Mayors Gone Wild

[Mogura]

What the fuck is going on with mayors/governors of large metropolitan areas? Are they all drinking the same Kool-Aid? Of course, Ishihara needs no introduction, but here are some other crazy mayors you might not know about...

Toru Hashimoto (Osaka):

Hashimoto clashes with Osaka officials over tattoo survey
Politics May. 23, 2012 - 07:10PM JST

OSAKA —
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, who launched a crusade to eradicate tattoos from the public sector last week, has announced plans to prevent the promotion and advancement of any city employee who declined to respond to a survey asking them if they have tattoos.

“Citizens feel uneasy or intimidated if they see tattoos (on workers) in services and it undermines trust in the city,” Hashimoto has said.

Although small tattoos are now a common means of self-expression in Japan and are no longer indicative of gang membership, the right-wing Hashimoto initiated a survey in Osaka that asked employees of the city government to provide information about visible and concealed tattoos, such as how long they had had them. He has also threatened to dismiss any city worker who has tattoos, Fuji TV reports.

The poll found that 110 workers reported having tattoos, including sea turtles, moons and dolphins. It has been reported that many of the respondents work in public transport and the city waste disposal departments. The government is considering whether to ask public servants with tattoos to find other employment, Fuji reported.

“We need to have possession of this information. Anyone who doesn’t respond to the survey should be reported to HR and passed over for future promotion. This all goes without saying,” Hashimoto told a news conference, according to Jiji Press.

So far, 513 employees have declined to respond to the survey which was given to about 33,000 workers. Hashimoto says they will be pressed again to give the information before disciplinary steps are taken. “If they insist on having tattoos, they had better leave the city office and go and work in the private sector,” he said Tuesday after the results of the survey were released.

Around 800 teachers and other education professionals have so far refused to respond to Hashimoto’s survey, in the belief that it infringes on their right to privacy. A Kansai-based lawyers’ group has also reportedly asked the city to cease the investigation, which it claims violates workers’ human rights, Fuji TV reported.

Hashimoto reportedly became infuriated earlier this year after learning that a worker at a children’s home threatened kids by showing them his tattoos.

Education professionals were to be included in the “investigation” from Wednesday, but the city’s Board of Education has put off the start date and requested that head teachers’ opinions be heard first.

During Hashimoto’s mayoral campaign, weekly tabloids in Japan claimed that his father and uncle, now deceased, were both gangsters, although it was not reported whether they were tattooed. Nikkan Gendai also reported that a cousin of Hashimoto is in prison for manslaughter. Hashimoto has publicly commented on the stories and has not denied them.

http://www.japantoday.com/category/poli ... too-survey

Soichiro Takashima (Fukuoka):

Fukuoka mayor imposes 1-month alcohol ban for public servants
National May. 22, 2012 - 04:11PM JST

FUKUOKA —
Fukuoka Mayor Soichiro Takashima has banned all public servants from consuming alcohol outside their homes for one month.

The unusual move was announced at an emergency meeting on Monday and is said to be the result of a series of scandals involving city employees, Fuji TV reports.

A 52-year-old port and harbor bureau official was arrested for assaulting a taxi driver on May 18. It was also reported that a 48-year-old official from the child care division was arrested last week for assaulting a former colleague. Both incidents are believed to have been alcohol-related.

At the meeting on Monday, Takashima told department managers that he hoped the shock of the announcement would make employees more aware of the seriousness of recent incidents and of their responsibility to their communities, Fuji TV reported.

Legal experts say the mayor’s request is exceptional partly because no law exists to enforce a drinking ban on city employees, meaning public servants cannot legally be disciplined or fired for ignoring the ban. However, the city is said to be “strictly enforcing” its no-alcohol policy.

http://www.japantoday.com/category/nati ... c-servants

[MacGyver]

Men with small dicks drunk on power is my guess.

[allblacks]

This Hashimoto guy thinks he can do whatever he wants. Hate to burst his bubble but Im not taking shit from some wanker like him. A while ago he made some rule about kids not taking cellphones to school. Fuck off! My kids arent safe due to insufficient school patrols and I reserve the right to make my kid take her phone to school with her.

[SamhainP8]

Wasn't it the Nagoya Mayor who made that statement about the Nanjing massacre?

What's the average age of a mayor in Japan? Probably over 60, says it all really.

[steki47]

I saw a news clip on TV about the Fukuoka mayor. He commented that he felt silly trying to regulate his employee's behavior and that 1. he has better things to do and 2. they are adults who should able to look after themselves.

The Osaka tattoo issue came up after a city worker (teacher?) showed his tattoo to small children and parents complained.

A nation of children...

[Mogura]

Wasn't it the Nagoya Mayor who made that statement about the Nanjing massacre?

Thanks for the remind.

Chinese City Severs Ties After Japanese Mayor Denies Massacre
By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — The Chinese city of Nanjing has suspended its sister-city relationship with Nagoya, Japan, after Nagoya’s mayor expressed doubts that the Japanese Army’s 1937 Nanjing Massacre actually took place, the Nagoya City Hall said Wednesday.

The falling out began Monday, when Nagoya’s mayor, Takashi Kawamura, told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from Nanjing that he doubted that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing in one of the most infamous atrocities of Japan’s military expansion across Asia in the early 20th century.

The falling out underscored how differing views of history remain a problem in Japan’s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely raised in such a public manner, or directly to Chinese officials. But there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China’s government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes.

Still, the Japanese government scrambled to head off a full-blown diplomatic quarrel. The top government spokesman restated Japan’s official position that the massacre did, in fact, take place.

“This is a problem that should be appropriately resolved between the cities of Nagoya and Nanjing,” said the spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura.

The City Hall of Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan, said it received what it described as a short and businesslike e-mail on Wednesday morning from the city government of Nanjing saying that the Chinese city was temporarily halting all exchanges.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kawamura remained unrepentant, saying that he did not intend to retract the statement or apologize. He explained that his father had been a solider in Nanjing in 1945, and was treated kindly by city residents, which he said would have been impossible had an atrocity taken place there just eight years earlier.

“There are many opinions about the so-called Nanjing incident,” he told reporters, using the Japanese term for the killings in December 1937. “I have said I want to have a debate with people from Nanjing.”

Such disagreements between Japan and its neighbors have quieted from the early 2000s, when Junichiro Koizumi, then prime minister, angered many in China and South Korea by visiting the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead, including executed war criminals.

However, questions of history can still disrupt relations. In Kyoto, Japan, in December, Japan’s prime minster, Yoshihiko Noda, was rebuffed by the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, when Mr. Noda asked for removal of a statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul that remembered women forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. The South Korean leader responded by asking for compensation for the surviving former sex slaves, most now in their 80s. Japan says war-related reparations were settled when it established diplomatic ties with South Korea after World War II.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world ... sacre.html

What's the average age of a mayor in Japan? Probably over 60, says it all really.

What's the average IQ of the people who elect them into power?

[inflames]

Most people don't care about these small things from their representatives - there are many other issues that are more important. People vote on issues like crime and the economy before stuff like tattoos and cell phones in schools (Actually, I'd bet most people support Hashimoto on cell phones in schools).

If you want to see a ridiculous mayor - just search for Marion Barry.

[allblacks]

You have kids Inflames? Mine go to school not far from our place but it worries me. Theres so many whack jobs out there its not funny. Any peace of mind will do for me. No school, mayor, cops etc will take any responsibility if something happens.

[Kuronama]

You have kids Inflames? Mine go to school not far from our place but it worries me. Theres so many whack jobs out there its not funny. Any peace of mind will do for me. No school, mayor, cops etc will take any responsibility if something happens.

I dont have kids but I can understand the need for kids to have cell phones, especially in Japan where more likely than not, kids are walking/riding/taking the train to school, and not being driven by their parents. The beef I have is teachers not being allowed to enforce a little discipline in the classroom - as in, "WAKE UP! Sleep at home, not at school!" or "STOP PLAYING WITH THAT PSP/DS/CELL PHONE!" Sadly, Im guessing (havent personally worked in a school, only eikaiwa, so this is based on stories from friends and on here) teachers usually dont enforce these sorts of rules, for fear of being "too strict" by the principal, who was probably lectured by countless monster parents

[Junken Master]

Most people don't care about these small things from their representatives - there are many other issues that are more important.

Like making Bentos

[inflames]

You have kids Inflames? Mine go to school not far from our place but it worries me. Theres so many whack jobs out there its not funny. Any peace of mind will do for me. No school, mayor, cops etc will take any responsibility if something happens.

I don't but the counterargument is quite easy - people will say I got through school without a phone and so did all of you so there's no need. I tend to agree with Kuronama - the ability to make the students put away their phones is necessary. I know about the whack jobs - I've been followed and grabbed and stuff myself (and I'm a big white guy).

I went to HS when phones were starting to get big but our school still prohibited them (the school was in a far more dangerous neighborhood than pretty much anywhere in Japan). I didn't have one but everyone who did knew to turn it off and keep it in your bag. I had a friend who went to a public HS and they thought he was a drug dealer because he got caught with a phone.