On September 25, 2020, Kōno Tarō, minister for administrative reform, announced that the Cabinet Office’s regulatory reform hotline would be renamed Tatewari 110-ban, the vertical-division emergency line. 110 is the police emergency number in Japan. He said that about 5,000 messages had already come in and were being read.
By 6 p.m. on November 19, 2020, the count was 7,191. At a press conference the next day, asked how many had led to action, he answered: Ima wa nai desu ne. None for now.
On January 6, 2001, Japan’s central government was reorganized. One office and 22 ministries and agencies became one office and 12. According to a government white paper, one of the four pillars of the reform was to remove the harm of tatewari gyōsei, vertically divided administration.
During the Pacific War, the Imperial Japanese Army built its own transport submarine, the maru-yu, and ran it separately from the navy. The navy, for its part, built a tank. Once, a navy ship signaled to the army’s boat: Nanji wa nanimono naru ya. Sensui kanō naru ya. Who are you? Can you dive?
The two services also competed over budgets, personnel and the balance of power in the cabinet. One account argues that the army’s need was urgent rather than a matter of pride, because transport by sea was the army’s job.
In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, clinics reported new cases to public health centers by fax. On May 15, 2020, the government began trial operation of HER-SYS, a system for reporting them electronically. By September 10, 2020, all 155 local governments with public health centers were using it.
The government’s 2021 white paper on information and communications also noted that each ministry had built its own vertically divided office network.
Mizuho was formed in 2000 from three banks: the Industrial Bank of Japan, Fuji Bank and Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank. Its appointments were mocked as tasuki-gake jinji, sash-crossing personnel, for being shared out among the former banks.
In November 2021, after repeated system failures, the news site J-CAST called kyūkō ishiki, legacy-bank consciousness, the more serious problem. It quoted a source close to the Financial Services Agency who said the bank had become takotsubo-teki, like octopus pots.
A young woman who wants to become a maiko in Kyoto first spends about a year as a shikomi, living in and training. Then comes minarai, learning by watching. At a designated teahouse, she is allowed to see what happens at the banquets. The day she becomes a maiko is called misedashi.
Around the fourth or fifth year as a maiko, after the age of twenty, she becomes a geiko. This step is called erikae, the changing of the collar.
Kuden (口伝): oral transmission. A master passing the deepest secrets of a learning or an art to a disciple by mouth. Also a document that records such secrets. Isshi sōden (一子相伝): passing to one child. A master hands the essence of an art to only one child or one disciple and keeps it secret from everyone else. Menkyo (免許): permission. The certificate a master grants when a disciple has completed training in a martial or other art.
Japanese banks once had MOF-tan, staff in charge of the Ministry of Finance. Bank inspections were supposed to come without notice. To learn the schedule, banks entertained the ministry’s inspection staff lavishly.
In early 1998, prosecutors raided the ministry’s financial inspection department, and officials were arrested over the entertainment. A written question submitted in the House of Representatives on February 3, 1998, refers to the arrests.
In kabuki, the ie no gei, the art of the house, and the forms a parent performed weigh on the successor as a duty to carry on. A Waseda University scholar describes the heyako: a disciple or child actor judged to have talent and placed above a disciple but below a son.
The scholar concludes that what kabuki must pass on is the art, not the blood.
On September 22, 1987, Emperor Shōwa had abdominal surgery at the Imperial Household Agency hospital. The agency announced chronic pancreatitis. In fact, it was cancer.
Reporters at a television network later said that they had confirmed early on that it was cancer. They had held back, they said, because of the question of telling the emperor himself and his family, and because of the social impact. On January 7, 1989, his chief physician announced the final diagnosis: a tumor around the duodenal papilla.