describes a few cases where the Product Reliability law, that is supposed to protect customers against producers actually works the other way round. Sometimes with the complicity of the Product Liability centers...
http://www.asahi.com/english/enews/enews.html#enews_27015
Also, a small piece about immigrants right to vote, a bill pushed by komeito (one of the three parties in the governing coalition) and delayed by jiminto (another one of the three). The article itself is not so interesting, mainly party politics and negociation stuff, the point is that this issue is brought to the public in a country where, as I pointed out recently, the number of foreigners is not so important they could be an important political force (well, obviously they seem to be considered as such...)
Although I don't know the links between the komeito and the korean community, the bill seems to be mainly aimed at people who have permanent resident status (which probably includes about 90% of the korean population -itself 40% of the 'foreign' population).
komeito means 'the party of light' (???) and is 100% related to the bouddhist sect 'sokagakkai' that a some of you have probably heard of.
ps: as a complement to the post on japanese foreign population I sent the other day, Angela forwarded me a paper on foreign workers labor market in Asia where it is mentioned that the number of un-documented residents in Japan is probably equal to the number of documented ones, raising the figure to 300.000 (the 'official' figure') to about 1.2 millions ...
JC Helary