Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has instructed government officials to consider giving Japanese wheelchair tennis legend Shingo Kunieda the People’s Honor Award, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Friday 3rd February. Kunieda would be the first para-athlete to receive the award since its establishment in 1977.
The draft report compiled by the city’s human rights policy council will include two proposals on penalties on hate speech: one that imposes an administrative fine for malicious acts, and the other in which a criminal penalty or an administrative fine will be imposed for such acts. The council will later meet again to go over the details and propose the final report to the Sagamihara Municipal Government.
An estimated 20,000 people between 40 and 64 in Yokohama, who have no illness or disability, have mostly stopped going out for at least six months, according to a survey by the city government.
In the survey, nearly 40% of those residents who are in a state of “hikikomori,” or social reclusion, said their condition began when they started avoiding leaving home amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Lawmaker Yasuhiko Funago, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, on Friday 27th January 2023, became the first in Japan to ask questions using a text-to-speech function of a computer in a parliamentary plenary meeting.
When Japanese news outlets reported the problems with software like Microsoft Teams, they used the term “障害”, and since the same term is often used to refer to a news story about disability issues, it was difficult to find news about people with disabilities in Japan, as any Google search with the term “障害”only returned results to do with the Microsoft 365 outage.
The rate of employment of people with disabilities, which companies are obliged to increase the employment of people with disabilities, reached the highest level in the prefecture last year, but nearly 30% of companies do not employ even one person, NHK found out in a summary by the Fukushima labor bureau.
Kumamoto District Court, presided over by Judge Yuichiro Nakatsuji, found that the law was unconstitutional, and denied the application to the case of the 20-year statute of limitations on compensation claims.
The 38-year-old Kunieda, a winner of 28 Grand Slam titles and three Paralympic gold medals in the men’s singles, retired while at the top of the world rankings.
He won his third Paralympic gold in Tokyo in 2021 and completed his career Grand Slam by winning Wimbledon last year. He also won 22 Grand Slam doubles titles.
When preparing for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Japan Railways (JR), based on guidance from Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport required that when at JR stations, mobility scooters:
“move at a speed no more than 2km/h and follow the instructions and warnings of the train attendant, and do not use routes other than the ones specified.”
A Japanese labor ministry panel will propose to boost the legally required employment rate for disabled people at companies to 2.7 pct from 2.3 pct at present, it was learned Wednesday 18th January.
The panel plans to propose keeping the required employment rate unchanged at 2.3 pct in fiscal 2023 starting in April and raising the rate in stages to 2.5 pct in fiscal 2024 and 2.7 pct in fiscal 2026.
Barrier Free Japan