Nipponica

The agency is recommending replacing the government’s long-standing Kunrei system with more widely used Hepburn-style spellings. The changes are expected to be approved within the current fiscal year and gradually rolled out in textbooks and other materials.

Under the Kunrei system, codified by Cabinet notification in 1954, phonemes for ち and ふ are written as ti and hu. Most Japanese schools still teach the style in romanization studies.

But the Hepburn system, which renders them as chi and fu, has become dominant both in Japan and abroad, making the impact of the change likely most evident in educational materials such as school textbooks.

The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu. It specifies that double consonants, as in てっぱん, should be written by repeating the consonant, while long vowels such as in かあさん can be indicated with either a macron (kāsan) or doubled letters (kaasan).

It is about a century too late but in Japanese time scales, pretty speedy. On a conceptual level I understand why Kunrei did what it did, but practically it only led to confusion for non-Japanese readers. Hepburn über alles.

A male assistant professor at Hokkaido University assaulted and injured multiple students while intoxicated at a social gathering, sources involved with the university have told the Mainichi Shimbun.

Following the incident, the students called on the university administration to conduct an investigation and take disciplinary action against the assistant professor, a member of the chemistry department of the university's Faculty of Science, questioning the department's reluctance to make the issue public. It took over a month following the incident for the department to distribute a document to students regarding "measures to prevent a recurrence."

Totally outrageous and this faculty should be terminated and prosecuted. Let’s keep the school violence sequestered on the other side of the Pacific and not let it seep into this country.

Among the teachers surveyed, 3,522, or 65.6% of the total, said that they take almost no breaks in the course of a day. The percentage shoots up to 85% when teachers who break for less than 15 minutes are included. The survey results show that a mere 1.5% of the teachers are taking breaks amounting to at least 45 minutes, as stipulated under Japan’s Labor Standards Act.

Many of the survey respondents said that they are not able to go to the bathroom at school because of the lack of breaks, and as a result some teachers have suffered recurrent bladder inflammation.

And I wonder why they are having just a hard time hiring new teachers.

The Japanese government plans to promote the use of generative artificial intelligence and other digital technologies to support the teaching of the Japanese language to children with foreign roots, sources close to the matter said Thursday.

Guidelines are expected to be drawn up to utilize generative AI for effective teaching methods for other subjects in addition to Japanese, amid a shortage of staff who can accommodate the native tongues of varying languages such as Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish.

This is bad. Everyone has been shitting on Duolingo for years for its gamification but it was a decent language learning app. But the quality plummeted when they went AI-first recently. Expand that enshittification to an entire cohort in Japanese schools and the results are catastrophic. I understand the issue with staffing shortages but this isn't the way.

Tatsuhiko Hoshino, an international relations officer at the nonprofit Japan Association of Overseas Studies (JAOS), said the depreciation of the yen had a significant impact on Japanese students looking to study abroad.

“There has been a notable shift away from traditionally expensive destinations,” Hoshino said, noting that students who still had their hearts set on Europe were looking to more affordable countries such as Germany, Hungary or Malta.

“This trend is unlikely to change, and I believe we will see even more Japanese students opting to study in Asia or EU countries going forward,” Hoshino said.

If I was a Japanese student looking at prices of an American undergrad education, I would do the same thing. It is simply unsustainable in this economy to expect students to go into lifetime debt for an educational gamble.

J-RISE is a major pillar of the government’s broader University for International Research Excellence initiative, which supports top Japanese universities through the national ¥10 trillion University Fund. The fund, managed by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, aims to elevate the global standing of Japanese institutions by supporting world-class research environments.

This level of investment signals a clear policy shift: Japan wants to become a global scientific hub. Sadly, this important strategic pivot is taking place against a backdrop of rising nationalist sentiment and economic frustration, neither of which bode well for attracting world-class researchers.

You want scientists to come to the country but you slash the money in to train them in PhD programs while starting a generic fund to push SCIENCE. Sounds like a typical day in Nagata-cho.

Ito Mayor Maki Takubo has reversed her decision to resign amid allegations she falsified her academic credentials, and will instead remain in office, she announced at a July 31 press conference here.

The 55-year-old Takubo, who had previously indicated she would step down in July and seek re-election, said she would instead focus on fulfilling her campaign pledges, including canceling a planned library construction project and scrapping a large-scale solar power initiative. "I will devote my full energy to delivering on my promises," she stated.

She clearly doesn't value education in her own life so why not extent that to her community as well.

The aid program, known as the "SPRING" (Support for Pioneering Research Initiated by the Next Generation) initiative, was launched in academic 2021 by the ministry's Japan Science and Technology Agency. It pays doctoral candidates up to 2.9 million yen (about $19,200) annually for living and research expenses. In the 2024 academic year, of the total 10,564 recipients, about 40%, or 4,125 individuals, were international students, with Chinese nationals making up the largest number -- 3,151. This led to criticism from ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers and others in the Diet.

Another blow to foreign residents. Some might slam this subsidy as wasteful spending but how else do you entice students to come to Japan when there are better and more lucrative options elsewhere. 2.9 million isn't much but it is enough to live a simple life as a student. I would think that this long term investment in education would pay off but perhaps the short term political gain was too shiny to pass up.

Principal Miki Okada remarked, "In recent years, even Sapporo has experienced dangerous heat levels. Last year, there were days when the temperature inside the school building exceeded 30 C. Air conditioning is essential not only for creating a conducive learning environment but also for protecting students' lives."

Following the record high temperature of 36.3 C in Sapporo in the summer of 2023, the city began installing air conditioning in all municipal schools and kindergartens (312 facilities, approximately 6,000 rooms) starting in fiscal 2024. This summer, 39 schools (roughly 580 rooms), accounting for 12.5% of the total, had permanent air conditioners with outdoor units for the first time. The education board is expected to have 67.3% coverage by the summer of 2026, with all schools equipped by the summer of 2027.

As a Hokkaido-jin, this is a sad but necessary reality. This year’s summer was horrendous and most infrastructure was never built to need AC. I have never felt so lucky to have AC in my building than I was this year.

A send-off event was held at the Japanese Embassy in New Delhi on Friday for 11 assistant language teachers and three international exchange coordinators who will be dispatched from India to Japan.

This marks the first regular dispatch of assistant language teachers from India under the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, a government initiative to promote international exchanges at the regional level. Only a few such personnel from India have participated in the program until now.

This is fantastic news and will diversify the JET program beyond English speakers from the Anglo world. I still have reservations of JET as a language education program as English levels of Japanese youth fail to rise. But as a cultural exchange program, it is world class.