Stephen Mansfield from Nikkei:
Perhaps it is a law of spatial gravity that when you cannot go out, you go up. What has long held true for urban architecture is now being applied to gardens, with Japanese landscape designers increasingly eager to requisition rooftops and walls to create gardens at higher elevations.
Sometimes it feels as though contemporary Japanese gardens can be read as message boards pointing to the near future. Substituting for hills and mountains, high-rise buildings are being requisitioned as borrowed scenery, while rooftop garden designers, conscious of weight issues, are resorting to hollowing out natural rocks, or replacing them with fiberglass equivalents.
This essay is full of beautiful examples of how to incorporate nature into our dense urban world by using wasted space to create beauty. Definitely worth the read.
Satoshi Tezuka from Nikkei:
The Japanese government is ramping up efforts to combat foreign election interference after the spread of misinformation by bots on social media became a problem in the recent upper house vote.
"Foreign interference in elections is commonplace around the world, and other countries are responding in various ways," said Masaaki Taira, minister for digital transformation, at a press conference on Tuesday. "Japan is not immune to this issue."
One thing I never really realized is that Japan lacks a CIA-like organization in the central government to collect and centrally distribute intelligence. The new National Cybersecurity Office will take on this work but relying on such a new office to take a lead on a new initiative might not lead to quick fixes to this.
Ryuko Tadokoro from The Mainichi:
The page displaying the passport holder's photo now uses plastic instead of laminated paper, and incorporates technologies such as holographic cherry blossoms and watermark cranes. Special processing has also been applied to raise the photo and date of birth above the surface.
Passports are one of my special interests and I always find it interesting on how they are produced. As the article mentions, previously they were made locally but no longer.