The is an administrative agency of the
Cabinet Office
The Cabinet Office is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for supporting the prime minister and Cabinet. It is composed of various units that support Cabinet committees and which co-ordinate the delivery of government objecti ...
of Japan responsible for consumer protection established on September 1, 2009.
Under the law passed on December 10, 2022,
the Consumer Affairs Agency now also has jurisdiction over the issue of donations between religious juridical persons and their followers. Until then, the
Agency for Cultural Affairs
The is a special body of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). It was set up in 1968 to promote Japanese arts and culture.
The agency's budget for FY 2018 rose to ¥107.7 billion.
Overview
The ag ...
had jurisdiction over all administration related to religious juridical persons. This legislation was intended to address the
Unification Church
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church, is a new religious movement, whose members are called Unificationists, or "Moonies". It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spi ...
's "
Spiritual sales
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick, based on a claim of secret or occult information. The basic feature of the scam involves diagnosing the victim (the "mark") with some sort of secret p ...
", which has become a serious problem in Japanese society.
Background
Individual ministries had their own relevant departments, but after a number of scandals involving food poisoning and various types of accidents caused by substandard products manufactured in or imported to Japan, it was decided that an independent body was needed to protect the interests of consumers. Consumers often did not know where to report problems, and if they did, complaints were often passed around from place to place inside the bureaucracies. In addition, past administrative policies tended to focus more on the needs and interests of producers and industry, rather than consumers.
The original plans for the agency were made in January 2008 under the administration of
Liberal Democratic Party Prime Minister
Yasuo Fukuda
is a former Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 2007 to 2008. He was previously the longest-serving Chief Cabinet Secretary in Japanese history, serving in that role from 2000 to 2004 under Prime Ministers Yoshirō M ...
, after a high-profile food poisoning case of Chinese dumplings. The bill to create the agency cleared the lower house of the Japanese diet unanimously on April 16, 2009 under the administration of
Tarō Asō
is a Japanese politician serving as the Vice President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 2021. Asō previously served as Prime Minister of Japan from 2008 to 2009 and as Deputy Prime Minister of Japan and Minister of Finance from 2 ...
and with the cooperation of the then-opposition
Democratic Party of Japan
The was a centristThe Democratic Party of Japan was widely described as centrist:
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* to centre-left liberal or social-liberal political party in Japan from 1998 to 2016.
The party's origins lie in the previous Democratic Part ...
.
It was originally planned to open in October 2009 or later, but leading up to the
2009 election Prime Minister Aso brought forward the opening to September 1, 2009, two days after the election. As a consequence, the agency was not well-prepared and faced many initial challenges. Shunichi Uchida, a former vice-minister of the Cabinet Office, was appointed the first head of the agency.
[The Japan Time]
Consumer Affairs boss underscores new, yet tenuous, role September 9 2009
Retrieved on August 14, 2012
References
External links
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Cabinet Office (Japan)
Government ministries of Japan
Government agencies of Japan
Consumer rights agencies
{{Japan-gov-stub