Tokyo Assembly Elections Sunday & Diet Vote on Organ Transplant Law on Monday

Tokyo voters go to polls in key test for PM

Asia Pacific News

TOKYO: Voters went to the polls in Tokyo on Sunday for the capital's assembly elections, seen as an important test of embattled prime minister Taro Aso ahead of a general election.

Aso's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its sole coalition partner, New Komeito, are aiming to defy opinion polls to maintain their majority in the assembly of the world's largest metropolitan city. ...

...A total of 221 candidates, including 58 fielded each by the LDP and the DPJ, are vying for the 127 seats of the assembly, seeking support of 16.6 million eligible voters across the sprawling capital.

The polls will close 8:00 pm (1100 GMT), with results expected late Sunday or early Monday. ... read more

* See NHK Video News on the election: http://www.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/fixed/asx/12_10_256k.asx



Upper House transplant vote set

The Japan Times Saturday, July 11, 2009

The House of Councilors will vote Monday on bills to revise the Organ Transplant Law in a move that could clear away a major obstacle in the way of efforts to press Prime Minister Taro Aso to dissolve the Lower House and call an election, lawmakers said Friday. ...

...lawmakers to support a particular bill on grounds that the matter concerns individual views of life and death.

Three bills, with two variations being added in the Upper House to the bill that cleared the Lower House last month, will be voted on one by one in Monday's plenary session, the lawmakers said.

While the original bill is designed to recognize people who are brain dead as legally dead and scrap the limit preventing people under 15 from being organ donors, the second bill calls for creating a government panel to come up with a more detailed explication of brain death in kids within a year.

The third bill is aimed at maintaining the current law, which recognizes brain death only in cases involving people who have declared their intention to donate organs.

The age 15 limit would also be kept.

Lawmakers feel generally pressed to revise the 1997 law because only 81 cases of organ transplants have been carried out in Japan under its provisions. As a result, people have been traveling abroad for transplants, something that World Health Organization guidelines would stop. ...

...In a plenary session Friday, Health, Welfare and Labor Committee Chairman Yasuhiro Tsuji reported committee deliberations by way of a preface to the plenary session vote.
Among promoters of the three bills, Midori Ishii of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party called for support for the first bill to "cement the relay of life as soon as possible."

DPJ member Yoriko Madoka argued the second bill is the most acceptable as it is designed to look into problems by setting a deadline, while Yataro Tsuda of the DPJ said in support of the third bill that the term of the current law is "a wisdom derived amid divisions in public opinions." ...read more

Completely unrelated but here is the video for today's NHK Taiga Drama "Tenjin" episode: http://www.nhk.or.jp/toppage/recommend_movie/index.html?mid=200907121400