Yen for Living

Cash or overcharge?

This spring the big news for train lovers was the integration of almost all the regional IC card services, thus making it possible to travel from one region to another on lines operated by different companies using a single IC fare card. But while computer systems have been linked successfully to allow for such inter-line transfers, one element of the changeover that has bothered public officials remained problematic: the non-integration of fares.

In some instances it actually costs more to go from point A to point B using an IC card than it does with a ticket, though most patrons aren’t aware of the fact. It depends on which lines you are using. For instance, if you are going from JR Kameari Station on the Joban Line in eastern Tokyo to JR Yokohama station and buy a ticket for the whole trip, it costs you ¥780. However, if you take the same route and use an IC card, ¥910 will be subtracted from your card balance. That’s because the Joban line turns into the Chiyoda subway line, which is operated by Tokyo Metro, after it passes Kita Senju, and the passenger then leaves the Chiyoda Line at Nishi Nippori and transfers back to JR in order to proceed on to Yokohama.

The ticket you buy from a vending machine takes these transfers into consideration and simply charges the zone-related JR fare between Kameari and Yokohama plus the Metro fare. But the IC card system doesn’t make such a distinction and each of the three legs of the journey is charged separately, meaning you pay two JR fares, one from Kameari to Kita Senju and another from Nishi Nippori to Yokohama, plus the ¥160 for the Chiyoda line between Kita Senju and Nishi Nippori.

The sticking point is JR East, and in Diet discussions about the IC fare discrepancy representatives of the company have said it’s a computer-related problem that they have yet to figure out, claiming that any changes to rectify the problem would “place on the system more of a burden” that might cause even more issues.

At the urging of Your Party the company did say it would make more of an effort to inform patrons of price differences where they occur. The various JR companies offer the Suica card system, but the equally popular Pasmo card has the same problem. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Area 80 percent of riders use one card or the other.

The problem is limited to transfers between JR and other lines. Other inter-line transfers don’t have the same problem. In fact, discounts that are normally offered to ticketed riders between the two Tokyo subway lines are integrated into the IC card fare structure, even when passengers leave one line through a wicket and enter the other through a different wicket. A transportation expert, discussing the problem in Tokyo Shimbun, said that such a change shouldn’t require a major system overhaul, and, in fact, JR recently announced it would make it possible for IC cards to subtract amounts of less than factors of ¥10 in line with the consumption tax increase, which means amounts of factors of ¥1 can be charged, but only if the patron has an IC card. Fares for tickets will still be rounded up to a factor of 10.

The fact is, the ticketing system costs operators more than the IC card system, which is why in London you pay less if you use a card than if you buy a ticket. Ideally, all patrons should use cards, so JR’s intransigence on the matter is difficult to explain.

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Anyone who still owns, much less uses, a fax machine may be embarrassed by the fact. The rest of the developed world has abandoned the device, and it seems that only in Japan is its utility valued, if for no other reason that to send maps to people who still don’t know their way around Google. And the same march of technology that has rendered the fax obsolete is making land lines an unnecessary expense. Most young people who acquire their first apartments don’t bother applying for them. Their mobile phones are perfectly adequate.

What the hell is that?

So what about those of us who still have land lines? More specifically, is the kanyuken — the subscription right to the line — worth anything? Once upon a time it cost as much as ¥80,000 to have a telephone line set up in one’s name. That was the cost of the right to a subscription, a kind of investment in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure, and you carried it with you your whole life; unless you wanted to sell it, which you could do. In fact, there was a market, with agents willing to broker your kanyuken to others. Though no one ever made money off their subscription rights, some people used it as security for small loans or pawned them.

Japan started offering telephone service in 1890, but the kanyuken system didn’t begin until 1897, when it cost ¥15. However, households didn’t really start getting telephones on a major scale until after the war, and it wasn’t until the late 1960s that more than half of the country’s population had phones in their homes. Many, in fact, were party lines. By 1976, the kanyuken cost more than ¥75,000, and subscribers could pay in installments. The telephones themselves were rented not owned. NTT was privatized in 1985, at which point the price of a subscription right dropped to ¥72,000, not including tax. It’s been slowly decreasing ever since. Since 2005 it has cost ¥36,000, though you can buy it on the market for as little as ¥11,000. NTT does not and never has bought back such rights, so once you purchase it it’s yours forever unless you unload it on someone down the line, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult. Few businesses now trade in kanyuken, though we did find one on the Internet that was offering ¥1,500 for a subscription right.

Consequently, some people forget that they have kanyuken. They move house and instead of having the land line in their new abode turned on, they just use their cell. In such situations, however, you still have to tell your local NTT office that you want to keep the right to a land line. After you do that they will send you a riyo kyushi no shirase (notice to stop usage), which allows you to maintain your subscription right, but only for 10 years. If you don’t re-remind the phone company that you want to keep the right, then after 10 years it expires and the shisetsu setchi futankin (money to facilitate operations) becomes invalid. Of course, during that time if you decide to reactivate your land line then the right is automatically preserved. In fact, the phone company recommends on the notice that you contact them every five years to confirm your subscription right. You never know. Faxes may make a comeback.

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“E” as in “exasperating”

Last week we received a monthly credit card statement that included the first payment for our emobile portable Wi-Fi service, which we signed up for at the end of February. The charge came to ¥4,642, which was higher than we expected. We had applied at a discount electronics store near our home. From the beginning we understood that the service costs ¥3,880 a month, and while that did not provide us with unlimited Wi-Fi access, the amount of access it did provide was more than enough for our needs.

We made this clear to the saleperson right from the beginning because there were other plans available at higher prices and we didn’t want to inadvertently sign up for one of those. He understood, but had to make his pitches.

The first had to do with the Wi-Fi device itself, which cost ¥33,600. Since the basic contract was for two years, that came to ¥1,400 a month, but because we were signing a two-year contract, the price of the device is waived, which means ¥1,400 would be deducted from the standard monthly fee. That doesn’t mean ¥1,400 is subtracted from the ¥3,880 emobile advertised as the basic monthly service fee. Apparently, ¥3,880 is the fee after the seemingly non-existent ¥1,400 device charge is subtracted.

If you break the contract before the two years are up or change to a different service/device, you have to pay a fee of ¥9,975. And if you don’t inform them that you don’t want to renew your contract at the end of two years, the company automatically renews it. This term has bothered a number of other subscribers, especially since there is only a one-month window at the end of a contract during which you can request that it not be renewed.

The second pitch had to do with options, none of which we took. One was insurance for both the device and the software, which costs ¥525 a month. The salesman didn’t try to push it, but he made a point of explaining that if we didn’t want it we had to “waive” it, meaning we had to actively decline the insurance. It wasn’t a matter of not taking it.

From our understanding, the insurance fee was automatically added to the service fee, which hardly made it an “option.” He said we would have to call the emobile customer support number to formally cancel it — for some reason we couldn’t do it through him — and that we should do it as soon as our Wi-Fi service went into effect, since we would be charged for the insurance almost as soon as we started using the device.

Continue reading about portable Wi-Fi contracts →

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The rise of non-regular employment has received a lot of coverage because of its effect on job security in the general work force. A seldom discussed side effect is the acute anxiety experienced by non-regulars as their contracts approach their expiration dates. Will mine be picked up for another year? Will I have to go out and look for a new job next month?

Hello Work website

For public non-regular employees this emotional roller coaster starts right after Jan. 1, since most contracts end with the fiscal year in March. And for those who have been working in the same position for an extended length of time, there is no solace in the new law that goes into effect this year and which says an employer must hire a contract worker as a regular full-time employee, complete with benefits, if the worker has been in the same position for five years.

Though it’s assumed that many employers will work the loophole by not renewing a contract just before the five-year period is reached and then hiring the person back after a six month “cooling off” period with an open-ended contract, non-regulars who work in the public sector aren’t covered by the new law in the first place. They can be retained as non-regulars indefinitely.

This exception was highlighted when the labor ministry announced that 2,200 non-regular members of its unemployment advisory staff had not had their contracts renewed for fiscal 2013. That represents 10 percent of all the non-regulars employed at Hello Work counseling centers nationwide, and presents an interesting scenario: Former employment counselors who themselves must seek employment advice.

In fact, a Tokyo Shimbun article described one woman in her 50s who received her notice in early March while she still had several weeks on her contract. Though she knew there was always the possibility her yearly contract would not be renewed the lateness of the notice (the media reported the announcement as being “sudden”) caught her off-guard.

In the last weeks of March she was looking for a new job at Hello Work on Saturdays while still working Monday through Friday at the same facility counseling people who themselves were looking for jobs.

One part of the new law that was already in effect before April 1 is to make the practice called yatoidome illegal. “Yatoidome” means nonrenewal of an employment contract for “no good reason,” but, of course, “good reason” constitutes a gray area that the Japanese legal system isn’t equipped to address. It is this part of the law that doesn’t apply to public workers, supposedly because non-regular government employees are only hired as stopgap workers, meaning people employed to fill certain positions on a temporary basis. They do not have to pass a test the way full-time regular civil servants do. However, in many cases, these workers become as indispensable as regular employees. In 2012, 63 percent of all Hello Work employees were non-regulars.

As for why the labor ministry decided to effectively lay off so many employment center staff at one time, a representative told the media that the ministry hired extra contract workers when the recession worsened in 2008 and again after the disaster of 2011, but now the job situation “is stabilizing” so the ministry doesn’t need as many counselors. Some laid-off employees counter this explanation by claiming that their workloads have been heavier in recent months, not lighter, especially in areas most affected by the disaster. What may have sparked the layoffs was the finance ministry, which has been auditing budgets across all government agencies and ministries and demanding cuts.

The yatoidome exception doesn’t just apply to national public workers. One-third of all local government employees, or about 700,000 people, are also non-regulars. That’s an increase of about 100,000 since 2008, according to a labor ministry survey. Of these, 60 percent work more hours than regular employees. More than half of these non-regulars make less than ¥160,000 a month or ¥2 million a year. And because they are technically part-timers, they are not up for promotions or salary increases. The most prevalent jobs in this category of public worker is day care attendant and librarian, but it also includes policemen, firemen and school teachers.

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Inzai Makinohara Station

We live on the Hokuso Line, which connects Takasago in eastern Tokyo to the Nihon University Medical Center in northern Chiba, a distance of 32.3 kilometers. The Hokuso Line has been called the most expensive train line in Japan. From one end to the other it costs ¥780, and for us to get from our station, Inzai Makinohara, to its neighbor to the west, Chiba New Town Chuo, it costs ¥290. Many people who live on the line and use it have complained to the relevant authorities and demanded that fares be reduced. In fact, five local residents sued the central government, demanding that the court rescind the state’s approval of the Hokuso Railway’s plan to lease its tracks to another railway company and claiming that the plan did not benefit users. On Mar. 26 the Tokyo District Court rejected the suit, saying that the government authorization did not damage the welfare of the railway’s users in any way.

The plaintiffs said they didn’t understand the judge’s reasoning. One, a 19-year-old man, told an Asahi Shimbun reporter that when he was a high school student he spent ¥90,000 on a six-month pass, which, on average, is about four times what it costs for a comparable student pass on any other line. Now that he’s graduated and going to a prep school he no longer qualifies for the student discount, and has to pay ¥170,000 for half-a-year. Single-station fares on the Hokuso are about twice as much as they are on other lines. The Hokuso Line is part of the Keisei Dentetsu Group, whose average fare for 32 kilometers is about ¥470, so the Hokuso fares are 70 percent higher than fares on other lines even within the same railway group. The reason for the high fares has been explained in this blog before, but in a nutshell, the line was designed to serve the Chiba New Town development project, which began in 1969. Planners envisioned 340,000 people eventually moving into the New Town area, which encompasses portions of three cities, but in the end only about 93,000 actually did. The main problem for the Hokuso Railway Co. was the cost of construction, in particular the cost of land. Purchases were made at the height of the bubble era, when land prices were sky high and so were interest rates. The debt currently stands at ¥90 billion, and the railway pays ¥5 billion on the note every year. But the Chiba New Town authority, which the railway belongs to, also has to pay shareholders, many of whom are farmers who sold it the land in the first place. You can see their huge houses, built with the money they made and are still making, all over the region that lies alongside the Hokuso Line. Since opening for business in 1991, the railway has raised its fares nine times, though it also cut a few, but only by ¥10.

The kernel of the court case is a leasing deal that the Hokuso Line made with Keisei Dentetsu, which wanted to use the Hokuso tracks for its Skyliner and Sky Access express trains to Narita Airport. Regular users of the Hokuso Line were under the impression that (more…)

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A recent feature in the Tokyo Shimbun looked into a conundrum that few people know about. Fifty-two years after his death, Ernest Hemingway remains one of the most popular novelists on the planet. Translated into dozens of languages, his books continue to sell well. Whether those works are now in the public domain depends on each individual country’s copyright laws. In Japan, the copyright for written works is protected for 50 years after an author’s death, but if you look at Hemingway’s individual novels there’s something strange. “The Old Man and the Sea,” which was published in 1952, is now a public domain work in Japan, but “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” published in 1940, is not, and it won’t be until 2022.

Get thee to a library: Cover of Japanese translation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

The reason for this discrepancy is a term included in the San Francisco Peace Treaty that officially ended the Pacific War when it was signed in 1951. This term in Japanese is called senji kasan, which in the body of the treaty is explained as a “wartime add-on to the protection period” of a particular work’s copyright. In other words, during the war, Japanese users of copyrighted works from the 15 countries aligned with the Allied cause did not pay fees and royalties to those copyright holders, so the period of that non-payment, from the declaration of war in 1941 to the signing of the San Francisco treaty, was added on to the regular copyright protection period in order to collect fees “retroactively.” Moreover, this add-on period was calculated in days, since each of the fifteen countries concluded the treaty at different times. For instance, Lebanon didn’t sign until Jan. 17, 1954, which means the add-on was 4,413 days.

What’s unique about senji kasan is that it only applies to Japan. The other two Axis powers, Germany and Italy, were not obligated to implement the add-on. Actually, Italy was supposed to have been obligated, albeit for only five years, but the country’s government negotiated with each of the Allied countries and eventually had the protection extension cancelled in 1993 when the European Union was being formed. France also had a similar extension condition domestically, since for much of the war it was occupied by the Nazis, but it expired a long time ago. According to Tokyo Shimbun, copyright experts tend to agree that the SF treaty extension is discriminatory and is merely a lingering remnant of the Allies’ will to punish Japan. But the war ended in 1945. Isn’t it about time the extension was rescinded?

As it turns out, the problem is not really the countries who benefit from this extension. According to one expert interviewed in the article, the problem is that the Japanese government “accepted the extension as punishment, a term of surrender,” and thus feels an obligation to pay, even now. None of the Japanese administrations that have been in power for the past 50 years even bothered to address the issue. It is simply a matter of laziness. If Japan wanted to get rid of the extension it would be relatively easy but time-consuming, since it would entail negotiations with each of the fifteen countries that signed the treaty. Some have said that the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership talks provides a perfect venue for discussing the matter.

Then again, there are some powerful parties in Japan who benefit from the extension, such as the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, which collects the royalties for foreign copyright holders. (more…)

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Fight club: Bengoshi Kaikan in Hibiya

It wasn’t long ago that the law was a lonely profession in Japan, though the number of attorneys may have only seemed small in comparison with the United States, where litigation is practically a spectator sport. Apparently, that’s no longer the case, according to a recent article in Tokyo Shimbun, which says that there is a glut of lawyers in the major cities. Consequently, many are branching out to smaller cities and even the countryside to find clients. The article profiles one young attorney who opened an office in Tokyo two years ago and has had scant business ever since, so in the past year he has held seven free sodankai (consulting sessions) in Hokkaido — six in Sapporo and one in Obihiro. The Hokkaido Bar Association says that such sessions are a burgeoning trend that started three years ago.

According to a government white paper on the legal profession, there are now 15,000 lawyers practicing in Tokyo, a 70 percent increase over the last ten years. And if you include the surrounding prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba, the number practicing in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area tops 32,000, which is more than half of all the lawyers in Japan.

An earlier white paper released in 2008 charts the steady rise of legal professionals in Japan. From 1989 to 1995, the ranks of attorneys added only about 200 new people a year, and after 1995 the number increased gradually until 2001, when the number leaped to 1,117. In 2008, more than 4,000 passed their examinations to become lawyers. Around the turn of the century, the business world demanded more legal experts, saying that trials, especially civil court cases involving commercial matters, took too long. As a result, more law schools were set up, but the demand never materialized on the scale predicted. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of civil suits handled by district courts in Japan increased by only 0.5 percent, though the overall number of lawyers went up by 62 percent. As a result, the number of cases handled per attorney dropped by 21.7 percent, though the attendant loss of income wasn’t quite as steep. The average yearly pay for a lawyer in 2004 was ¥16.5 million and in 2008 was slightly less than ¥16 million.

The profession received a much needed boost in 2006 when the Consumer Credit Law was revised with regard to “gray area” rates (kinri) and consumer credit companies were forced to refund ¥1.6 trillion in overcharged interest. About 70 percent of the customers eligible for the refunds hired lawyers and notaries to the tune of ¥40 billion, and somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of all the lawyers in Japan have so far benefited from this windfall.

Since most of the nation’s lawyers are in Tokyo or Osaka and the consumer loan-related bankruptcy business in those areas has dried up, they are looking farther afield. One Tokyo law office, Adire, which advertises extensively on television, has already set up offices in Sapporo, Hakodate, Obihiro and Kushiro. Most law offices looking to expand in this way hire advertising agencies, which research regional municipalities and set up the consulting sessions that alert locals to the availability of legal services. A president of one ad agency told Tokyo Shimbun that big city lawyers sometimes have an edge over locals in smaller towns, because people don’t know them. It’s sometimes difficult for locally based attorneys to get business, especially with regard to bankruptcies, because potential clients are also neighbors who would prefer that the community not know anything about certain aspects of their business.

But of course, local lawyers resent these city slickers invading their bailiwicks. A representative of a consumer protection committee in Sapporo told Tokyo Shimbun that since there are no regulations limiting where a lawyer can practice, most stay in Tokyo and do their distant business online or by phone, which means they can’t always help clients in emergencies. Conversely, some of the city lawyers say they are suddenly faced with much bigger travel costs, but assume that increased revenues will justify the added expense, thus implying that until a lawyer shows up in your town you probably never thought you needed one.

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