Toru Kurita from The Mainichi:
As the number of children with foreign citizenship in Japan grows rapidly, a tool enabling teaching staff to display their translated speech in real time has been introduced for the first time in the country by this city's education board.
This is great news to inclusivity for foreign students not versed in Japanese. The article states that the numbers of foreign students without language skills is over 600 in Kobe so this is a total game changer for their education in an already restrictive system.
Alice French from Nikkei:
Japan's parliament passed amendments to its political funds control law on Wednesday, cracking down on lawmakers who fail to appropriately report political income.
The amendments are part of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's efforts to restore faith in his ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which is facing record-low approval ratings and local election losses amid an enduring political kickback scandal.
This is a good explainer to the new law as well as the bottomless pit of disapproval that Kishida and his government are currently in.
Yusuke Kato from The Mainichi:
Students at a junior high school here are now able to set their own class rules apart from school rules in an initiative intended to address issues in school life. However, while the system reflects some students' input, others find it confusing, and parents are questioning the entire project, the Mainichi Shimbun has discovered.
This entire story is worth a read simply to see how feckless the school was from preventing students from abusing each other with the regime they created. A personal favorite to demonstrate the monster that was created:
Meanwhile, there are also rules that the school is unaware of, such as, "Gym short drawstrings must be the same color as when purchased." The male student said, "There was an uproar in the class when someone changed their drawstring color." His mother wondered whether the students had adopted the mindset of binding people with rules.
Avi Landau from Tsukublog:
In Japanese summers, the most common type of web, ones that are found ALL AROUND US, are in fact, horizontal “shelf” or “funnel” type webs. Though they are usually much more densely woven than the iconic “suspended” spider-creations, they often go unnoticed, lost in the greenery of the shrubbery in which they are set – and hard to see because of their horizontal “flatness”. But in the morning, when the dew has set in, after a rare summer-rain, or when the sunshine hits them just right, you can see that these webs cover almost every inch of the hedges and shrubbery (where left alone and untrimmed) – a veritable mine-field for unsuspecting insects who want to have a rest in the bushes.
From a local blog, a reminder from home. Do not click if spiders aren't your thing.