This month’s topic are Abe’s press conference on Coronavirus, the couple Kawai, the State of Emergency and the trial of Satoshi Uematsu.

Let’s compare what different newspapers say on the same topic!

In this post, I compare editorials from different newspapers for the same day.

Introduction This week’s post is very short, only two topics, and it will be the last post in the section “Japanese News”… The reason why I stop is that I think this exercise already bore its fruits. I started it to help me read the news, and it worked better than I could say: Studying articles on my blog improved my reading comprehension (when I started doing this exercise, reading a political article was really scary and I usually understood nothing unless I studied it sentence by sentence). Posting every Friday forced me to be regular and read the news, if not every day, several times a week. More than the study part, I think that the regularity the blog forced me into is what helped me the most. I learnt a lot of English words too (to be honest, the real challenge of the Friday post was often more English than Japanese! It is not easy to write about politics in English…) But now, I have reached a point where writing this post takes …

The topics I studied this week are: The labour reform: a recap Post-Abe: a list of the 5 candidates who could succeed Abe Football: Politicians’ reactions to the last match and a Korean digression The execution of Aum Leader Matsumoto. Labour reform On Friday 29th, the Diet enacted the Labour Reform bill. Despite many criticisms, the 高プロ was not removed from the text. As it stands, the reform contains three major topics: The system “同一労働同一賃金” will ensure that regular and non-regular employees get the same salary if they do the same work. I think that nobody criticises this point. A maximum cap for extra time “残業時間の規制”. Even if the opposition welcomes this instauration, they criticise that it is only fixed at 100 hours per month, which is higher than the 過労死ライン. The so-called 高プロ or 高度プロフェッショナル制度. This is the most controversial part of the reform. According to this system, some skilled professional workers with high salary will no longer be concerned by the working-hour regulation system: 高収入の一部専門職を労働時間規制から外す. According to the opposition, the 高プロ will only increase the number …

Politician criticises the press Let’s start this post with a shocking statement by Taro ASO, who is both Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. Seeing that the LDP had received high support among people under 30 during previous elections, he used this result to criticise the press. He said: “一番新聞を読まない世代だ。読まない人は全部自民党（の支持）だ.” To me, this is a strange way to attack the press. I guess that he wants to criticise the newspapers which, like Mainichi, make a lot of reports about political scandals and point out the problems of the government. Young people who don’t read newspapers are not “corrupted” by them, or at least, I think that this is the core of the message. But it is then easy to reply, as did a member of the communist party: “新聞を読んで真実が伝われば自民党支持にならないというのは、ある意味でその通りだ” (source) The most shocking part is that Aso says that people should not read newspapers: “新聞（の購読者増）に協力なんかしない方がいいよ。新聞販売店の人には悪いけど、つくづくそう思った.” 購読・こうどく: buying (a book or a magazine) and reading it つくづく: really, keenly, deeply, profoundly, (think) from the bottom of one’s heart IR Bill or Integrated Resorts Enabling Act …