Asahi says keeping Takaichi in the Diet for 50-plus hours to explain her budget isn’t enough. Democracy will be threatened unless she is made to stay longer, scholar is quoted as saying.
digital.asahi.com/articles/ASV...
I know from experience—business and political reporters can get the legal niceties wrong. Pretty embarrassing to get it wrong on page one, though, when the other Japanese papers all got it right with 違法.
I don’t expect Nikkei to correct this but it isn’t really accurate to say that Scotus ruled the Ieepa tariffs “unconstitutional” (違憲) or that the case was about the constitutionality of the tariffs. The case was about whether the Ieepa statute authorized the tariffs.
3) Roberts is withering about Kavanagh's dissent in footnote 6, saying K ignored a previous ruling's cautions about its narrow ambit. CJ cites five times that ruling said it shouldn't be treated as a broad precedent. "This is not quite, 'No, no, a thousand times no,' but should have sufficed ..."
2) Gorsuch to pro-Trump Republicans: Respect Congress. Its "deliberative nature" is "the whole point": We can "tap the combined wisdom" of lawmakers, "not just that of one faction or man." This leads to enduring laws, so people can plan "in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day."
Couple of thoughts on #Scotus tariff ruling:
1) Roberts doesn't say whether the emergencies Trump cited were really emergencies. A lot of laypeople thought that was the critical question. Roberts, though, bypasses it and says: Even if these ARE emergencies, IEEPA doesn't authorize tariffs.
Count ‘em:
1) Spring or mine: 収益源
2) Stronghold or inner sanctum: 牙城
3) An object that shakes: 揺らぐ
Fwiw, Claude thinks 2+3 is ham-handed but not all that bad.
Nikkei’s rewrite person manages to mix three metaphors in a single phrase: 日本勢が収益源としてきた牙城が揺らいでいる
www.nikkei.com/article/DGKK...
Dentsu, the company criticized for working its employees to death, has picked as its next CEO a guy who does nothing but work. He decided to apply there after reading a book by Tahara Sōichirō that depicted the company as trying to brainwash Japanese people. www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...
Now it is saying its business is "to support corporate culture transformation" at clients. OK. www.dentsu.co.jp/en/news/rele...
In its glory years, Dentsu's bread-and-butter was acting as a broker for scarce prime-time TV ad space. Japanese still watch more broadcast TV than Americans but it is hard to see much enduring value in that business.
This comes just three months after Dentsu said everything was getting better. No wonder the CEO is getting axed.
It seems Dentsu lost about $2 billion last year, its fifth year out of the last seven in the red. The idea that a Japanese ad agency would run Western ad and PR agencies better than their previous owners was flawed, I daresay. www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...
Tina Brown: “The fashion to write off legacy media as a dinosaur trade extinguished by the headwinds of change fails to ask why Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker was able to crisply revitalize that paper of record.”
Two years ago Jesper Koll predicted the Nikkei would hit 55,000 by 2025. He was off by a few weeks, but as market predictions go, this one was about as good as they get. Today, the Nikkei closed above 55,000 for the first time. Congrats to Jesper. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CX6...
Takaichi inherited much of her ideology from Abe, who said in his memoirs that he believed MOF would rather destroy the nation than see its parochial interests harmed. (MOF disagrees, naturally.) I would watch for what kind of retribution she exacts.
Since then, Asahi and certain bureaucrats have been sniping at Takaichi, suggesting that she misspoke and that business is angry at her. It was the kind of whisper campaign Beijing hoped for, but with the opposite of the intended effect.
Her initial Taiwan comment was barely mentioned by Nikkei but led the Asahi, which suggested that China would react harshly. It did.
If China thought it could peel off Japanese support for Takaichi through relentless attacks … call that a fail.
Something to keep in mind the next time you read a tech journalist claiming that AI is about to discover the next wonder drug. If I've learned anything from @dereklowe.bsky.social, it's that drug discovery isn't so easy.
I consider this a failure of journalism more than of medicine. As Yamanaka says, advances in basic research can take decades to translate into patient care. Yet how many hundreds of articles did Nikkei etc. write in the 2010s suggesting clinical advances were imminent?
www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...
It took a 19-hour flight but I should be safe from snowstorms and 10-degree (F) weather for the time being.
Two issues with Changi-JFK flight:
1) 17 straight hours in the air
2) Discovering it’s 20 degrees F on arrival (it was 80 when I left my apt)
Shouganai
Nikkei print circulation falls to 1.25 million, down about 6% from 1.33 million a year ago and down more than 50% from a decade ago. We don’t know how many 押し紙 undistributed newspapers they are printing so real circulation may be under 1 million. Still a lot for this day and age.
It’s a problem if one employee is stealing money from customers, but if a hundred of them are doing it … maybe that’s your business model?
digital.asahi.com/articles/ASV...
For how long have Japanese said “Itadakimasu” before a meal? Centuries, right? Nope, first written citation is from 1891.
www.nikkei.com/article/DGKK...
冬の六義園 Rikugien (Komagome, Tokyo) in winter
お正月の万両 Manryō (Ardisia crenata) to mark the New Year in Japan.
元旦のキンギョソウ New Year’s snapdragon
“Food in Singapore is not that good,” according to a Straits Times writer. (Quoted from the text—headline plays down the criticism) www.straitstimes.com/opinion/sing...
