Cyberspacecreated a sphere where anyone can express his or her opinion about any theme. Onlinenewspaper articles in Japanese and in Korean created a distinctive local mediacoverage shaping the general public’s perception of Japan-Korea relationship. Thisresearch focused on how events or themes in online newspaper articles inJapanese and in Korean are differently interpreted. In this study, Japan-Koreaindicates Japan and the Republic of Korea or South Korea. The primary data usedfor this research are online newspaper articles limited to 300 articles publishedin 2014 and 300 individual blogs via search engines using Korea-Japan as a keyword in Japanese and in Korean. The notion of alterity or “the Other” isadopted as a part of the critical theoretical departure. For the data selection, the year 2014 wasparticularly chosen because it was years after two historical landmark legalcases were brought by the district courts in Korea against the Japanese firms.Two cases that reversed the prior rulings are the former Mitsubishi HeavyIndustries and Nippon Steel. The Mitsubishi case had lasted for 16 years since thebeginning of the initial suit. The rulings were significant since Supreme Courtin Republic of Korea based their decisions on the illegality of Japan’s Protectoratetreaty against Korea in 1905 and invalidity of statute of limitations on tortdamages. Although the Korean media covered these two rulings extensively, onlyfew articles appeared in the Japanese newspapers. The rulings can be an examplefor both Korea and Japan to be able to step into the shoes of "the Other."
The Shift in Burden of Proof in Transfer Pricing Litigations This text is a part of the outcome of research performed under a Waseda Univeristy Grant for Special Research Project 2015K-297. The outcome of the research has been partly presented at International Conference on Innovation in and Management in January 2016.This article focused on analysis of transfer pricing litigations in Japan in relation to the criteria of the burden of proof in arm’s length pricing methods. Transfer pricing cases are used as primary data and the study analyzed the process of how hypothetical or secret comparables affect the final court decisions. Transferpricing cannot be “an exact science” within the Japanese litigation system becauseburden of proof is primarily on the tax authority. Since the burden of productionis based on the judge’s psychological conviction, the taxpayer’s comparablesfor the arm’s length price can be rejected. This article attempted to prove that an arm’s length price in transferpricing encompasses a mechanism that involves estimation or hypotheticalcomparables.