Nipponica

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.

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.

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.