Nipponica

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.