Death industry reaps grim profit as Japan dies - Reuters

An employee adjusts flowers in a viewing room, where chilled encoffined corpses are delivered through hatches through an automated storage system, during a photo opportunity at the Lastel corpse hotel in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, September 10, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Yuriko Nakao

By Tim Kelly

TOKYO | Mon Sep 12, 2011 5:51am EDT

TOKYO (Reuters) - Across from a noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb, Hisayoshi Teramura's inn looks much like any other small lodging that dots the port city. Occasionally, it's even mistaken for a love hotel by couples hankering for some time beneath the sheets.

But Teramura's place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travellers. The white and grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins.

"We tell them we only have cold rooms," Teramura quips when asked how his staff respond to unwary lovers looking for a room.

The daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is 12,000 yen. For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city's overworked crematoriums.

Death is a rare booming market in stagnant Japan and Teramura's new venture is just one example of how businessmen are trying to tap it.

In 2010, according to government records, 1.2 million people passed away, giving the country and annual death rate of 0.95 percent versus 0.84 percent in the United States, which is also the global average.

The rate of deaths is on the increase. Last year, there were an extra 55,000 dead and over the past decade, an average of 23,000 more people have died each year in Japan.

Annual deaths are expected to peak at 1.66 million in 2040 as the bulk of the nation's baby boomer generation expires. By then, Japan's population will have shrunk by around 20 million people, an unprecedented die off for a nation neither at war or blighted by famine.

Although two decades of economic malaise has weighed on incomes, a tradition on splashing out on ceremonies means the Japanese still pay an average of 1.2 million yen on flowers, urns, coffins and other funeral expenses. It adds up to a market worth a whopping $21 billion a year, or twice what Americans spend annually on funerals.

"There's been a rush into the market," says Teramura, who founded cemetery developer company Nichiryoku (7578.OS) 45 years ago. Even Japan's second biggest retail chain, Aeon (8267.T), rail companies and the nation's biggest farmers association, Japan Agriculture are getting into the business, he notes.

CREMATORIUM QUEUE

Teramura, 71, decided a decade ago to widen his business beyond graves to funerals and he opened Lastel last year.

Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.

Building new urban crematoriums to deal with the surge in bodies is near to impossible because nobody wants the furnaces in their back yard, explains Teramura. That not-in-my-backyard crowd is forcing cities to make do with the facilities they have, even as the body count mounts.

In Yokohama, the average wait for an oven is more than four days, driving up demand for half-way morgues such as Lastel.

"Otherwise people have to keep the bodies at home where there isn't much space," says Teramura. It also provides a captive audience to which he can market his other funeral services and wares.

FREE FOR ALL

Joining Teramura in the funeral rush are a slew of new entrants, some of them refugees from a shrinking wedding industry.

Entry to the industry is easy. There are no licenses or mandatory qualifications. All any wannabe funeral director needs is an office and a telephone. Flowers or coffins are easy to order and ceremonial halls, hearses and monks are all for hire.

In the United States, by comparison, most funeral entrepreneurs need to study for three years, including a stint as an apprentice before regulators consider handing out a licence.

In a recent poll of 2,796 funeral industry related firms, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry METI.L found that a third have been in business for a decade or less.

It's becoming a wild west market in some ways, attracting the honest operators and the not so reputable too.

"People tend to leave things to the funeral director and some people take advantage of that. So instead of a 100,000 yen coffin you may end up with a 1 million yen cask," Teramura says.

A lack of official oversight and a wealth of cash transactions also makes it a magnet for full fledged mobsters, or yakuza, say some industry players.

A niche that the yakuza have slipped into is as brokers who introduce funeral homes to hospitals, said one funeral director, who declined to be identified. That role alone can pull in millions of dollars in commissions.

Just how fast the industry is growing is hard to ascertain.

METI in 2005 said there were 4,107 companies employing 49,079 people. Across the street at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, officials say there were 6,606 firms in 2006, supporting a workforce of 72,046.

Yoshiatsu Mitsuhashi, who is in charge of compiling the METI survey, said that growth may even understate the pace, because the ministry changed the way it gathered data.

"It probably does indicate that the number of operators is rising, but we don't really know," he admits.

Tokyo-based Yano Research Institute said companies positioned to succeed may be former wedding organizers able to respond to growing demand for personalized services on a tighter budget -- changes that have roiled the bridal industry already.

Yano predicts the funeral market will be worth 1.96 trillion yen by 2015.

BRIDAL REFUGEE

One former wedding organizer trying his hand at the death industry is Takayuki Nakagawa. In 2002, he founded Urban Funes, which offers customized theme funerals from a converted wedding chapel in a Tokyo suburb.

For recent events, Nakagawa has asked his staff to collect discarded fruit and vegetable boxes for the funeral of a greengrocer. For another, he asked them to come up with a fitting send off for father and husband who for four decades had blown half his salary on booze and gambling.

"People are less bothered about following customs," says Nakagawa in his offices above the hall where workers were arranging flutes and other memorabilia as part of a final farewell for a middle-aged woman.

To make money Nakagawa, who has no qualifications as a funeral director, says he keeps his operation lean, outsourcing whatever he can. Within five years he wants to do 3,000 funerals a year, compared with 900 in the last 12 months.

"The places that are struggling are those with a lot of facilities," says Nakagawa.

Those include mutual associations known as gojokai, set up to collect monthly fees from members, meant to pay a chunk of funeral expenses when they pass on. Those funds combined amount to more than 1.7 trillion yen, according to the industry association that most are members of.

Over-exuberance during Japan's Shangri-La bubble years meant they invested much of that money poorly in golf memberships, event halls and real estate, leaving many teetering on the brink of failure two decades on.

The Japanese government is pushing for the industry to consolidate, cajoling stronger operators to absorb weaker ones. A round of funeral fund failures will allow investors to make at least some money for their distressed assets, Nakagawa reckons.

"We aren't ordering them to combine, but encouraging them to act in order to avoid problems for consumers," explains an METI official in charge of overseeing the associations. "It's difficult to give a timeline for when this issue will be resolved," he adds.

As for Lastel's Teramura, he's pushing ahead with expansion plans.

He pulls out his mobile phone and shows a picture of an office building he just bought in another Yokohama neighbourhood. When he has finished renovating it will be his second Lastel, with room for 40 bodies, more than double the first.

He refuses to divulge, however, exactly where it is in case any NIMBY neighbours get wind of what he is up to and try to kill his latest corpse hotel.

(Editing by Michael Flaherty and Lincoln Feast)

View the original article here

Death industry reaps grim profit as Japan dies

TOKYO (Reuters) – Across from a noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb, Hisayoshi Teramura's inn looks much like any other small lodging that dots the port city. Occasionally, it's even mistaken for a love hotel by couples hankering for some time beneath the sheets.

But Teramura's place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travelers. The white and grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins.

"We tell them we only have cold rooms," Teramura quips when asked how his staff respond to unwary lovers looking for a room.

The daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is 12,000 yen ($157). For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city's overworked crematoriums.

Death is a rare booming market in stagnant Japan and Teramura's new venture is just one example of how businessmen are trying to tap it.

In 2010, according to government records, 1.2 million people passed away, giving the country and annual death rate of 0.95 percent versus 0.84 percent in the United States, which is also the global average.

The rate of deaths is on the increase. Last year, there were an extra 55,000 dead and over the past decade, an average of 23,000 more people have died each year in Japan.

Annual deaths are expected to peak at 1.66 million in 2040 as the bulk of the nation's baby boomer generation expires. By then, Japan's population will have shrunk by around 20 million people, an unprecedented die off for a nation neither at war or blighted by famine.

Although two decades of economic malaise has weighed on incomes, a tradition on splashing out on ceremonies means the Japanese still pay an average of 1.2 million yen on flowers, urns, coffins and other funeral expenses. It adds up to a market worth a whopping $21 billion a year, or twice what Americans spend annually on funerals.

"There's been a rush into the market," says Teramura, who founded cemetery developer company Nichiryoku 45 years ago. Even Japan's second biggest retail chain, Aeon, rail companies and the nation's biggest farmers association, Japan Agriculture are getting into the business, he notes.

CREMATORIUM QUEUE

Teramura, 71, decided a decade ago to widen his business beyond graves to funerals and he opened Lastel last year.

Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.

Building new urban crematoriums to deal with the surge in bodies is near to impossible because nobody wants the furnaces in their back yard, explains Teramura. That not-in-my-backyard crowd is forcing cities to make do with the facilities they have, even as the body count mounts.

In Yokohama, the average wait for an oven is more than four days, driving up demand for half-way morgues such as Lastel.

"Otherwise people have to keep the bodies at home where there isn't much space," says Teramura. It also provides a captive audience to which he can market his other funeral services and wares.

FREE FOR ALL

Joining Teramura in the funeral rush are a slew of new entrants, some of them refugees from a shrinking wedding industry.

Entry to the industry is easy. There are no licenses or mandatory qualifications. All any wannabe funeral director needs is an office and a telephone. Flowers or coffins are easy to order and ceremonial halls, hearses and monks are all for hire.

In the United States, by comparison, most funeral entrepreneurs need to study for three years, including a stint as an apprentice before regulators consider handing out a license.

In a recent poll of 2,796 funeral industry related firms, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) found that a third have been in business for a decade or less.

It's becoming a wild west market in some ways, attracting the honest operators and the not so reputable too.

"People tend to leave things to the funeral director and some people take advantage of that. So instead of a 100,000 yen coffin you may end up with a 1 million yen cask," Teramura says.

A lack of official oversight and a wealth of cash transactions also makes it a magnet for full fledged mobsters, or yakuza, say some industry players.

A niche that the yakuza have slipped into is as brokers who introduce funeral homes to hospitals, said one funeral director, who declined to be identified. That role alone can pull in millions of dollars in commissions.

Just how fast the industry is growing is hard to ascertain.

METI in 2005 said there were 4,107 companies employing 49,079 people. Across the street at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, officials say there were 6,606 firms in 2006, supporting a workforce of 72,046.

Yoshiatsu Mitsuhashi, who is in charge of compiling the METI survey, said that growth may even understate the pace, because the ministry changed the way it gathered data.

"It probably does indicate that the number of operators is rising, but we don't really know," he admits.

Tokyo-based Yano Research Institute said companies positioned to succeed may be former wedding organizers able to respond to growing demand for personalized services on a tighter budget -- changes that have roiled the bridal industry already.

Yano predicts the funeral market will be worth 1.96 trillion yen by 2015.

BRIDAL REFUGEE

One former wedding organizer trying his hand at the death industry is Takayuki Nakagawa. In 2002, he founded Urban Funes, which offers customized theme funerals from a converted wedding chapel in a Tokyo suburb.

For recent events, Nakagawa has asked his staff to collect discarded fruit and vegetable boxes for the funeral of a greengrocer. For another, he asked them to come up with a fitting send off for father and husband who for four decades had blown half his salary on booze and gambling.

"People are less bothered about following customs," says Nakagawa in his offices above the hall where workers were arranging flutes and other memorabilia as part of a final farewell for a middle-aged woman.

To make money Nakagawa, who has no qualifications as a funeral director, says he keeps his operation lean, outsourcing whatever he can. Within five years he wants to do 3,000 funerals a year, compared with 900 in the last 12 months.

"The places that are struggling are those with a lot of facilities," says Nakagawa.

Those include mutual associations known as gojokai, set up to collect monthly fees from members, meant to pay a chunk of funeral expenses when they pass on. Those funds combined amount to more than 1.7 trillion yen, according to the industry association that most are members of.

Over-exuberance during Japan's Shangri-La bubble years meant they invested much of that money poorly in golf memberships, event halls and real estate, leaving many teetering on the brink of failure two decades on.

The Japanese government is pushing for the industry to consolidate, cajoling stronger operators to absorb weaker ones. A round of funeral fund failures will allow investors to make at least some money for their distressed assets, Nakagawa reckons.

"We aren't ordering them to combine, but encouraging them to act in order to avoid problems for consumers," explains an METI official in charge of overseeing the associations. "It's difficult to give a timeline for when this issue will be resolved," he adds.

As for Lastel's Teramura, he's pushing ahead with expansion plans.

He pulls out his mobile phone and shows a picture of an office building he just bought in another Yokohama neighborhood. When he has finished renovating it will be his second Lastel, with room for 40 bodies, more than double the first.

He refuses to divulge, however, exactly where it is in case any NIMBY neighbors get wind of what he is up to and try to kill his latest corpse hotel.

(Editing by Michael Flaherty and Lincoln Feast)

View the original article here

Death industry reaps grim profit as Japan dies (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) – Across from a noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb, Hisayoshi Teramura's inn looks much like any other small lodging that dots the port city. Occasionally, it's even mistaken for a love hotel by couples hankering for some time beneath the sheets.

But Teramura's place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travelers. The white and grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins.

"We tell them we only have cold rooms," Teramura quips when asked how his staff respond to unwary lovers looking for a room.

The daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is 12,000 yen ($157). For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city's overworked crematoriums.

Death is a rare booming market in stagnant Japan and Teramura's new venture is just one example of how businessmen are trying to tap it.

In 2010, according to government records, 1.2 million people passed away, giving the country and annual death rate of 0.95 percent versus 0.84 percent in the United States, which is also the global average.

The rate of deaths is on the increase. Last year, there were an extra 55,000 dead and over the past decade, an average of 23,000 more people have died each year in Japan.

Annual deaths are expected to peak at 1.66 million in 2040 as the bulk of the nation's baby boomer generation expires. By then, Japan's population will have shrunk by around 20 million people, an unprecedented die off for a nation neither at war or blighted by famine.

Although two decades of economic malaise has weighed on incomes, a tradition on splashing out on ceremonies means the Japanese still pay an average of 1.2 million yen on flowers, urns, coffins and other funeral expenses. It adds up to a market worth a whopping $21 billion a year, or twice what Americans spend annually on funerals.

"There's been a rush into the market," says Teramura, who founded cemetery developer company Nichiryoku 45 years ago. Even Japan's second biggest retail chain, Aeon, rail companies and the nation's biggest farmers association, Japan Agriculture are getting into the business, he notes.

CREMATORIUM QUEUE

Teramura, 71, decided a decade ago to widen his business beyond graves to funerals and he opened Lastel last year.

Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.

Building new urban crematoriums to deal with the surge in bodies is near to impossible because nobody wants the furnaces in their back yard, explains Teramura. That not-in-my-backyard crowd is forcing cities to make do with the facilities they have, even as the body count mounts.

In Yokohama, the average wait for an oven is more than four days, driving up demand for half-way morgues such as Lastel.

"Otherwise people have to keep the bodies at home where there isn't much space," says Teramura. It also provides a captive audience to which he can market his other funeral services and wares.

FREE FOR ALL

Joining Teramura in the funeral rush are a slew of new entrants, some of them refugees from a shrinking wedding industry.

Entry to the industry is easy. There are no licenses or mandatory qualifications. All any wannabe funeral director needs is an office and a telephone. Flowers or coffins are easy to order and ceremonial halls, hearses and monks are all for hire.

In the United States, by comparison, most funeral entrepreneurs need to study for three years, including a stint as an apprentice before regulators consider handing out a license.

In a recent poll of 2,796 funeral industry related firms, Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) found that a third have been in business for a decade or less.

It's becoming a wild west market in some ways, attracting the honest operators and the not so reputable too.

"People tend to leave things to the funeral director and some people take advantage of that. So instead of a 100,000 yen coffin you may end up with a 1 million yen cask," Teramura says.

A lack of official oversight and a wealth of cash transactions also makes it a magnet for full fledged mobsters, or yakuza, say some industry players.

A niche that the yakuza have slipped into is as brokers who introduce funeral homes to hospitals, said one funeral director, who declined to be identified. That role alone can pull in millions of dollars in commissions.

Just how fast the industry is growing is hard to ascertain.

METI in 2005 said there were 4,107 companies employing 49,079 people. Across the street at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, officials say there were 6,606 firms in 2006, supporting a workforce of 72,046.

Yoshiatsu Mitsuhashi, who is in charge of compiling the METI survey, said that growth may even understate the pace, because the ministry changed the way it gathered data.

"It probably does indicate that the number of operators is rising, but we don't really know," he admits.

Tokyo-based Yano Research Institute said companies positioned to succeed may be former wedding organizers able to respond to growing demand for personalized services on a tighter budget -- changes that have roiled the bridal industry already.

Yano predicts the funeral market will be worth 1.96 trillion yen by 2015.

BRIDAL REFUGEE

One former wedding organizer trying his hand at the death industry is Takayuki Nakagawa. In 2002, he founded Urban Funes, which offers customized theme funerals from a converted wedding chapel in a Tokyo suburb.

For recent events, Nakagawa has asked his staff to collect discarded fruit and vegetable boxes for the funeral of a greengrocer. For another, he asked them to come up with a fitting send off for father and husband who for four decades had blown half his salary on booze and gambling.

"People are less bothered about following customs," says Nakagawa in his offices above the hall where workers were arranging flutes and other memorabilia as part of a final farewell for a middle-aged woman.

To make money Nakagawa, who has no qualifications as a funeral director, says he keeps his operation lean, outsourcing whatever he can. Within five years he wants to do 3,000 funerals a year, compared with 900 in the last 12 months.

"The places that are struggling are those with a lot of facilities," says Nakagawa.

Those include mutual associations known as gojokai, set up to collect monthly fees from members, meant to pay a chunk of funeral expenses when they pass on. Those funds combined amount to more than 1.7 trillion yen, according to the industry association that most are members of.

Over-exuberance during Japan's Shangri-La bubble years meant they invested much of that money poorly in golf memberships, event halls and real estate, leaving many teetering on the brink of failure two decades on.

The Japanese government is pushing for the industry to consolidate, cajoling stronger operators to absorb weaker ones. A round of funeral fund failures will allow investors to make at least some money for their distressed assets, Nakagawa reckons.

"We aren't ordering them to combine, but encouraging them to act in order to avoid problems for consumers," explains an METI official in charge of overseeing the associations. "It's difficult to give a timeline for when this issue will be resolved," he adds.

As for Lastel's Teramura, he's pushing ahead with expansion plans.

He pulls out his mobile phone and shows a picture of an office building he just bought in another Yokohama neighborhood. When he has finished renovating it will be his second Lastel, with room for 40 bodies, more than double the first.

He refuses to divulge, however, exactly where it is in case any NIMBY neighbors get wind of what he is up to and try to kill his latest corpse hotel.

(Editing by Michael Flaherty and Lincoln Feast)

View the original article here

Japan storm death toll rises to 25, more missing (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan's death toll from tropical depression Talas, earlier downgraded from a tropical storm, has risen to 25 with 52 missing, the government said Monday, as torrential rain pounded the west of the country at the weekend, triggering mudslides and bursting river banks.

Talas, which cut through Japan's main island Saturday and Sunday, was off the country's western coast as of 8:00 p.m. EDT, heading northeast, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

There were no reports of major disruption to factory operations and Tokyo Electric Power Co said its tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, located in eastern Japan, has not been affected by the storm.

Talas has mostly moved at about 6 mph, roughly the speed of a bicycle, and its slow progress caused heavy and prolonged rainfall over Japan, the agency said.

"We'll do our utmost in terms of search and rescue operations," Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told reporters when asked about the disaster.

As Talas moves on, heavy rain is expected in the north of the country, though JMA warned residents of the west to remain on alert for landslides.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Joseph Radford)

View the original article here

Amnesty chief targets death penalty

There is a wide gap between Japan and much of the rest of the world when it comes to human rights issues, and nongovernmental organizations need to play a role in changing people's awareness, especially on the death penalty, said Hideki Wakabayashi, the newly appointed executive director of Amnesty International Japan.

On a mission: Amnesty International Japan's new chief, Hideki Wakabayashi, is interviewed recently in Tokyo. YOSHIAKI MIURA

Japan currently has 120 people on death row. Every day they live in fear, not knowing when they are going to be hanged.

Meanwhile, the global trend is slowly but surely moving toward the abolition of capital punishment.

According to AIJ, the most recent information shows 139 countries have ended the death penalty by law or in practice while 58, including Japan, retain it.

During a recent interview with The Japan Times, Wakabayashi, who became head of AIJ in March, stressed that the government, which is responsible for the death penalty, also is responsible for creating a society in which some people become criminals.

"The death penalty is a symbol of human rights issues," Wakabayashi said. "I don't think the government has the right to rob the most important right — to live."

According to a 2010 government survey, 85 percent of the public approved of the death penalty, the highest rate of support since the survey was first taken in 1994. This public support is often used to back the government's policy of maintaining capital punishment.

"We can't just pursue advocacy," Wakabayashi said. "We need to win the sympathy of the general public to change society.

"We need to act so that people supporting the death penalty will change their opinions — and that will change policies and politicians and ultimately, society."

But as a former lawmaker of the Democratic Party of Japan, Wakabayashi knows just how difficult it will be to get the government to move away from executions.

He served as an Upper House member for six years starting in 2001, while the DPJ was still an opposition party, but health problems prevented him from running again in 2007.

During that time he held several key positions, including as the party's shadow trade minister and as chairman of a committee to draft a new Constitution.

Looking back on those days he regrets one thing — that he quit the nonpartisan group of lawmakers promoting abolition of the death penalty after being warned that affiliation with such an organization would hurt his re-election chances.

"The death penalty is still a controversial issue and I was told that being in the group would affect my next campaign," Wakabayashi said. "I've always regretted quitting the group. I am ashamed that I cast my philosophy and policies to the winds for the election."

When the DPJ took over the government in 2009 after a historic Lower House election, it was believed that various human rights issues, including capital punishment, would come to the forefront, especially with the appointment of Keiko Chiba, a known opponent of the death penalty, as justice minister.

Chiba opened the execution chamber to reporters for the first time in an attempt to increase transparency, and she set up a study panel to discuss capital punishment, but in the end she also signed off on two executions.

Wakabayashi pointed out that DPJ campaign platforms have been written to play up differences with the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

"So when the party includes measures on human rights, those opposed to it remain quiet . . . to win the election (by presenting a unified front)," Wakabayashi said. "But whether the party is serious about human rights is another matter."

One example, he said, was the DPJ's pledge to establish a human rights commission.

The need for an independent human rights organ has been cited because human rights issues are currently dealt with by the Justice Ministry, which oversees prisons and immigration control.

But earlier this month, Justice Minister Satsuki Eda announced that the commission would be an affiliate of the ministry, triggering criticism not only from opposition parties but from within the ruling coalition.

"The human rights commission has been eviscerated," Wakabayashi said.

Aside from being a former lawmaker, the director has had an interesting career.

A graduate of Waseda University with a bachelor's degree in commerce and a master's in forestry from Michigan State University, Wakabayashi worked as a salesman for Yamaha Corp., the musical instrument maker.

From there, he became an executive member of the Japanese Electrical Electronic and Information Union and then worked as a diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in Washington. He was also a visiting fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Japan is viewed as a country that is behind when it comes to human rights issues and I would like to use my experiences to make even a small difference," he said.

And along with Wakabayashi's appointment this year, the global Amnesty International saw its 50th anniversary. Despite being one of the largest international NGOs in the world, with 3 million members and supporters, the Japanese group has only about 6,500 supporters nationwide.

Wakabayashi said he thinks the low number is a reflection of the limited image in Japan of human rights, with the focus on issues like discrimination and social integration.

But he pointed out that human rights covers other aspects of society, including labor issues like taking child-care leave.

"I think that the concept of human rights is narrow in Japan," Wakabayashi said. "It is important to view human rights from a broad angle . . . and to change the definition and image of human rights."

View the original article here