Asia News July 6th

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JAPAN:

On Monday, rebel political leader Ichiro Ozawa walked out of Japan’s ruling party along with a total of 40 Democratic Party members of the lower house and 10 from the upper house in protest to actions by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. They strongly disagree with his attempt to push a controversial sales tax increase through parliament. Their resignations severely weaken the Prime Minister’s majority power. Noda had announced plans to double the tax from 5% to 10%. The move was part of Noda’s plan to manage Japan’s enormous public debt.
Noda only took the leadership of the government in September and is the 6th Japanese leader since Prime Minister Koizumi who ruled for over 5 years. A no confidence vote is a distinct possibility for Noda as a result of the resignations. Ozawa says that he expects a new general election to be called in the near future.

In other news from Japan, the country has begun restarting its nuclear power production for the 1st time since shutting down all of its reactors following the earthquake/tsunami disaster last year. The Ohi nuclear plant’s No. 3 reactor was restarted last Sunday and was expected to begin providing power to Osaka and parts of western Japan by mid week.
The move brought out large numbers of loud demonstrators decrying the decision. Police were on hand to control the crowd. The No. 4 reactor is scheduled to restart by July 24th.
Despite all of the reportage of the aftermath of the disaster that began in March of 2011, no deaths due to the nuclear accident have been reported, but more than 15,000 died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami.

SOUTH KOREA:
On Monday, the only South Korean figure skater to ever win Olympic gold and a world championship announced that she will continue to compete. Kim Yun-na said she will enter the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. There has been a lot of recent speculation that she would retire.
At the press conference she said that moving her training from Los Angeles to Seoul she had found new inspiration by being around the new younger Korean skaters. “I just tried to be a good teammate for the young ones,” she said. Kim hasn’t competed in over a year. She said she will try to become a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) after the Sochi Games.

In other news from Korea, last Friday the South Korean government and Japan said they would delay signing of their groundbreaking military intelligence pact because it has stirred up relations between the 2 Koreas. Much of this has to do with anti-Japanese feelings resulting from the fact that Japan occupied Korea for over 3 decades in the first half of the 1900s.
That sentiment permeates the North as well as the South. During that occupation thousands of Korean men were forced to serve the Japanese in the military, while equally large numbers of young Korean women were forced into duty as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers. They were literally held as sex slaves.

INDIA:

On Monday it was reported that monsoons in the northeast Indian state of Assam have killed over 80 people. Over two million people have been forced from their homes. Five hundred thousand of those are living in relief camps and the rest have moved in with relatives or are camping out in the open. Most of the dead were swept away by flooding of the Brahmaputra River. Some entire villages were swept away.
The Army had to use boats to rescue villagers from rooftops and the Air Force is dropping food and drinking water from aircraft. Over 700 relief camps have been set up. Assam is one of India’s chief tea producing states, but tea production is not expected to be affected.