Interesting week in Japan. Livedoor’s Takafumi Horie has been sentenced to 2.5 years for securities law violations:

Horie, the 34-year-old founder of Internet services company Livedoor Co., pleaded innocent to the charges of window-dressing and stock market manipulation.

He argued that he was simply the victim of a witch hunt by prosecutors who had concocted a story to punish the young businessman who shook up the Japanese business world with his aggressive tactics.

But the court sided with the arguments of the prosecutors.

“He illegally boosted his company’s share price by announcing fake business performances,” Judge Kosaka said. The crimes “could not possibly have been conducted without (Horie’s) instructions and approval.”

From what I can tell, neither side is entirely in the right. Horie is right that the business-bureaucratic machine left over from the Japan Inc. era hates him for succeeding without playing their game. There is no doubt in my mind that the prosecution and other government agencies involved investigated every potential charge with grim, intense relish. But this isn’t the Japanese version of the Martha Stewart case; Horie was pretty clearly involved in real violations, though the court disagreed with the prosecution’s contention that he’d masterminded the whole shell game.

Turning to coverups of a more frequent kind, we see that yet another nuclear power plant operator failed to report an accident:

Hokuriku Electric Power Co., known as Hokurikuden, failed to report a criticality accident in 1999 at its nuclear power plant in Shikamachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, in which there was an uncontrollable chain reaction for 15 minutes, the government and the power company said Thursday.

On June 18, 1999, three of the 89 control rods inserted from underneath into the reactor core suddenly slipped out during a regular checkup at Shika Nuclear Power Station, causing the reactor to reactivate.

The reactor was not automatically stopped and the chain reaction lasted for 15 minutes. But the company did not sufficiently inspect the cause, and failed to keep records of the accident or report it to the government.

…

Nobody was exposed to radiation, however, because there were no workers near the reactor in the building at the time of the accident.

One of the operating errors stemmed from an erroneous description in the procedure manual for operating the water pressure control valve.

That’s just what we want in operations manuals for nuclear facilities, huh? Erroneous descriptions of equipment! There seems to have been no major threat to human life here; the point is that we hear about these little mishaps based on slack procedure or faulty maintenance at power plants every few months. And it’s not as if it were always the same power company. The problems seem more systemic than that.

The Chinese premier is set to visit Japan in April. Head-of-state visits were suspended a few years ago, mostly over the Yasukuni Shrine pilgrimages and history textbooks:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will visit Japan for three days from April 11, government sources said Thursday.

Wen will meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the first day of his trip and then plans to visit Kyoto.

This will be the first visit by a Chinese leader in about seven years–the last such visit was made by former Premier Zhu Ronji in October 2000.

China initially proposed a weeklong visit for Wen from April 9-15, but this was cut short because he decided to visit South Korea before coming to Japan. As a result, Wen’s planned appearance on Japanese television for direct interaction with the public will be canceled. Even so, Wen still plans to make a speech in the Diet–the first Chinese premier ever to do so.

Presumably, Wen and Abe will discuss the DPRK, those disputed gas and petroleum fields in the East China Sea, and trade policy. Neither side likes the other’s nationalists.