Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2012 May 30 - June 5 TOP3 [WELFARE]

Osaka mayor to abolish city symphonic orchestra

Akahata Sunday edition

Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto Toru will dismantle the Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band in April next year and dismiss all the musicians, who are also city government workers.

The lead conductor said, “Our activities have been based on the Osaka municipal ordinance. Despite this, the mayor is forcing us to accept his abrupt decision to dismiss the band just in 1 year.”

The band has a 90 year history and is well known to Osaka citizens. The band attracts more than 1,000 students and teachers to its annual Wind Orchestra Festa.

Since his election campaign last year, Hashimoto has called for “the opening of field-work services to the private sector” and for “cuts in the number of city workers by about 12,000 (more than 30% of the total).” He is now on the way to privatize the Osaka municipal subway, sewerage, and garbage disposal sections.

Local music lovers fear that the mayor wants to use the dismantling of the band as a precedent for mass layoffs of municipal workers associated with the privatization of many other services.

The band comprises 38 members. They are all Osaka municipal employees, playing concerts for Osaka citizens and teaching music to students in brass bands of city-owned junior high schools and high schools. This year, 63 schools are on their workshop schedule.

The 42-year-old mayor said, “Because they will have no other municipal section to work, it is as a matter of course to dismiss them. That is the way things are.” He refuses to relocate the bandsmen to other departments of the city government.

Tadokoro Kenji of the Osaka Municipal Workers’ Union said, “While scrapping the department, he disallows personnel transfers and dismisses the workers. Such a high-handed approach is against the law.”