Nipponica

Foreign nationals in Japan earn less than their Japanese counterparts even after controlling for such factors as education and experience, according to a recent government report covering an area at the center of intense policy debate.

The Cabinet Office's economic white paper for fiscal 2024 includes for the first time a section focusing specifically on Japan's more than 2 million foreign workers, finding that they earn 28% less than Japanese nationals.

This owes in large part to demographic differences, with many Japanese workers being in their 40s to 50s while their foreign counterparts skew younger, often in their 20s, and have less experience. But even after adjusting for age, education, and other characteristics of individual workers or workplaces, the paper still found a 7% gap that cannot otherwise be explained.

Japan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday began its first full-scale U.S. base relocation work on the Oura Bay side of the Henoko coastal area in the city of Nago, Okinawa Prefecture.

The work, which involves the construction of seawalls on the Oura Bay side with soft ground, is part of the project to build a replacement facility for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Futenma air station in the Okinawa city of Ginowan. The ministry plans to fill in the area surrounded by the seawalls with soil.

The museum in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, is located inside a renovated old factory built in 1969, where the gaming giant began life making Western-style and Japanese playing cards and later repaired consoles.

The company on Tuesday also released a video of Shigeru Miyamoto, the renowned creator of Super Mario Bros and other famous games, giving a sneak preview of what's inside.

"The Nintendo Museum is a place where visitors can learn about Nintendo's commitment to manufacturing that places importance on play and originality," Miyamoto said in the clip.

Booking flight now.

Japanese convenience store operator Lawson Inc. has started requesting staff to wear a badge if they can speak a foreign language, aiming to cater to an increase in overseas visitors, the company said Tuesday.

The badge covers seven languages -- English, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Nepali. Lawson said it chose them as the most commonly spoken by foreign tourists and based on the nationalities of Lawson staffers. Wearing a badge will be voluntary.

This is a great idea to help assist those not comfortable in Japanese and to reward employees of Lawson to invest in language studies. I've seen these kind of language badges elsewhere and they do help foster inclusiveness in multicultural settings.

In Japan, which is made up of just 2.66% foreign nationals, there is no such named conceit for the Japanese people or for the foreign population.

Still, just because there’s no recognizable “Japanese dream” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And as is increasingly apparent, the country needs a considerable increase in skills and talent from abroad to address its depopulation problem.

This is a great essay about the stories of some recent immigrants to Japan and how they chose coming here best choice for their future. The Japanese Dream is real but can be difficult to achieve unless you really work hard to integrate, compromise, and understand that it is a give-and-take process. Japan needs a part of you before it will take you in.

A Mexican man was found to have landed on one of the Senkaku Islands in Ishigaki, Okinawa Prefecture, on Friday, after apparently drifting in a canoe, the Japan Coast Guard said.

The man was picked up by a helicopter and taken to a hospital in the prefecture. He was quoted as saying that he had been drifted after leaving Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island, by canoe.

A new challenger enters the ring...

The photos, found among previously unarranged materials, capture scenes such as the bustling black market in front of Hiroshima Station, streetcars in the process of being restored and houses that began to appear among the ruins of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing. These images document the period when people were beginning to take steps toward the city's reconstruction and recovery after its complete destruction.

The pictures include three shots taken in September 1945 and seven taken in February 1946. With cooperation from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and experts, the locations of all but two of the September 1945 shots were identified. There were no records of the names of the reporters who took the pictures.

The National Diet Library Law requires publishers and others to deposit publications to the library when they are released. When the law was revised in 2000, commercially available video games were included in the deposit system.

The library in June 2022 started a program to allow visitors to play some of the games, about 3,300 title, in its collection on a trial basis. However, due partly to a lack of advertisement, there have been only 16 instances of a video game being played in the about two years until Jul7 27. The program limits the use of video games to research and study, and the library checks how the user plans to publicize the results of the play session.

After reading the headline, I reflexively started to buy a ticket to Tokyo to take up the Diet Library's offer of an afternoon of GTA: Vice City. However, my hopes were dashed when the use for the archive was research. Shame.

Japanese government workers will survey an uninhabited southwest Alaskan island from Monday to pave the way for the first recovery in over 70 years of remains of World War II soldiers who died fighting U.S. forces there.

Some 2,600 Japanese soldiers died on Attu Island in May 1943, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in a doomed attempt to hold the northern Pacific island, captured in June 1942, from over 10,000 U.S. personnel.

Remains of around 320 soldiers were recovered in 1953, but later inspections in 2007 and 2008 did not culminate in the collection of any remains.

The Tokyo metropolitan government has launched an artificial intelligence system that uses high-altitude cameras to detect fires and building collapses in real-time to accelerate its initial disaster response during major earthquakes.

The AI-driven system analyzes footage from high-resolution cameras, with two installed at the Tokyo metropolitan government building and one each at a bridge near Tokyo Bay and a location in the western part of the metropolitan area, the local authorities and system developer Hitachi Ltd. said.

When Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced he would not run in the Liberal Democratic Party’s presidential election slated for September, he insisted that the ruling party must demonstrate change.

“In this election, we must clearly show the public a new LDP, an LDP that will change,” Kishida said at a press conference Wednesday.

A Yomiuri Shimbun national opinion poll conducted in July revealed that support for the Kishida Cabinet was stuck in the 20% range for the ninth consecutive month, as the impact of a hidden funds scandal that embroiled several party factions continued to reverberate.

A powerful typhoon continued its advance toward Tokyo and other eastern areas of Japan on Friday, with the weather agency urging people to prepare for strong winds and heavy rainfall, and transport operators canceling many train services and flights.

The Japan Meteorological Agency warned of violent winds, mudslides, high waves and flooding, as heavy rain will sharply increase the risk of disaster.

U.S Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel "has not decided on his departure date," the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo said Sunday, after a media report said he was considering leaving his post in November.

Bye bye.

This December, in line with integrating Japan's health insurance cards with the "My Number" IC-chipped ID cards, existing ones will in principle be discontinued. A July 20-21 Mainichi Shimbun poll revealed that despite hopes for improved convenience and other benefits as part of the government's push toward a digital society, fears remain strong over data protection and other matters, and opposition to the government's handling proved more conspicuous than criticism of the new system itself.

Communication from government is key. But also actions (and in this case inaction) are important. The several My Number-related controversies over the past few years have severely impacted the public's perception of an already unpopular system. The Digital Agency needs better PR (and better quality assurance) to make the future of this system less bleak.

Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio has decided that he will not run in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's presidential election next month.

Breaking on NHK.

The annual number of telegrams the NTT group handles peaked at about 95 million in the 1960s, when the group was still Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public, and plummeted 96% in about 60 years to about 3.8 million amid the spread of more accessible online communication methods such as email and messaging apps.

The most common reason for using telegrams was emergency communication during the peak period, accounting for 86%, but congratulatory and condolence messages have accounted for over 90% in recent years.

News to me.

Tsunamis of up to one metre were initially expected to arrive or had arrived in some coastal areas in Kyushu and Shikoku islands, the JMA said.

The agency also said a small tsunami was possible in Chiba, about 850km from the epicentre.

“Tsunamis will strike repeatedly. Please do not enter the sea or approach the coast until the warning is lifted,” the agency said on social media platform X.

However, tsunamis of only 50cm, 20cm, and 10cm were confirmed to have hit some places, including the port of Miyazaki, more than an hour after the quake, it said.

Rahm Emanuel would not attend the event on Friday because it had been “politicised” by Nagasaki’s decision not to invite Israel, the embassy said. Instead, he would honour the victims of the Nagasaki bombing at a ceremony at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo and a lower-ranked US official would attend the Nagasaki event, it said.

The mayor of Nagasaki, Shiro Suzuki, said his decision not to invite Israel was unchanged despite announcements by the US, five other G7 countries and the EU that they would send lower-ranked envoys instead of ambassadors to the ceremony.

“We only want to hold the ceremony in a peaceful and solemn atmosphere” to honour the victims, Suzuki said on Thursday. “It is absolutely not because of political reasons.

This is a bad call for the US and its undeserving ambassador to Japan. The US destroyed Nagasaki and should always be there to acknowledge its past.

Summer, the season of mountain climbing, is here in Japan, but is that peak you plan to hike an active volcano? There are 111 such peaks across the country, quite a few of which are popular with hikers, and it wouldn't hurt to prepare by thinking about how to improve your chances of survival in the event of an eruption.

ANA was commissioned to conduct part of the training that deals with preparing astronauts mentally for their space missions, looking into their skills such as leadership, teamwork and decision-making.

The training started in April last year and is expected to last through October this year. It helps candidates acquire the necessary knowledge and skills required of astronauts.

It is the first time a private company has taken part in the agency's training for an extensive period of time and JAXA said it is ramping up collaboration with private companies to sustainably offer training for future astronauts.