for the first time since the expo.

This year, the museum drew 311,000 visitors as of the end of October, ensuring a new record for the second consecutive year.

The driving force behind the good times is foreign tourists.

The live demonstrations put on by museum staff, who operate real machinery, spin yarn and weave cloth, have generated a buzz on global travel information website TripAdvisor, where the museum was ranked No. 28 in this year's "Japanese sightseeing spots popular among foreign tourists."

Foreigners account for about 30 percent of the visitors to the museum. Apparently, the increase in the number of individual visitors is outpacing that of groups.

Another factor behind the museum's renewed popularity is the TBS TV drama "Leaders," which focuses on the life of Kiichiro Toyoda. The series was aired this past March.

The museum served as a location for scenes such as one in which Kiichiro is seen drawing. The series depicts how he redirected the assets of his father, Sakichi, and pursued his dream of developing Japanese-made automobiles.

The Tokai region in central Japan has many industrial sightseeing facilities suitable for touring that carry the stories about and history of industrial technology. Visitor numbers apparently peaked around the time of the Aichi Expo, with excitement waning thereafter. However, the cheaper yen has signaled the winds of change, with more foreign tourists visiting Japan.

Toyota is forecast to earn a net profit of 2 trillion yen ($16.81 billion) for the fiscal year ending in March 2015, a record high.

Masami Hayashi, the head of the Chubu Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry's logistics and service industry section, hopes the company's performance, along with the increasing flow of visitors to Toyota's "group mecca," will "lead to a utilization of the region's assets and stimulate the economy."

Asahi

Marubeni Completes Nagoya Solar Project

 

Marubeni completed its solar energy project with success yesterday.  Sharp and Yingli supplied the PV modules, a Marubeni spokesperson tells Recharge, without disclosing additional details.

The project, constructed on 78 hectares of reclaimed land in the town of Kisosaki, Mie prefecture, is expected to generate enough electricity to supply power to 14,500 homes per year.

Last April, the Tokyo-based conglomerate finished one of Japan’s biggest solar projects, an 82MW installation in Oita prefecture, on the southwestern island of Kyushu.

In late October, it revealed plans to work with Japanese e-retailer Rakuten to offer services to consumers of renewables-generated electricity, in anticipation of the government’s plans to open the nation's retail electricity market up to competition by 2016. 

Recharge Energy

Nagoya Based Child Care Company Sued In Tokyo

Sekimachi Kita, Tokyo

When the Asc Sekimachi-kita day care center opened in Tokyo's Nerima Ward in 2007, it surrounded its yard with a three-meter high sound isolation wall, the kind of wall seen along expressways. It limited the time for children to play in the yard to two hours a day and the facility has double-paned windows.

Despite these efforts, the center was sued by neighbors who claimed the children’s loud voices constituted noise.

Hiromi Yamaguchi, head of Nagoya-based Japan Nursery Service Inc., which runs the day care center, said the facility was treated as a troublemaker in the lawsuit.

“I have managed day care centers with the sense of a mission, but I don’t feel like establishing new facilities if it causes trouble,” Yamaguchi said.

Tokyo govt mulls review of the ordinance.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ claims were based on a stipulation in the metropolitan government’s environmental security ordinance that states, “No one should make noises exceeding the regulatory standards.”

The metropolitan government had received complaints saying that it was unreasonable to equate children’s voices with the noise of factories and from other causes.

Sixty-five percent of local governments in Tokyo also have called for review of the ordinance.

Given this, the metropolitan government has started to consider excluding children’s voices from the stipulation.

The metropolitan government plans to revise the ordinance as early as next spring. An official of the metropolitan government’s Environment Bureau said: “Although it is considered undesirable to control children’s voices from the viewpoint of [its effects on] their growth development, it is also true that some people cannot abide noise. It’s necessary to strike a balance in the review.”

Some day care centers have started making efforts from the planning stage to communicate with neighbors to avoid possible trouble with local residents.

A day care center that is scheduled to open in Ota Ward in April next year plans to welcome local people to events such as a summer festival, by joining a local residents’ association. Yoshitaka Nishio, president of Blossom Co., a Chuo Ward-based company running the day care center, said: “It’s impossible to make children follow the instruction, ‘Keep quiet.’ This is a matter that adults rack their brains to solve.”

“I suppose more people feel that children’s voices are noisy because it has recently become rare to hear their voices in our daily lives due to the declining birthrate,” said Masako Maeda, professor of Konan University who specializes in social security studies. 

“Still, if such voices are considered noise, the educational environment would become suppressed. So, the revision of the ordinance would be reasonable,” she said.

Maeda was involved as deputy mayor of Yokohama in the city’s efforts to tackle the issue of children on day care waiting lists.

“It’s also necessary to make compromises. Operators of day care centers need to provide more thorough explanations, and local residents may need to exercise patience,” she added.Speech

Paper Suggests Ways To Make Nagoya Protocol Easy

 

A recent paper proposes that countries use the access and benefit-sharing mechanism of the Nagoya Protocol to ensure conservation action and effective implementation of the protocol.

The Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force in October (IPW, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, 10 October 2014).

The paper is published in the Asian Biotechnology and Development Review and entitled, “Access and Benefit Sharing as an Innovative Financing Mechanism”.  It suggests innovative ways to build access and benefit sharing (ABS) models.

“We need to stop looking at ABS through the lenses of the Nagoya Protocol negotiations where the focus is to prevent biopiracy at all costs,” it says. “Instead we now have to start viewing ABS as an innovative financing mechanism than a regulatory burden.”

The authors are Balakrishna Pisupati, senior research fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway, and Sanjay K Bavikatte, a fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, UNU-Institute of Advanced Studies in Japan.

The paper encourages countries to prioritise “modest but steady revenues from ABS over infrequent but big pay offs.” It also calls for prioritising “cooperation over competition when it comes to shared genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge.” And it proposes to prioritise “incentives over penalties to motivate compliance with ABS laws.”

The paper, citing another study, says: “If over 50 per cent of pharmaceutical products in the market now are derived from genetic resources or inspired by natural compounds, the global market for pharmaceutical products alone should hold enormous resourcing potential for prospecting based financing for biodiversity conservation agenda.”

This paper is being made available for distribution with special arrangement from the Asian Biotechnology and Development Review.