Nipponica

As regular transportation to the island had been cut off due to the quake, collapsed buildings and debris remain almost untouched, and residents are waiting for full-scale restoration. The about 50 people who sailed there Wednesday included evacuated residents and local government officials. After they arrived at the island, the residents began the hard work of cleaning up their homes.

This quake was so damaging to the region and it is surprising that it is taking so long to recover from it, especially after the massive quake yesterday causing little damage.

The ¥2,000 banknotes never gained popularity, despite the promotional efforts of the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan, because most ATMs and vending machines did not issue or accept them. Circulation peaked at around 510 million notes in August 2004, and then declined rapidly thereafter. Since that fiscal year, no new notes have been printed, and the number in circulation has remained just below 100 million, which is only 0.6% of all banknotes in circulation. The notes have become so rare that many people have never encountered one or wonder if they can still be used to make purchases.

However, in Okinawa the situation is quite different. The note has special significance for residents of the prefecture because it features an illustration of the Shureimon gate of Shuri Castle, which is the symbol of Okinawa. ATMs for Okinawa Bank and the Bank of the Ryūkyūs have a “¥2,000 priority button” that allows users to choose to withdraw these notes to use for their daily purchases.

I distinctly remember using an ATM in Okinawa for the first time and the 2000円 notes being spit out. Was my first time seeing them and I briefly thought I was being scammed. They are beautiful banknotes and the only remaining ones with the previous design language since they were not changed with its 1000円, 5000円, and 10000円 comrades.

U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs will create regional trading blocs and realign global supply chains, the CEO of Japanese trading house Marubeni has warned.

"There is a perception that things are getting back to normal" now that some countries have tariff agreements with the U.S., but "the protectionist tendencies will alter the movements of goods and alter supply chains in the mid to long term," Masayuki Omoto, the CEO of one of Japan's five main general trading houses, told Nikkei Asia.

"I believe economies will become more regionally focused -- or bloc-based," he said.

Globalization being buried, one tariff at a time.

Hiroyuki Goto ventured into what appeared to be a high-risk business nearly two decades ago when, at the age of 28, he started providing rent guarantees for foreign nationals living in Japan.

Goto's experience suggested that the actual risk of backing a foreign resident might not be unusually high, and he thought that renting a place should not be an obstacle for people coming to Japan. More broadly, he felt it was inevitable that the country would have to accept more foreign workers due to depopulation.

So, he started GTN.

This is one of many areas that make starting a life in Japan so difficult. GTN was the only company that would allow me to open a credit card when I first came here to work and that allowed me to build up my personal infrastructure. This guy is a saint.

A man sustained injuries after falling through the floor of a bathroom at a train station in western Japan, the railway operator said Thursday.

According to JR Shikoku, a panel in the floor covering a maintenance space gave way under the man trapping him in a 65-centimeter-deep hole.

The incident occurred at around 8:45 a.m. at Ritsurin Station on the Kotoku Line in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture.

My literal worst nightmare.

A military factory that was said to be the largest in the Orient was once in operation at a site now part of Osaka Castle Park at the center of the city of Osaka, and a researcher is calling for the remaining buildings to be preserved as a "negative legacy."

Osaka Army Arsenal, which manufactured artillery for the now-defunct Imperial Japanese Army, employed up to around 66,000 people, including mobilized students, across its approximately 6-million-square-meter site.

It is very easy to be critical of Japan when talking about smoothing over one's own history. Hopefully, those in charge do preserve a monument to the senseless destruction of humanity as an example to the future about the values of today.

A 2023 estimate from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research projected that Japan's foreign population would exceed 10% in the 2070s.

Speaking at a news conference at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo, Suzuki said that the number of foreign residents would top 10 million and exceed 10% in 2045 if the number of foreigners continues to increase by over 350,000 per year, the pace recorded last year. Taking into account Japan's population decline, the 10% mark could be reached in 2040, he added.

Putting all the 'Japanese First' rhetoric from recent weeks to one side, my question is why the Justice Minister was making this statement rather than the Health Minister, the one in charge of the research institution that made this estimate. Later in the article it quotes him as saying "[Japan] needs to start preparing now" which is doubly ominous.

Tsunami advisories lifted for all areas of Japan

We did get lucky.

While the national government has viewed foreigners as "workers," local governments tend to see them as residents and community members just like Japanese citizens. The association is calling for the establishment of a central organization to oversee multicultural policies, among other measures.

The association calls for establishing a new central organization separate from the Immigration Services Agency, which oversees immigration administration, and for drafting a systematic and comprehensive basic law to underpin national and local multicultural policies. It also highlights the need for the national government to provide financial support for local multicultural coexistence measures and actively spread information on systems that foreign residents need to know.

Very bold proposals especially compared to the usual milquetoast faire from politicians at the national level. It does make sense to have a unified approach to multicultural policies instead of it depending on where you live. The only downside here is that the progressive stance that many cities take, like with LGBT residents, might be reverted if the central government has the reigns.

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.