Baby post

Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto plans to set up the country's first "baby hatch"where mothers are able to drop off new born and unwanted babies. Jikei Hospitalexplains they will begin to install the hatch as soon as they obtain permissionfrom local public health authorities and Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor. The Ministry did not necessarily admit the plan to go ahead to install suchbox but they say there is at least no laws which prohibits such conducts.

I have never heard of such a system until I read this article listed inYahoo news. I read the fact that the system seems to be functioning withoutmajor problems in one of a baby care center in Germany.

In along with the news article at Yahoo site, there is an questionnaire on thissystem asking whether you agree with it or not. I have posted the
affirmative vote without seeing the summary result so far. I was satisfied to find the result of the vote that about 60% of people were affirmative about the system.

Hospital director Shoichi Hasuda says the baby hatch “is an emergency measureand it is not aimed at encouraging parents to abandon babies.” Yes, that's it.I fully agree with this message. But while I read many other news and comments expressed from several central Government authorities later on, I found there expressed various concerns to introduce such system in this country.

One big question raised was of course, whether the system would encourage the abandonment of a baby that is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. The Criminal Affairs Bureau of the Justice Ministry declined to comment on the legality of the hospital’s plan. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor also seems to be very uncertain about it.

I understand some of those development. This is a good first concrete step to save valuable lives of abandoned babies. I do hope and believe that a number of discussion will be made on this system from various views including legal, social, humanistic, ethical and religious point of views from now on.

2007/2/24

Tadashi HAYASE

Decisive battle of Tokyo gubernatorial election

Screening of candidates from Democratic Party of Japan for Tokyo gubernatorial election in April is not going well. Shiro Asano, the former Governor of Miyagi Prefecture is now one most possible candidate, but he is not so eager to accept the candidacy at the moment. Several other candidates including some famous TV casters who were asked to be the candidate by DPJ also denied the possibility.

Naoto Kan, Deputy Representative of DPJ and Seiji Maehara, the former Representative of DPJ are also included in the possible candidates. It seems that there exists some possibility for Seiji Maehara to accept the candidacy but Naoto Kan seems to have no such intention at all.

Shintarou Ishihara, the Governor of Tokyo will run again and he is not quite so strong as before for he has several issues concerning spending of travel expenses for his fourth son and entertainment expenses from public fund.But he still keeps more than fifty percent support from citizen of Tokyo according to a recent popular vote for his strong leadership and policy implementation capacity. His proposal to hold the second Olympic Game in Tokyo also seems to have a good support from
electorates in Tokyo.

Regardless such situation in Tokyo, the gubernatorial election in April is very important for DPJ and they must win in this election to win the following House of Representative election in July. If they could win in April, they could win in July as well.

From this point of view, I wonder why DPJ is still wondering so much to select a candidate for the gubernatorial election. According to my belief they must select either Naoto Kan or Seiji Maehara as a candidate. Naoto Kan seems to be the best choice and several mass media forecast that DPJ could win in the election if Naoto Kan run for it. I agree with that view personally. He may be the only one candidate who could win against Shintarou Ishihara in all respects.

Nevertheless, Naoto Kan seems to have no intention to run for the election fortunately. Ichirou Ozawa, Representative of DPJ also denied the possibility of his candidacy saying Naoto Kan is very necessary man as a top executive of the Party. But I think the message is wrong.

It is the day of local autonomy. One typical example is that the Government itself is now starting to discuss possible introduction of Dosyusei(regional system) in this country in near future. The Prime Minister will be elected from governors of regions in the future as we see now in US.

I am very sorry if Naoto Kan and Ozawa lack this kind of view. It is very possible that Naoto Kan will be able to be the Prime Minister of Japan after he worked as the governor of Tokyo for one term or two.

DPJ should select this option if they wish to win in the election in April and in July.

I am not necessarily a dedicated supporter for DPJ. But I do hope that the party should take the power once in Japanese politics replacing Liberal Democratic Party. This is very necessary to improve the quality of democracy and politics in Japan.

It is my sincere hope that DPJ could now make a right decision now on the selection of a candidate for coming election in April.

tad

Qualification of a good teacher

"Democratic Party of Japan submitted the counter plan for Revision ofSchoolteachers' Licensing System" Asahi Newspaper Feb.8

There were a number of misconducts of school teachers reported in newspapers these days. Some teachers at elementary schools and juniorhigh schools participated themselves in some bullying at their class rooms. There is a formidable teacher who took pornographic photographof students in his class. Those are a number of such unbelievable news and there might exist many more such vicious teachers at school these days.

Many confusions at school today come basically from lack of ethics education at home according to my opinion. But it is also true that lack of ethics of children derives from the lack of training andteaching at school. Schools are not managed enough in that respect dueto lack of leadership of principal and lack of capacity of teacherin that regards at class rooms.

I agree with the idea of the Ministry of Education and Science that education boards of each cities will review the qualification of schoolteachers every ten years. Every teachers will be sent to training centerto refresh their motivation and skills as school teachers. I think thatthose process are very necessary to refresh their mind and skills.

I also agree with the counterproposal proposed by Democratic Party of Japanto take longer years to train school teachers from four years to six yearsjust like the license of medical doctors. They are trained for four years concerning basic skills as teachers and for another two years as intern toget trained at actual classrooms. That is really an good idea which shouldbe considered to be included to revise the law.

Cultivating good school teachers is one of the most important subject to improve a number of problems at school today. This is an issue whichshould be discussed by suprapartisan groups at the diet.

Qualification of good teacher are not only skills and knowledge aboutteaching subjects but also fundamental quality as human being. The lattermay be more important as a matter of fact as a qualification for a goodteacher.

The qualification may not be checked just by paper test. The qualificationmay be checked by principals and vice principals during their internship period at school. Some group interviews may be necessary at the final stage ofthe selection examination.

Since the training period gets longer just like medical doctors, their remuneration should be much higher compared with the present one althoughwhether or not that is considered in the revision of the law.

The most important thing to make any new teacher training system work is to create a general atmosphere in our society that school teachers are respected much more by students at school and by people at communities.

2007/2/10

Tadashi HAYASE

From TIME report

Reference is made with the article of Time.

I don't agree with the comment saying Kyuma and Aso were echoing what a majority of Japanese feel. I am not in the majority at least.

I am quite surprised to the comment and I quote: their statements seemed almost calculated
to cause embarrasment to their boss. May be so. There are no such comments by any Japanese
papers as far as I know.

tad

Participation of injured persons to judgment

Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice has submitted a draft plan for the participation of injured persons to a court judgment. So far in any court judgments, there are no room for injured parties to participate in court judgment process at all. All they can do is to come to a court and listen to what's going on at courts. They may enter the witness-box on the request of prosecutors or defense councils but it is all what they can do as far as court process is concerned.

In this new draft plan, injured parties can participate in closing argument with prosecutors. This is really epoch-making court process which has never been tried before in Japan.

It is hard to guess the sentiment of injured people who suffered some serious
criminals such as killing or sex-related crimes against their infant children.
In such case, we often observe that those injured families worked hard to punish criminals so that they are sentenced to death at some extreme cases.

We are puzzled very much to see that those injured people even devote their life to work for making criminal sentenced to death in court judgment. We understand their real sentiment first time when we know the whole background about what happened to those injured parties.

From outsider point of vies, having such kind of sentiment of revenge seems to be a feeling of very personal one of injured party. We should never say that way just by one word. The feeling may come not only come from personal sentiment but also from social viewpoint that such crime should never be repeated again in the future without wasting lives of their families.

The public court judgments exist to punish such crimes to avoid that would not happen again in the future. Participation of injured parties to court decision is very necessary from social point of view as Legislative Council suggested.

Such injured party participation systems are already introduced in various advanced countries such as US and Europe. But there involved some basic problems to make the whole system work. The system is not to protect the basic right of suffered parties but to make fair social judgment from overall legal and social point of views.

We must wait for further discussion on the draft plan at the council so that this will become a law in near future. I personally agree with this directional movement at any rate.

2007/2/3
Tadashi HAYASE