The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:53 JST,  September 1, 2026

Mid-air pumpkins are ready for harvest in a greenhouse in Naganuma, Hokkaido, before they are shipped to markets in Tokyo.

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:15 JST, August 25, 2026

Lawson, Inc. announced Monday that it will lower the prices of 20 items in its line of signature Temaki Onigiri (hand-wrapped rice balls) by ¥10 to ¥11, starting Sept. 29. This will also include region-exclusive products.

The prices will be reduced due to a decline in the cost of domestically produced rice. There will be no change to any product specifications, such as the quantity or quality of the fillings, the company said.

The price of its tuna mayo rice ball will drop from ¥181 to ¥171, while the price of its grilled salmon rice ball will drop from ¥221 to ¥211.

Seven-Eleven Japan Co. said it will also lower the prices of two kinds of hand-wrapped rice balls — salmon and spicy pollock roe flavors — by about ¥19, starting Sept. 8. The company attributes the reduction to lower raw material procurement costs.

Read more at The Yomiuri Shimbun

At 11:01 on the morning of 15 August, Takaichi Sanae laid flowers at Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, where the state keeps the remains of unidentified war dead. Her official car reached the car park of the Nippon Budōkan at 11:09. She stayed inside it for nine minutes. At 11:18 she got out, faced Yasukuni Shrine about six hundred meters away, and made two bows, two claps, and one bow. Her aides told reporters this was yōhai, worship from a distance. She did not walk the six hundred meters.

She had sent something ahead. A tamagushi-ryō had reached the shrine that morning, the monetary offering that accompanies a sacred branch at a Shinto rite. She paid it from her own pocket. Suzuki Shun’ichi, the Liberal Democratic Party’s secretary-general, carried it in, and she made it as president of the party rather than as prime minister. Each element had an answer prepared for it before anyone asked: the money was hers, the acting office was the party presidency, and she had faced the shrine without entering it.

Four cabinet ministers, eighty-nine Diet members, the LDP’s four senior officers, and the shrine’s own administrators spent the fifteenth and sixteenth making distinctions of the same kind. The wire copy reproduced the distinctions.

The Offering

Article 89 of the constitution forbids spending public money, or providing public property, for the use, benefit, or maintenance of religious organizations. That is what the private funds answer to. The government wrote the rest of the test itself and did so early. Miki Takeo set four conditions for a private visit in 1975: no official car, the offering from private funds, no title in the register, no officials in attendance. A unified government position of 17 October 1978 generalized the criteria. A visit to a shrine is a private act unless the government has decided upon it as a function of government, or has paid for the offering with public money. Abe Shinzō confirmed in a written Diet answer in 2015 that the 1978 position was still the operative standard. Takaichi’s three specifications satisfy a test nearly fifty years old.

Nakasone Yasuhiro took the other route. He declared his 15 August 1985 visit official, rode in an official car, and signed the register as “Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro.” He paid for flowers from public funds as a kyōka-ryō, a flower payment, rather than a tamagushi-ryō. The 1978 rule required that, for him, public money and the branch offering could not be combined. Three damages suits followed, in Osaka, Fukuoka, and Himeji. The Fukuoka High Court held in February 1992 that continuing official visits were unconstitutional, and the Osaka High Court held in July 1992 that the visit was of doubtful constitutionality. Both dismissed the claims.

The courts kept going and kept dismissing. Fukuoka District Court found in April 2004 that Koizumi Jun’ichirō’s visit of August 2001 fell within his official duties and violated Article 20, paragraph 3. The court wrote that it considered ruling on the question its own responsibility. Osaka High Court agreed in September 2005. Neither awarded anything. In June 2006 the Supreme Court’s Second Petty Bench closed the route, holding that a prime minister’s visit injures no legally protected interest, so the constitutional question need not be reached. No plaintiff has ever won a remedy against a prime minister for going.

One case reached the merits, because it came by a different door. The Ehime tamagushi-ryō case was a residents’ suit under the Local Autonomy Act, where plaintiffs did not have to show a personal injury. On 2 April 1997, the Supreme Court’s Grand Bench held that the prefecture’s payment of tamagushi-ryō to Yasukuni from public funds violated Article 20, paragraph 3, and Article 89. Private money and the same offering have never been tested. After 2006, there is no obvious plaintiff who could test them.

Abe Shinzō ran the identical arrangement for seven years. After his single visit in December 2013, he sent a masakaki offering at the spring and autumn festivals, and a privately funded tamagushi-ryō on 15 August, delivered through a party intermediary. Takaichi added the irei no yōhai. Jiji Press put 異例 (irei) in its headline and noted in the text that it was extremely unusual for a sitting prime minister’s remote worship to become known at all. A close aide put the calculation in fractions: Abe had looked at the method too, everything that could be done had been done, and this was a quarter-step forward toward an actual visit.

The offering put her inside the shrine’s rites and left her body outside the gates. The remote worship reversed the pair.

The Four Ministers

Four members of the cabinet went in. Koizumi Shinjirō, the defense minister, arrived at 7:26. Kikawada Hitoshi, minister for Okinawa and Northern Territories, arrived at 7:30. Kiuchi Minoru, minister for economic and fiscal policy, arrived in the late morning. Onoda Kimi, minister for economic security, came with the cross-party group at half past ten. Four ministers walking in together would have constituted a cabinet act. Arriving apart across four hours, they constituted four private acts by people who hold cabinet posts.

Cabinet members have used the same formula ever since. It locates the act in the person and leaves the office aside. A minister who visits privately is understood to set the office down at the torii and pick it up on the way out. The ministers then answered press questions on the shrine’s approach, in their capacity as ministers.

Kyodo attached two counts to the day. Ministerial visits on the anniversary have now run seven consecutive years, and four in a single year is the highest since 2020, under the Abe cabinet. Koizumi is the first serving defense minister to go since Kihara Minoru in 2024. A formula written for exceptions has produced seven consecutive years.

The Count

Eighty-nine Diet members went in as a group. NHK reported the number and the vehicle: a cross-party league called the Association of Diet Members for Everyone to Worship Together at Yasukuni Shrine, chaired by the LDP’s Aisawa Ichirō. The league converts individual visits into a collective one. Jiji rounded to about ninety and named the participating parties without giving figures.

No mainstream outlet published a party breakdown of the eighty-nine. Shinbun Akahata, the Japanese Communist Party’s daily, itemized the group on the sixteenth. Nine from Ishin, three from the Democratic Party for the People, eight from Sanseitō, one from Team Mirai, and two independents or minor-party members, in a body the paper described as centered on the LDP. Subtract those and sixty-six LDP members remain, a figure the paper does not print.

Onoda Kimi sits in two counts at once. NHK’s ministers article lists her among the four cabinet members who visited, and its league article records her within the eighty-nine. Nippon Television describes her attendance as collective worship with the league. Jiji filed a standalone item on her visit alone.

Three of the LDP’s four senior officers went in together: Suzuki, General Council chair Arimura Haruko, and Election Strategy Committee chair Nishimura Yasutoshi. Sankei called the party’s leadership group visit an irei (異例), unusual, and Nippon Television and Mainichi said the same. The party leaders of Sanseitō and Nippon Hoshutō, Kamiya Sōhei and Hyakuta Naoki, also visited.

The fourth officer arrived the next morning. Policy Research Council chair Kobayashi Takayuki had stayed away on the fifteenth to handle flood damage in his Chiba constituency, where the death toll reached ten. He ascended to the main hall at about half past six on the sixteenth, which Asahi noted completed the set of the party’s four senior officers. He paid a tamagushi-ryō from private funds. He said he had come as one of the bereaved; Kyodo reported that his grandfather died in the war, and Sankei that he died of illness on campaign in China. He signed the visitors’ register, as he disclosed, “Member of the House of Representatives Kobayashi Takayuki.”

He had paid from his own purse, described himself as a bereaved grandson, and signed with his parliamentary title. Asked about Chinese and South Korean objections to the ministerial visits, he called the matter “それぞれの内心の問題” (sorezore no naishin no mondai) — a matter internal to each of them. The word naishin (内心) is the constitutional term for inner belief, not for conscience in the moral sense. He had used the same formula in 2024 for his own visits, which named a freedom he was claiming for himself.

The Dress Code

Eight days before the anniversary, the shrine posted a notice on its website. The heading read “A request concerning dress and the like within the precincts.” Two prohibitions followed: no costume worn within the grounds, and no military dress, which the shrine defined as uniforms and military equipment. Then the shrine added a third line, exempting military dress worn by virtue of the wearer’s own affiliation or qualification. A supplement issued on 12 August clarified that the prohibition had never applied to Self-Defense Force personnel or to the armed forces of other countries.

The shrine was not policing the garment. It was policing those who wore it, since the same uniform is prohibited for civilians and permitted for serving officers. The stated purpose is to maintain the tranquility and dignity of sacred ground where the spirits of the war dead are enshrined. The policy runs year-round, well beyond the anniversary, and the shrine disavows enforcement in terms: this is purely a request, the supplement says, and is not premised on making anyone leave by force.

Sankei traced what produced the notice. Veterans once came in uniform to memorialize dead comrades. As the veterans died, people who had not fought began appearing in uniformed formation. Some wore imitations of Nazi-era German uniforms and insignia, which had been noticed abroad. Some wore kappōgi work smocks with National Defense Women’s Association sashes, reenacting the home-front women’s organization founded in Osaka in 1932. Sankei reported that worshippers had complained that none of it suited a place of mourning. The shrine says otherwise. Its notice states that the policy responds to no particular complaint or individual incident and applies year-round rather than to any specific day.

Tokyo Shimbun’s Kochira Tokuhōbu desk put a reporter on the grounds from opening to closing on the fifteenth. The drum sounded at six and about six hundred worshippers walked to the main hall. By seven, the prohibition signage was up. The reporter found a man of sixty-one in a Japanese army cap, carrying a former Imperial Army flag. He wore it every year, he said, and had honestly wanted to again this year. The spirits, he thought, would be happier that way.

The reporting does not say whether he had breached anything, and the notice does not enumerate caps or flags. Mainichi found the boundary being tested more directly. Small groups in clothing resembling old army and navy uniforms were present throughout the day, and the shrine said that, as of half past five, no costume-related trouble had been confirmed. A self-employed man of twenty-six came in a homemade imitation of Imperial Army uniform and cap. He wore it to show the Japanese spirit, he told the paper, and it was not a costume but the uniform of a right-wing organization. Nobody had stopped him, he said, and he had worshipped normally.

The exemption turns on affiliation, so he had reclassified himself and not his clothes.

The Address

At the ceremony inside the Budōkan, Takaichi read an address into a form successive prime ministers have altered in small, traceable increments. The dead are numbered at about 3.1 million. The battlefield dead, the atomic bombings, the Okinawa ground fighting, the deaths in captivity abroad. Gratitude, the unrecovered remains, the postwar commitment to peace. One slot in the form is where prime ministers have varied their language.

Hosokawa Morihiro broke the form in 1993 by addressing Japan’s aggression toward neighboring Asian countries and offering condolences to their victims. Murayama Tomiichi added “deep remorse” and a “resolve against war” in 1994. Abe Shinzō dropped both in 2013, having used remorse in 2007 under his first cabinet, and neither returned under Suga Yoshihide. Kishida Fumio restored a reference to the lessons of history in 2022 and omitted the other two. Ishiba Shigeru brought remorse back in 2025, the first time since Noda Yoshihiko in 2012. Takaichi’s first address removed it again and dropped the lessons of history with it.

Her text is a closer copy of Ishiba’s than the headlines suggest. His 2025 address pledged to carry a resolute vow against war across the generations. Hers keeps the resolute vow and keeps the carrying across generations, and cuts the two characters that said what the vow was against. What survives runs: 戦争の惨禍を、二度と繰り返させない (sensō no sanka o, nidoto kurikaesasenai) — the scourge of war, never to be allowed to happen again.

Previous addresses used "kurikaesanai" (繰り返さない), "we will not repeat it," a formula Abe introduced at the seventieth anniversary in 2015, which every prime minister through Ishiba has retained. The change is one syllable and is causative, which requires someone to be prevented. The construction also carries a plainer preventive sense in which no agent is specified, so the grammar permits the reading without compelling it. Japanese commentators drew it anyway. Yamada Akira of Meiji University told Mainichi that the cause expresses a historical understanding in which Japan did not wage the war as an agent but was drawn into it as a victim. Okuda Hiroko of Kantō Gakuin University read the change together with the address’s forward orientation as an attempt to keep historical understanding from becoming contested ground. Jiji’s headline put it in four characters: 戦争主体曖昧に (sensō shutai aimai ni), the agent of the war rendered ambiguous.

The address then adds a formulation of Takaichi’s own. Japan “can become” a shining lighthouse of the Indo-Pacific, a country others rely on — a statement of capability rather than a vow. Kyodo, which read the entire memorial text as security-focused and stamped with her own coloring, traced the phrase to her February policy speech. That speech is where the two halves of it sit together. Its defense section undertook to accelerate the review of the five categories in the Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment. That rule confined exports of Japanese-built finished equipment to five non-combat missions: rescue, transport, warning, surveillance, and minesweeping. Lifting it, the speech said, would strengthen the deterrent and response capacity of allies and partners, as well as Japan’s own defense production and civilian technology bases. The closing passage of the same speech called for Japan to be a shining lighthouse of the Indo-Pacific, a country the world relies on.

On 21 April the cabinet and the National Security Council revised the three principles and their operational guidelines. Transfer of all finished equipment became permissible in principle — the government’s own summary names fighter aircraft, escort ships, and submarines, and the press added missiles. Weapons may go only to states bound by an international commitment to use them in conformity with the UN Charter, currently seventeen countries holding equipment-transfer agreements with Japan. Joint development and licensed production partners are exempt from that limit. The National Security Council decides at a four-minister meeting or, for transfers already approved, at the deputies’ committee. The Diet is notified once the decision is taken and published. Transfers to countries judged to be currently at war are barred unless special circumstances arise from Japan’s own security needs, and neither instrument specifies what those are.

Takaichi told reporters that day that the change carried the meaning of forestalling conflict before it occurred, and thus served Japan’s security. Three days earlier, in Melbourne, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries had signed contracts to build three upgraded Mogami-class frigates for Australia — the largest defense export contract in Japan’s postwar history. Koizumi and his Australian counterpart signed an accompanying memorandum.

On 15 August she moved the February peroration into an address from which the pledge against war had been removed.

The Emperor spoke in the same hall about ten minutes later, after the minute’s silence. His words kept the clause the prime minister dropped: 深い反省の上に立って (fukai hansei no ue ni tatte), standing upon deep remorse, and the earnest wish that the scourge of war 繰り返されぬ (kurikaesarenu), not be repeated. That verb is passive, and Nikkei noted it was the same formula he uses every year. Neither text names Japan as the agent of the war. The Emperor’s passive suppresses the agent; the prime minister’s causative moves it. Only one of the two keeps remorse.

China and South Korea

The Chinese foreign ministry published a spokesperson’s written answer to a submitted question, which bundled Takaichi’s offering with visits by individual cabinet members. The answer treated the bundle as a single issue: China strongly condemns the negative moves by the Japanese side regarding Yasukuni Shrine and has lodged solemn representations and strong protests. The statement also observed that this year marks eighty years since the Tokyo Trials opened; the tribunal convened in May 1946.

Seoul separated the actors. Its foreign ministry issued a spokesperson’s commentary saying the government could not but deplore an anachronistic act that had forgotten history, and calling on Japan’s leaders to show humble self-examination in their conduct. The director-general for Asian and Pacific affairs summoned a minister from the Japanese embassy. The defense ministry summoned the Japanese defense attaché specifically over Koizumi’s visit. The defense minister’s visit was broadcast on the defense channel.

Party against state, private against public, remote worship against attendance, league membership against ministerial visit: these answer Japanese constitutional questions, Japanese litigation history, and Japanese parliamentary procedure. Beijing declined all of them. Seoul kept the one that mattered to a defense ministry.

The Car Park

Every other distinction made on the fifteenth has paperwork behind it. The private funds answer to Article 89, and the test they satisfy was written in 1975 and generalized in 1978. The private-capacity visit has nearly fifty years of use and four decades of litigation. The parliamentarians’ league has officers, a secretariat, and a proxy rule under which an absent member may send a secretary in his place. The shrine’s exemption for genuine uniforms at least states a test: either a current obligation to wear one or possession of the qualification.

No court has passed on the yōhai. That reflects less a gap in the rules than the rules’ indifference to what she did. The advisory report the government adopted in 1985 held that the form of worship makes no difference: official capacity makes a visit official whatever posture the minister adopts. The 1978 position turns on who decided and who paid. Neither mentions where the body stands. Asked about the remote worship on the sixteenth, Kobayashi Takayuki said it was a matter for each prime minister to judge.

It was not improvised. The aide who measured it in quarter-steps said Abe had looked at the method as well. Takaichi used an option that had been held in reserve and never spent. The audience for it was at home. The offering went in regardless, and Beijing counted the offering and the four ministers who walked through the gate as one set of moves.

By Motoshi Sakata / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

20:00 JST, August 14, 2026

YAMAGUCHI — Catches of wild torafugu puffer fish, a highly prized delicacy, have plummeted in western Japan, including in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the nation’s top handler of the fish.

Catches in the area have fallen to less than half of what they were 20 years ago. Rising sea temperatures are said to have deterred adult fish from approaching spawning grounds, causing a “declining birth rate” among their population.

The government is considering the introduction of a total allowable catch (TAC) policy to protect the fish stock, but the proposed regulation has received pushback from fishermen amid concerns over lost income.

According to the Fisheries Agency and other sources, torafugu populations are broadly divided into three groups: one that migrates around the waters off western Japan, including the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea and the Seto Inland Sea; one that lives off the Tokai region on the Pacific side; and one that lives off the Tohoku and Kanto regions also on the Pacific side.

In 2024, catches in western Japan totaled 131 tons. They reached 144 tons in Tokai, and Tohoku and Kanto saw 155 tons — a sharp increase from 2019, when catches totaled 66 tons and 48 tons respectively. In contrast, catches in western Japan have declined and now stand at just under 40% of the 363 tons recorded in 2002, when the current survey began.

Farmed fugu, which is produced in various areas across Japan, saw a volume of 2,758 tons in 2024.

While the reason for the increase of wild torafugu in Pacific areas is not clear, a contributing factor in their decline in western Japan is the drop in the number of fish that are less than a year old. Torafugu are believed to have a lifespan of over 10 years, and spawning is carried out by adults aged 3 or older.

The number of wild torafugu less than a year old has been on a downward trend for about 20 years in western Japan. In 2024, the number totaled 110,000, just over 10% of the 820,000 spawned in 2005. The decline has triggered a drop in the number of fish aged 2 or younger, creating a significant impact.

The Fisheries Resources Institute, a government research agency, said that the wild torafugu population will be depleted if the situation continues.

The decline in fugu that are less than a year old is believed to be caused by rising sea temperatures as a result of global warming. Torafugu spawn and release sperm in the same waters where they were born.

In western Japan, the Seto Inland Sea and the Kanmon Strait are major spawning grounds. During the spawning season between March and June, adult fish return from the East China Sea and elsewhere. However, warm water flowing into these grounds has caused temperatures to exceed the optimal range for spawning, which is between 11 C and 16 C. According to experts, this has deterred the fish from returning.

Slow recovery

In 2023, the Fisheries Agency announced its policy to introduce TAC for torafugu caught in western Japan.

TAC, introduced in Japan in 1997, is a catch limit set for a particular species. The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister determines a catch limit after hearing opinions from advisory councils. The minister or a prefectural governor oversees compliance with the TAC, with violators given guidance, recommendations or orders to suspend their operations. There are currently 30 fish species that have TACs applied, including Pacific saury and yellowtail.

While the timing for setting a TAC on torafugu and its targeted volume have not yet been determined, the Fisheries Agency estimates that a temporary limit of less than 100 tons would become necessary.

Discussions of setting such a quota have not progressed for torafugu in the Tokai region, while there are no plans at this time to set quotas in the Tohoku and Kanto regions amid rising catch volumes and a lack of spawning data from these areas.

Citing a past example of a TAC helping the recovery of bluefin tuna stock, the agency has persuaded torafugu fishermen in western Japan that “recovery of the fishery stock will take longer if levels drop and there are delays to setting a catch limit.”

Fear over loss of reputation

Fishermen in western Japan, including those in Yamaguchi and Nagasaki prefectures, oppose any introduction of a TAC, arguing that it will lead to a decline in income. There are also strong concerns that as torafugu from the Tohoku and Kanto regions gains market share, Shimonoseki could lose its status as the nation’s top source of the fish. Therefore, Yamaguchi Prefecture has requested to the Fisheries Agency that a uniform limit be applied nationwide.

An official of the Shimonoseki Fuku Renmei, a federation that comprises local wholesale dealers and others in the prefecture, insisted that fishing grounds in the prefecture have already implemented seasonal restrictions and restocked fry. “It’s unfair if other regions can fish without limits,” he said. “We can get by solely with voluntary measures.”

Toshio Katsukawa, an associate professor of fisheries resources at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, said recovery of the torafugu stock would lead to an overall increase in revenue, and “the government needs to make a concerted effort to explain this to fishermen.”

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The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:38 JST, August 13, 2026

The Defense Ministry plans to provide the Self-Defense Forces with unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of long-range navigation, according to ministry sources.

The ministry envisages the UUVs being used for a wide range of purposes — including launching missiles and torpedoes; conducting surveillance and monitoring; and performing ocean observations — by changing their equipment as needed.

A plan to deploy such UUVs will be specified in the nation’s key three security documents to be revised by the end of this year, with the aim of completing their provision to the SDF by fiscal 2031, the ministry sources said.

Compared to manned submarines, UUVs can be mass-produced at a lower cost. Such vehicles have already been introduced to the Maritime Self-Defense Force but their use has been limited to purposes such as the detection and disposal of mines.

The ministry envisages that new UUVs currently under consideration for introduction to the SDF will be designed to operate in wide ocean areas for extended periods by combining AI technology, which enables autonomous navigation, with high-capacity batteries.

These vehicles are expected to be cylindrical in shape, about 1.8 meters in diameter and equipped with a sonar system at the front and a screw propeller at the rear.

Another new initiative is to adopt a modular design that will allow the UUVs to perform various functions by changing or adding equipment. The Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency has been developing a new UUV model with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. since fiscal 2019, and research and development are underway on equipment to be mounted on this base model.

According to the agency, a model capable of conducting ocean observations, such as measuring water temperatures and observing seafloor topography, has already been completed. The agency plans to finish development of a UUV that will be equipped with optical cameras for surveillance and monitoring by fiscal 2028.

It also intends to consider developing other models, such as those capable of launching torpedoes and missiles, as well as laying mines. These UUVs are envisaged to be exported to like-minded nations in the future.

The use of UUVs will also help address the shortage of SDF personnel. Submarine crew members face significant mental and physical strain due to long-term missions and cramped quarters, making it a challenge to secure enough people.

The ministry intends to operate a combination of manned submarines and UUVs to strengthen Japan’s deterrence, particularly against China, while reducing the number of personnel required.

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Six thousand miles away, a government that spent sixty years refusing to sell weapons has been reading that order book with interest.

A thousand Tomahawks, eighty-six a year

The American order replaces ordnance that has already been fired, which makes its size a matter of arithmetic rather than projection. Analysts estimate up to 290 THAAD interceptors were fired (Military Times 2026a), with reserves returning to prior levels only by mid-to-late 2029, and Tomahawk replenishment running to 2030 or 2031. Reuters, citing Pentagon figures, reports more than 50,000 rockets, missiles, and rocket-propelled munitions expended (Reuters 2026) since February 2022 across support to Ukraine and the Iran campaign. Current holdings are reported at fewer than 1,000 Patriot interceptors and fewer than 250 THAAD (Daily Record 2026b).

A word about the word. American law defines “munitions” expansively: 10 USC §101(e)(4) covers all ammunition products and components, and specifies that the term includes rockets, guided and ballistic missiles, bombs, warheads, mortar rounds, artillery ammunition, small arms ammunition, grenades, mines, and torpedoes. One category holds a four-million-dollar hit-to-kill interceptor and a rifle cartridge.

That bundling lets a missile-procurement surge be announced as an arsenal-rebuilding program, and reported as factory jobs. Three distinctions run through what follows. Armament hardware is durable and reusable: launchers, radars, howitzers, warships, aircraft. Guided expendables are consumed on use and carry high unit cost and heavy electronics: PAC-3, THAAD, Tomahawk, AMRAAM. Conventional expendables are also consumed on use but are mostly metal and energetics: shells, propelling charges, general-purpose bombs. The official category respects none of these lines, and the differences between them turn out to determine who gets employed, at what wage, and where.

The scale of the request sorts almost entirely into the middle tier. Service munitions accounts ran at just under $20 billion in FY25 and $24.4 billion in FY26 (Breaking Defense 2026b); the FY27 request seeks $70.5 billion, a 188 percent increase, with the Army’s missile account alone rising from $8 billion to $36.6 billion. The production targets are starker than the dollars.

Analysts at Taxpayers for Common Sense disaggregated the request and found that the war was written into it as a differential: munitions identifiable as used in the Iran war rose from $4.5 billion enacted to some $22 billion requested, a 387 percent increase, while the rest of the munitions request rose by 125 percent (Taxpayers for Common Sense 2026). Everything went up. What was fired went up much more.

The contracting instruments lock the demand in place. The Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a seven-year THAAD contract worth more than $35 billion (Military Times 2026b), running from March 2026 to June 2032, quadrupling output from 96 interceptors a year to about 400 (Defense News 2026c). The Army converted an earlier one-year, $4.7 billion PAC-3 award into a seven-year agreement worth more than $58 billion (Al Jazeera 2026), lifting PAC-3 output from 600 a year to 2,000. In June, the President invoked the Defense Production Act (CBS News 2026), finding that systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base threatened national defense, and naming the bottlenecks precisely: solid rocket motors, igniters, guidance systems.

A state that commits to buy through 2032 has concluded it cannot receive the goods any sooner. That is the demand signal Tokyo is looking at, and it has a seven-year floor under it.

One qualification, which returns at the end. The framework agreements are non-binding and contingent on appropriations (Gledhill 2026), much of the money routed through a reconciliation bill that has not passed. In January, appropriators declined a late $28.8 billion multiyear munitions request (Breaking Defense 2026a), writing into the justification document that the Department had not demonstrated the systems met the statutory requirements for multiyear authority.

Six firms and one shell plant

The awards concentrate in six firms and arrived between February and August 2026. Beyond Lockheed, Raytheon signed five framework agreements (RTX 2026) covering Tomahawk, AMRAAM, SM-3 and SM-6, raising Tomahawk production to more than a thousand a year from a US rate of roughly sixty. Northrop Grumman took $3 billion in dual seven-year deals (DefenseScoop 2026) to become a second source of Patriot rocket motors and to supply THAAD structural components. L3Harris received nearly $400 million (L3Harris 2026) for boost motors and divert systems. BAE Systems signed its own seven-year framework in March to quadruple production of the THAAD infrared seeker, built at Nashua, New Hampshire, and Endicott, New York (BAE Systems 2026).

Against all of that, the conventional tier: General Dynamics committing $200 million of its own capital (Capaccio 2026) to restart a Mesquite, Texas shell plant that opened in 2024, cost more than $500 million, was contracted to reach 30,000 rounds a month, never got there, and sat under a work-stoppage order for eight months. The two figures are not strictly comparable—federal awards on one side, a company’s own capital on the other, alongside an Army contract at the same plant worth some $591 million—but the disparity is not in doubt. The guided tier is being funded in tens of billions, the conventional tier in hundreds of millions.

The column that does the work is the third.

Geography follows. Raytheon builds at Tucson, Huntsville, and Andover. Lockheed broke ground in May on an 87,000-square-foot production center at Troy, Alabama (Daily Record 2026a), alongside a Munitions Acceleration Center at Camden, Arkansas, and modernization across more than twenty sites. The 155mm base remains where it has been since the 1940s: government-owned, contractor-operated, in Scranton and a scatter of Second World War plants.

Three-quarters at desks, one in eight on a line

Who builds these things, and on what terms, is the question the American record answers least well. No securities or procurement rule requires a contractor to report how many employees work in production rather than administration, or how many hold permanent rather than contingent positions.

Lockheed reports nearly 4,000 employees in Alabama and plans to add about 4,500 “frontline workers” nationally (Daily Record 2026a); the Patriot award takes Camden, Arkansas from about 1,200 to about 1,850 (Defense News 2026b) by 2030. “Frontline” is the company’s own category, defined nowhere.

One public source answers the occupational question structurally. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publishes aggregate workforce reports by industry code, sorting employees into ten job categories. The available aggregates for these industries date from the mid-2000s, so they describe not today’s payroll but the durable shape of two businesses.

In guided missile manufacturing (EEOC 2005a), of 67,884 employees reported, 40,154 were professionals and 9,722 officials and managers. Craft workers, operatives and laborers together came to 9,049. Three-quarters salaried and degreed; one in eight on a line.

In ammunition manufacturing excluding small arms (EEOC 2005b), the proportions invert. Of 4,817 employees, 2,894 were craft workers, operatives, or laborers, against 1,265 professionals and managers.

The missile business is an engineering payroll with a factory attached. The shell business is a factory. The surge is running almost entirely into the first, and the political language of restored industrial employment sits awkwardly on top of that. The binding constraint sits in the smaller workforce: a PwC and Aerospace Industries Association survey found fewer than half of executives confident of doubling production within eighteen months, with 74 percent naming skilled labor shortage as a major constraint (NOTUS 2026), skilled trades ranking ahead of engineers and machine operators.

A large, contractually locked, seven-year demand that American industry cannot meet on its own schedule. Somebody was always going to read that as a market. The claim that munitions manufacture is a route to national prosperity has one serious precedent in Japanese policy, and it is not recent. Between 1950 and 1953, American special procurement (tokuju, 特需) placed orders for goods and services with Japanese suppliers to sustain a war on the Korean peninsula in which Japan was not a combatant. Japanese industry supplied that war through the arsenal of the power fighting it, and was paid in dollars for doing so.

Tokyo makes its current case on the strength of that precedent.

What Japan may now sell, and to whom

On 21 April 2026, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae announced changes that effectively eliminated restrictions on defense sales, including lethal weapons, to Japan’s closest security partners (CSIS 2026a). The mechanism was a revision of the Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology, the framework governing what Japan may sell abroad. It abolished the restriction confining exports to five non-lethal categories (ORF 2026)—rescue, transport, surveillance, warning, and minesweeping—and replaced them with a binary of “weapons” and “non-weapons,” opening almost all categories to case-by-case review. It is the most consequential relaxation since restrictions were introduced in 1967.

Eligibility runs to seventeen countries holding transfer agreements with Tokyo. The Cabinet Secretariat’s own revision paper lists them: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Philippines, France, Germany, Malaysia, Italy, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Sweden, Singapore, UAE, Mongolia, and Bangladesh (Cabinet Secretariat 2026).

Six of those—the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden—sit among the most significant Western donors to Ukraine. The eligible list doubles as a backfill list. The same paper states the rationale in terms of demand from abroad, noting that partner countries in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe are placing higher expectations on Japanese defense equipment.

Backfilling the arsenals that armed Ukraine

Japan cannot sell into a war. Transfers of lethal equipment to countries involved in ongoing conflicts remain prohibited except in exceptional circumstances (Breaking Defense 2026c)—where the recipient is subject to armed aggression, for instance—and any such transfer requires approval by the four ministers of the National Security Council.

The restriction routes the trade instead of stopping it. Japan can replenish the arsenals of states that do supply belligerents, and it has already done so once. On 20 November 2025, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kihara Minoru confirmed that delivery was complete under an export contract signed with the United States the previous July (Japan Times 2025): Japanese-made PAC-3 interceptors, drawn from Japan Air Self-Defense Force stocks, sold to supplement American inventories, with a confirmed undertaking that they would not be passed to any third country (Jiji 2025). The wire service Jiji headlined the announcement as indirect support for Ukraine.

A category that appears to prevent Japanese materiel from reaching a war instead determines its routing, its paperwork, and which four ministers have to sign. The classification does organizational work rather than prohibitive work, and the first thing it organized was a shipment out of Japan’s own magazine into America’s.

What a contract is allowed to earn

Ask what a defense firm earns on a given contract and the answer depends on which government you ask, and on which of that government’s own published figures you read. Washington, London, and Tokyo all publish something. No two of them publish the same thing.

Washington publishes a modest figure. Under DFARS 215.404-71-2, contracting officers build a profit objective on a weighted-guidelines form: performance risk carries a normal value of 5 percent within a range of 3 to 7, with a 7-to-11 band reserved for genuinely novel technology. Contract type adds a second layer (DFARS 215.404-71-3), ranked by risk rather than scale: firm-fixed-price with no financing normally rates 5 percent, the same arrangement with progress payments 3, cost-plus-fixed-fee 0.5.

The regulation anticipates the restock situation directly. Where costs have been incurred before a contract is definitized, contracting officers are told to score contract-type risk at the low end, and where a substantial portion has been incurred, they “may assign a value as low as zero percent, regardless of contract type.” The THAAD award is an undefinitized action. Work is underway, and the price has not been settled; the $35 billion is a ceiling, and about $842 million in FY26 funds was obligated (Military Times 2026b) at signature. No profit rate exists to disclose, because none has been negotiated.

Lockheed publishes a different figure, and a much larger one. Its quarterly filing for the period ended 28 June 2026 (Lockheed Martin 2026a) reports Missiles and Fire Control sales of $4,101 million against operating profit of $594 million—a 14.5 percent margin, up from 14.0 a year earlier, attributed to PAC-3 and THAAD production ramps. The company raised full-year guidance in July (Lockheed Martin 2026b) to 8 percent sales growth and 28 percent higher segment operating profit.

Neither figure is concealed, and neither is wrong. The regulation prices a percentage of negotiated cost on one contract; the filing reports a percentage of segment sales across hundreds. What no public document does is join them, and the weighted-guidelines records are not routinely released.

That opacity is a policy choice rather than a technical necessity, which becomes visible the moment you look at either ally. Britain’s Single Source Regulations Office publishes a baseline profit rate annually; its 2026/27 analysis (SSRO 2026) shows that agreed contract profit rates typically run between 7 and 19 percent, and reports that in 2024/25 contractors on average earned or forecast to earn 11.67 percent—higher than originally agreed. A published rate, and a published audit of the gap between intention and outcome.

Tokyo publishes its rate too, and sets it in the opposite direction. Speaking to the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives on 30 January 2023, Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu announced a calculation allowing contractors an operating profit ratio of up to 10 percent, with up to 5 percent added for procurement cost fluctuation (The Diplomat 2023)—a maximum of 15 percent, from that April, against a previous ceiling near 8. The Ministry of Finance had put the assumed margin on defense equipment at 7.07 percent as of FY2020, against a realized figure said to average 2 to 3 percent once material costs rose after orders were placed. “Domestic industry is defense capability itself,” Hamada told the Diet.

A Japanese minister stated the target margin on the floor of the legislature. A British regulator publishes both the agreed rate and what contractors actually earned against it. American law publishes the arithmetic and discloses no outcome at all. The three states are not measuring different industries; they are making different decisions about what the public is entitled to see.

The directions differ as much as the disclosure. Tokyo raised the price of the work to keep firms in a business two decades of decline had made unattractive. Washington moved the other way, legislating around the measurement problem instead of closing it.

Executive Order 14372 (US Senate 2026), signed in January 2026, restricts buybacks and dividends by underperforming contractors; a Senate provision would require Pentagon approval before large contractors repurchase stock. The supporting material cites a Pentagon finding that between 2009 and 2019 contractors cut the revenue share going to research and capital expenditure while buyback share rose from 3.7 to 6.4 percent, and that since 2020 the five largest firms have committed over $100 billion to buybacks and dividends, more than twice their capital spending. Washington regulates the disposal of profit because the measurement of it sits out of reach.

Export agency, state-owned plant, directed credit

The rest of the machinery matches. The Act on Enhancing Defense Production and Technology Bases, passed in 2023, let the Defense Ministry contract below the prime contractors for the first time (Breaking Defense 2024), giving it visibility into a supply chain it had been unable to see. Officials now plan an interagency organization to promote defense sales abroad, possibly a defense-focused version of the trade promotion agency JETRO, alongside new authorities to acquire, own, and lease manufacturing facilities (CSIS 2026a) so firms can avoid the up-front capital cost. A defense industrial strategy follows in December 2026.

Export promotion agency, state-owned plant, guaranteed margins, directed credit. This is the standard postwar Japanese sequence for standing up a target sector, pointed at armaments.

The doctrine got its fullest statement on 4 August 2026, when the Defense Ministry published its annual white paper. It argues that arms production can support economic growth, urges Japan to harness technology, fund startups and use more commercial components, and stresses that investment in defense benefits the wider economy and people’s lives (CNN 2026). The cover is an anime illustration of a family in a gleaming cityscape.

Thirty interceptors a year

The gap between Tokyo’s policy and its industry is measurable, and the measurement is unflattering. The International Institute for Strategic Studies reported in May that since the first liberalization in 2014, exports of finished defense products amounted to three fixed air surveillance radars and one mobile radar to the Philippines (CNBC 2026), before the Australian shipbuilding deal. Twelve years, four radars.

Manufacturers served a single customer for decades, which left little incentive to build export marketing teams, reduce unit costs, or hold spare capacity. Firms are still declining: Toyota Customizing & Development told Reuters it could not accommodate a request for military vehicles “based on our business scope and policy” (Defense News 2026a).

And the capacity that exists is capped by an American component. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries produces roughly thirty PAC-3 interceptors a year under license from Lockheed Martin (Defense Post 2025), with capacity to double once Boeing-built seekers cease to be a bottleneck—an expansion expected to show results from 2027 (Defense Post 2024). Meanwhile Japan’s own FY2026 budget request contained zero new procurement of PAC-3 MSE interceptors (Murano and Chou 2026), the terminal layer of its own missile defense.

Thirty a year, against an American production objective of two thousand. Japan gave the Americans interceptors out of its own inventory because neither country could build them fast enough, and then did not budget to replace them.

The US Commercial Service is advising American firms that Japan’s revised rules create opportunities to supply critical components and subsystems to Japanese primes facing increased export demand, since their industry has long relied on US inputs and its shift towards export-oriented production is expected to increase that need (US Commercial Service 2026). Washington reads Tokyo’s arms opening as a market for its own components. Hold that against the seeker constraint, and the question is whether Japan is entering the arms trade or taking a position inside somebody else’s.

A $35,000 drone against a $3 million interceptor

The fastest-growing part of this market does not work like any of it.

An Iranian Shahed drone costs perhaps $35,000. The interceptors used against that class of target run to $1.1 million for an AMRAAM and $3 million for a PAC-3 (ASPI 2026), while Ukraine’s drone interceptors, at $3,000 to $5,000, now account for one in every three Russian aerial targets brought down. Everything described above is an expensive way of remaining on the wrong side of that exchange.

Both states have noticed. The Pentagon’s FY27 request allocates $54.6 billion to the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, against $225.9 million appropriated the previous year, with more than $70 billion across drones and counter-drone systems, and a target of 200,000 autonomous platforms by 2027 (Drone Intelligence 2026). Japan’s unmanned-capability funding more than doubled to ¥277.3 billion, with a production target of 80,000 domestically manufactured drones a year by 2030 against 1,000 in 2024 (Langley Esquire 2026), and a ruling-party proposal in June calling for mass introduction across air, sea, and land in an era when “we use drones like bullets.”

A bullet made of software is where the three-tier distinction stops holding. A reusable surveillance platform is armament hardware; a loitering munition is a guided expendable; a two-thousand-dollar interceptor drone is closer to a shell in economics while carrying more code than a Tomahawk.

In this tier, the direction of trade reverses. Terra Drone announced in March 2026 a strategic investment in Kharkiv-based Amazing Drones, which manufactures interceptor drones in Ukraine (Asian Military Review 2026); their joint product neutralizes Shahed-class attackers at $2,000 to $3,000 a unit. Moscow summoned the Japanese ambassador in April to protest. Ukrainian firms, for their part, are sourcing cameras and microelectronics from Japan and Taiwan (United24 2026) to reduce dependence on China.

In this tier, Japan supplies components and buys combat-proven design knowledge from a belligerent it cannot legally arm.

Both routes into the market run through a supply chain Tokyo does not control. Interceptors are capped by American seekers. Drones are capped by Chinese parts: analysts note that nearly every unmanned system in Ukraine contains materials originating in Chinese factories and refineries (CSIS 2026b)—carbon fiber, rare-earth magnets, lithium-ion cells, gallium-nitride chips—and Japanese makers remain heavily reliant on Chinese speed controllers, propellers, and generators (DigiTimes 2025) despite the branding. The second chokepoint belongs to the country the entire buildup is aimed at.

Eisaku Ito, president and chief executive of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, told the Financial Times in July that converting struggling car plants into drone factories would fail and waste public money: a line built to turn out hundreds of thousands of identical units cannot carry a product whose specifications change with the tactics, and the country would end up with mountains of obsolete hardware bought with taxes (Seoul Economic Daily 2026a).

He was not arguing against the program. MHI developed a counter-drone interceptor in three months, is weighing a mass-production prototype, and is separately building collaborative combat aircraft; Ito expects the business to reach considerable scale with his firm as Japan’s leading supplier (Seoul Economic Daily 2026b). The largest defense contractor in the country wants the work and is disputing the method. That is a harder problem for Tokyo than reluctance would be, because it is an argument about whether the state understands the product it is ordering.

Korea, America, and Japan, 1950–53

The precedent has a record, and the record is more equivocal than the doctrine that invokes it.

Chung Jin-Sung puts the receipts at some $800 million a year in foreign currency across the war (Chung 2020). Asai Yoshio makes the comparison exact. Counted in dollars alone, Japanese exports earned about $400 million in 1952; special procurement earned twice that. Across every one of the four years from 1951 to 1954, American orders brought in more dollars than everything else Japan sold abroad, and at the peak they supplied more than a third of all foreign-currency receipts on current account (Asai 2002).

The totals do not reconcile cleanly between sources, and Asai shows why: what counted as special procurement depended on which American purchasing agency was included, since the category covered not only US forces in Japan but the Japanese offices of American aid agencies. Michael Schaller records first-year procurements of $329 million (Schaller 1997); a standard Japanese reference work puts the three-year total at $980 million (Yamakawa Shuppansha 2016).

What the orders bought matters as much as what they were worth. About seventy per cent went on goods and thirty percent on services (Yamakawa Shuppansha 2016). In the first year the goods ran a quarter textiles, a quarter metals, a fifth machinery: cotton cloth, blankets, gunny sacks, barbed wire and the steel posts to string it on, bridge steel, locomotives, freight wagons, trucks, dry batteries. Among services, repair of materials and facilities took nearly forty per cent, transport twenty-three, construction thirteen. Trucks alone accounted for a fifth of contracts in the first two months, and the 11,940 vehicles delivered by June 1951 came to 49 percent of ordinary vehicle sales over that period (Asai 2002).

There is a reason the list reads like that. Weapons manufacture was prohibited in occupied Japan, so no large-scale arms procurement could arise; only when GHQ authorized production in March 1952 did weapons take a substantial share of the total (Asai 2002).

Tokuju did not buy Japanese technology, because for most of the war Japanese technology was not what Japan was allowed to sell. It bought sewing, rolling, hauling, and fitting.

Set against those receipts, two research fellows at the Cabinet Office’s own institute are deflationary: special procurement generated by the Korean War accounted for around 1 to 2 percent of GNP per year (Yoshioka and Kawasaki 2016). And the arrangement did not survive the armistice on its own terms. Tokyo spent the rest of the decade hunting for replacement demand, securing $400 to $500 million a year in the late 1950s only by attaching itself to American foreign-aid procurement for Southeast Asia (Chung 2020). The war orders had to be replaced by other orders, from the same customer.

Contemporaries had the evidence in front of them. In January 1953, the American embassy in Tokyo cabled Washington that Japanese earnings from special procurement in 1952 were about $283 million, roughly two-thirds of the previous year’s, and that against an FY1953 planned level of $350 million, contracts placed in the first six months came to only $135 million (FRUS 1952–54, 1:1, doc. 39).

The special procurement boom was undershooting its own projections while contemporaries described it as salvation. Tokuju was decisive for foreign exchange and for particular sectors. As a share of national output it was small, and its forecasts were wrong in real time, in the direction of optimism.

A white paper argues that arms production will benefit the wider economy on the strength of a precedent that at its height reached one or two per cent of GNP. Eighty thousand drones a year by 2030, from a base of one thousand, in a sector whose twelve-year export record is four radars, whose largest firm expects the output to be obsolete, and whose two production routes are gated by American and Chinese suppliers respectively. The industry that took the bet in 1950 was forbidden to make weapons and was asked for blankets and truck repair. The one being asked now has to build seekers.

Only the depletion is settled: more than a thousand Tomahawks fired against an annual purchase of eighty-six, fewer than 250 THAAD rounds left in the magazine. Everything built on top of it—the seven-year frameworks, the export liberalization, the growth doctrine, the production targets—is a forecast, and forecasts of this kind have a documented tendency to disappoint while the people making them are still calling it a boom. The American appropriation that funds most of it has to clear Congress by 1 October, or the autonomous-warfare budget reverts to $225 million, and the whole edifice waits another year.

Tokyo is betting that someone else’s war can once again be an engine of Japanese industrial growth. The bet was placed before anyone checked whether the industry that took it the first time still exists.

References

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 1, pt. 1, doc. 39. Telegram, US Embassy Tokyo to Department of State, January 1953.

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Breaking Defense. 2024. “Japan Looks to Revamp Defense Industry after Years of Downsizing.” June.

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On Monday morning, leaflets went out at the 206 evacuation centers still open across Kumamoto Prefecture. They told the 8,556 people registered in them at half past seven that morning that they could apply to move into a hotel or a ryokan. Kumamoto City recorded its first kokushobi (酷暑日) on record the same day. The Japan Meteorological Agency had adopted that term, for a maximum temperature of 40°C, as official forecast terminology on 17 April, three months before the ground moved. An online application form opened alongside the leaflets, with a call center in preparation. The earthquake struck on 28 July at 16:27, magnitude 7.1, registering the maximum seismic intensity of 7 in Uki City and Hikawa Town. By Monday, the prefecture counted 38 dead. What opened on Monday, however, was not a shelter. It was a procedure.

The immediate reason is cooling, and the numbers are not flattering. Kumamoto’s designated school gymnasiums have air conditioning in 20.9 percent of cases, against 33.1 percent nationally. Of the seven municipalities that recorded shindo 6-upper or above, four have none at all—including Hikawa and Uki, the two that recorded 7. Hikawa opened three schools and put people in the air-conditioned classrooms instead of the halls; eight further designated shelters in the town could not be opened, because the power cut had taken the cooling with it. Misato and Mashiki did not open their school shelters at all. Uki was due to finish installing cooling in every school gymnasium during this financial year, opened the one building where the system stood days from commissioning, and ran it off a generator truck. “If only it had been a little sooner,” the official said.

The state has been improvising around that gap all week. The education ministry issued a nationwide notice on 29 July telling boards of education to use air-conditioned classrooms as shelters. The Ministry of Defense airlifted some three hundred spot coolers into Kumamoto Airport. The treasury had already raised its subsidy for gymnasium air conditioning to half the cost in last year’s supplementary budget, which arrived too late to cool a single hall in Hikawa.

The hotel scheme is the fourth improvisation, and it is older than the heat. It has a name in Japanese administrative practice—niji hinan (二次避難), secondary evacuation—and it is not what a British or American reader would assume. Hotels and inns are not being converted into temporary housing. They are being borrowed as evacuation shelters under Article 4(1)(i) of the Disaster Relief Act, with the cost split between the national treasury and the prefecture. Deemed temporary housing (minashi kasetsu, みなし仮設), the leased private flats approved for more than twelve thousand households after 2016, sits under the second limb of the same item but is reached by a different standard. The two tracks opened on the same day: while the leaflets circulated, construction began on seventy units of built temporary housing in Hikawa and Uki, with occupancy from September.

Nor are evacuees merely permitted to apply. The Basic Disaster Management Plan directs national and local government to urge movement into hotels where evacuation is likely to be prolonged, and the national guideline issued in December prescribes the machinery of urging: questionnaires handed out at crowded shelters, door-to-door and telephone outreach by officials, and individual approaches to evacuees judged at particular risk. Receiving applications is the last step in that sequence, not the first.

Kumamoto has run this before. Under a 2014 agreement with the prefectural ryokan and hotel trade association, the 2016 earthquake response placed 2,273 people in 74 facilities by late September. Eligibility then was narrow: the elderly, the disabled, pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and their families—the population the state files under yōhairyosha (要配慮者), persons requiring special consideration. On 1 August the transport minister, Kaneko Yasuyuki, announced that the tourism agency and the prefecture had secured 73 facilities for about 2,200 people. Ten years apart, one facility fewer.

The clearest surviving document from 2016 is a leaflet that Mashiki Town distributed to its shelters on 6 May. It opened by asking, in the interrogative-invitation form Japanese officialdom reserves for things it would like you to do, whether residents might not care to evacuate somewhere else for a while. It listed reasons: overcrowding, infection risk, stress, the danger of falls, and reduced activity leading to a decline in walking ability and constipation. Then it priced the offer. For the ryokan option, about three hundred places in the Shimoda hot-spring district of Amakusa, accommodation was free for yōshiensha—defined on the leaflet as anyone sixty-five or over, preschool children, disabled persons, and pregnant or postpartum women, regardless of any care certification—and free for their families. Two thousand yen per head, excluding tax, for everyone else. Daily shuttle, three meals, and a recommendation in bold: a week or more.

That leaflet did the classificatory work the earthquake could not. Collapsing buildings do not distinguish between the sixty-four-year-old and the sixty-five-year-old. The form does.

This year the category has widened. Kumamoto has opened the scheme to all disaster victims, with priority for those requiring special consideration: a shift from gatekeeping to triage. The wider frame was already written. Among the circumstances the December guideline names for activating the scheme is the absence of heating or cooling at a shelter, “particularly where evacuees likely to suffer heatstroke, pregnant women, or families with infants are present”. The heatstroke evacuee became an administrative category seven months before this summer.

Securing capacity and filling it are different problems. During the July 2020 floods, Kumamoto reserved 56 facilities with room for roughly 1,900 people and placed 84 people in nine of them. Ishikawa Prefecture, after the 2024 Noto earthquake, had 5,275 people in hotels at peak. What separated the two was not goodwill but plumbing: a reception desk on 9 January, direct buses on 11 January, a call center on 14 January.

The guideline that standardized the apparatus carries eight forms—a facility list, an application, a decision notice, rules of use, an evacuee roster, two returns to the Cabinet Office, and a departure notice to be filed two days before leaving. The returns ask for each evacuee’s date of birth, age, sex, category of special consideration, and future housing plans, updated weekly. Which inverts the obvious worry. Moving out of a gymnasium into a hotel room does not thin the record; it thickens it. The person who fills in the form acquires a household number, a category, and a projected exit date.

The thinning happens elsewhere. Evacuees sleeping in cars or in damaged homes are not counted in the 8,556, because no one registered them. Kumamoto’s first suspected disaster-related death of this earthquake was a woman in her seventies, found on 30 July in a car whose petrol had run out and whose air conditioning had therefore stopped. She was not in the population the leaflets reached on Monday, and the government has since ordered officials to go out and find people like her.

The room itself is paid for from public funds, at up to ten thousand yen per person per night, and must be billed below the hotel’s ordinary rate. Meals are not covered. Neither is the bathing tax. Neither is the two hundred yen per night that Kumamoto City began levying on 1 July, the prefecture’s first accommodation tax, earmarked for the promotion of tourism. It came into force twenty-seven days before the earthquake. An evacuee moved out of a hall with no air conditioning, into a room the state has rented on her behalf, and pays it at the counter like anyone else.

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Sources: NHK, Nikkei, Kyodo, KAB and KKT Kumamoto, RKK, Shimbun Akahata; Cabinet Office (Government of Japan), guideline on the use of hotels and inns as evacuation shelters, December 2025, and supplementary materials on secondary evacuation and temporary housing, 29 September 2016; Cabinet Office, “The use of hotels and inns as evacuation shelters in disasters”, 17 December 2021; Kumamoto Prefecture, accommodation provision manual; Kumamoto City, accommodation tax; Japan Meteorological Agency; MEXT air-conditioning survey, 1 September 2024.

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:15 JST, July 20, 2026

The Immigration Services Agency will urgently increase the number of officers to strengthen a crackdown on foreigners illegally overstaying in Japan.

The agency, which made the unusual move of making the decision during a fiscal year, will increase immigration officers by more than 200. The move is also aimed at reinforcing border security.

The government is set to announce the increase at a meeting this week of relevant Cabinet ministers with regards to the acceptance of foreigners and realizing an orderly and inclusive society.

The number of overstayers reached about 83,000 as of Jan. 1, 2020, and remained at a high level of 68,000 as of Jan. 1, this year. Leaving the issue unaddressed could foster illegal employment, such as working outside what is permitted by a visa status, and potentially lead to a deterioration in public safety. For these reasons, there is an urgent need to crack down on the number.

The number of immigration control officers, who are responsible for apprehending overstayers, will be increased by about 50. They will be mainly deployed to Ibaraki Prefecture, which is home to the largest number of illegal workers.

The number of immigration inspectors, who will work on investigations into illegal workers, will be increased by about 180. The agency aims to strengthen investigations on illegal employments that are difficult to detect just by analyzing documents, and is looking to speed up and tighten the screening of residence status applications, which is becoming strained due to the rising number of foreign residents.

The government is planning to set up a new advisory panel of specialists regarding policy on the acceptance of foreigners in society by the end of July. Discussions will take place concerning numerical targets, such as over the proportion of foreign residents within the population, which has been requested by the Japan Innovation Party among others. A separate panel of specialists will discuss designing systems to help foreign people learn about rules and culture in Japan.

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:33 JST, July 23, 2026

Japan on Thursday marked its third consecutive day of temperatures exceeding 40 C, the threshold for a so-called brutally hot day.

On the same day, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency, this highest temperature recorded in the country so far this year — 41.1 C — was marked in Hamamatsu’s Tenryu Ward, and temperatures hit 40.8 C in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture; 40.7 C in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture; and 40.6 C in Mino, Gifu Prefecture.

Temperatures reached 36.5 C in central Tokyo.

Jiji Press

14:18 JST, July 23, 2026

Tokyo, July 22 (Jiji Press)—Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said Wednesday that 10,857 people were transported to hospitals by ambulance for heatstroke in Japan in the week through Sunday, up 2.4 times from the preceding week.

The weekly number exceeded 10,000 for the first time since surveys for this year began on May 1. “It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a disaster,” an agency official said of the recent extreme heat.

Among those rushed to hospital, 6,734 were aged 65 or older, accounting for more than 60 pct of the total. Fourteen people died while 321 had severe symptoms requiring hospitalization for at least three weeks.

Of the total, 4,523 people suffered heatstroke at residences, the most common location where cases occurred.

Temperatures have soared across the country since the start of this month, with many locations recording maximum daily readings of 35 degrees Celsius or higher.

The mercury reached 40.6 degrees in the city of Kuwana in Mie Prefecture on Wednesday, the highest in the central Japan city since data started and the highest temperature in the country this year, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The city of Tajimi in Gifu Prefecture, a Mie neighbor, logged 40.0 degrees, hitting the 40-degree mark for the second straight day. On Tuesday, the temperature in the city rose to as high as 40.3 degrees.

Tenryu Ward in the city of Hamamatsu in the central prefecture of Shizuoka and the city of Mino in Gifu each recorded 40.1 degrees Wednesday.

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency advised the public to get hydrated and replenish salt before becoming thirsty, warning that many people have not yet acclimatized to the sudden heat. It also urged people to refrain from going out as much as possible on days when heatstroke alerts are issued.

Leroy recently completed an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS University of London. His work has centred on historical videogames, Japanese history, cultural representation, and public history — the point where the study of Japan’s past meets the media through which most people now encounter it.

That angle is what he brings here. Japanese Modernity concerns itself with how institutions in Japan produce, sort, and govern knowledge — of labour, memory, heritage, and the categories through which the state renders its subjects legible. Leroy’s interest in how the past is represented, contested, and circulated — in games, but also across the wider apparatus of public history — connects directly to those questions. A UNESCO heritage listing and a playable reconstruction of the same site are doing related work; both decide what the past is allowed to look like.

Over the coming months Leroy will be contributing original writing, helping to curate and develop the publication, and keeping an eye out for work worth engaging. He is still finding his footing across both mastheads, and readers will find his early pieces repay the attention.

The two publications have always been companions. With Leroy working across both, the seam between them — where Japan’s institutional past meets its digital afterlives — becomes a place to build.

— Chris

The changing face of Japanese migration to Australia

Iori Hamada

Approximately 1.3 million Japanese citizens lived overseas in 2025, including a record-high number of permanent residents. Australia hosted 105,566 Japanese nationals, making it the second-largest destination for Japanese citizens overseas after the United States and ahead of China. This growth reflects the increasing scale and diversification of Japanese mobility since the early 2000s.

Yet public discussions of the Japanese community in Australia are still often shaped by older images of corporate expatriates, affluent tourists and ‘middle-class’ lifestyle migrants linked to Japan’s post-war economic rise. Contemporary Japanese migration looks increasingly different.

Japanese migration to Australia has evolved through several distinct phases. Pre-war migration included small communities involved in pearling, agriculture and commerce before being disrupted by wartime internment and repatriation. Post-war migration was closely linked to Australia–Japan economic relations and corporate mobility, while later decades saw the emergence of lifestyle migration and, following the Fukushima disaster, family- and safety-oriented migration.

The plural term ‘migrations’ signals the diverse and often overlooked trajectories that have long shaped Japanese mobility to Australia. The experiences of working holiday makers, students, mixed-heritage Japanese Australian youths, post-Fukushima migrants, Japanese-Indigenous Australians and LGBTQ+ migrants reveal forms of mobility, settlement and belonging that extend well beyond older expatriate-centred understandings of Japanese migration.

The economic context behind migration has also changed significantly. Since the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the 1990s, wage stagnation, insecure employment and declining purchasing power have weakened expectations of stable middle-class life. The sharp depreciation of the yen against the Australian dollar since 2020 has made the economic gap between Japan and Australia visible in everyday life. These developments suggest a broader shift away from the affluent middle-class migration narratives that once dominated understandings of Japanese mobility.

For many younger Japanese people, moving overseas is no longer simply about lifestyle or cosmopolitan aspiration. Concerns about economic insecurity, limited career prospects and uncertainty about Japan’s future have become increasingly important. Rather than representing a straightforward pursuit of upward mobility, migration is more frequently shaped by a combination of aspiration, insecurity and risk.

At the same time, migration does not necessarily provide the stability or upward mobility many hope for. Educational credentials, English-language ability and overseas experience often fail to translate into secure futures abroad. University-educated Japanese migrants can still find themselves working in hospitality, tourism, agriculture and other temporary sectors despite previous professional careers in Japan.

Japanese media discussions often portray Australia as a destination where young people can earn substantially higher wages than in Japan. Some commentators have described these movements as a new form of dekasegi (‘working away from home’), a term originally used to describe the phenomenon of Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese descent moving to work in Japan. While contemporary migrants differ significantly from the household wage earners historically associated with dekasegi, the popularity of this language reflects growing anxieties about wage stagnation, economic security and social mobility in contemporary Japan.

But the reality is more complicated than a simple story of higher wages abroad. Professional experience gained in Japan is not always easily recognised within Australian labour markets, which often prioritise local experience and accredited expertise. The result is a form of mobility that is increasingly uncertain. Experiences of occupational downgrading, fragmented career pathways and precarious employment challenge the familiar image of the affluent Japanese migrant. This emerging pattern reflects a form of post-middle-class mobility — migration shaped as much by economic insecurity as by aspiration.

Some post-Fukushima migrants experienced similar difficulties. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, many highly educated Japanese professionals relocated to Australia seeking safety and long-term stability for their families. Some built meaningful lives in Australia but later returned to Japan or moved elsewhere in Asia after struggling to establish sustainable professional pathways in Australia.

These changing migration trajectories also raise broader questions about the meaning of community in the Japanese Australian context. Compared with larger and more visible migrant communities, Japanese communities in Australia have often been smaller and more geographically dispersed. Many Japanese residents also do not hold Australian citizenship, shaping how political participation and civic engagement take place.

As a result, everyday forms of participation matter greatly. Community language schools, cultural associations, intercultural families, restaurants, digital networks and local initiatives all help sustain Australia–Japan connections in relatively quiet ways. Yet contemporary long-term Japanese residents, ageing first-generation migrants and mixed-heritage younger generations remain relatively underexamined in Australian migration research, particularly in relation to ageing, care, belonging and everyday civic participation.

The significance of Japanese migrations to Australia lies not only in numbers or economic impact, but also in the everyday relationships and social ties through which people continue to connect the two countries. Understanding contemporary Japanese migration requires moving beyond older assumptions about affluent expatriates and lifestyle migrants. The growing diversity of Japanese migration reflects changing migration opportunities alongside broader transformations within Japanese society itself.

As Australia and Japan build closer strategic ties, these quieter forms of connection deserve greater attention.

Iori Hamada is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Monash University, Australia. This article is based on the book Japanese Migrations to Australia: Transformation and Heterogeneity (Taylor & Francis, 2025).

Published: 18 June 2026

Japan’s anti-piracy engagement in Southeast Asia is often treated as a technical niche, but it should be better understood as a quiet blueprint for regional order-building — one which suggests that the most stabilising form of power may be the kind that reassures rather than intimidates.

When Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Vietnam in May 2026, she did not emphasise military deterrence or alliance politics but instead pledged to cooperate on energy security, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and semiconductors. Takaichi also announced support for crude oil procurement at Vietnam’s Nghi Son refinery under Japan’s Partnership On Wide Energy and Resources Reliance (POWERR Asia), launched in April 2026. This US$10 billion financial framework aims to strengthen regional energy resilience through emergency coordination efforts and long-term structural responses.

Takaichi’s visit exemplifies Japan’s broader strategy to strengthening influence in Southeast Asia — one which focuses on capacity-building to lower political costs. An April 2026 survey indicates the effectiveness of this approach, with 65.6 per cent of Southeast Asian respondents expressing confidence in Japan — higher than the European Union, the United States or China. Trust in Japan peaks where Chinese maritime pressure is most direct — the Philippines and Vietnam indicated some of the highest levels at 77.3 and 67.9 per cent respectively.

Japan’s cooperation with ASEAN on piracy offers a clear window into its strategy. The region is one of the world’s most affected chokepoints, with the Singapore Strait recording 61 piracy and armed robbery incidents in 2024 within a region-wide total of 107, marking a 6 per cent increase from the previous year. Yet ASEAN states do not share a single view of the problem. While Singapore emphasises economic vulnerability, Indonesia treats most incidents as domestic policing matters and the Philippines links piracy to criminality and broader insecurity in its southern seas.

This diversity of threat perceptions within ASEAN turns piracy into an issue serious enough to require cooperation but not politically sensitive enough to provoke anxieties over sovereignty. The Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) reflects these concerns within its design, which embeds voluntary information-sharing instead of joint enforcement.

Japan’s anti-piracy efforts in ASEAN work around these sovereignty constraints. Tokyo’s dependence on Malacca Strait sea lanes gives it a direct stake in regional maritime security, which it addresses by deploying the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) — a civilian agency whose law enforcement mandate avoids the escalation risks associated with naval deployments.

Though the boundary between civilian maritime law enforcement and defence is becoming increasingly blurred, the JCG’s institutional identity has thus far enabled Japan to deliver security assistance without activating fears of militarisation or alignment. Patrol vessels transferred through Japanese official development assistance arrive without armament and training focuses on coast guard capability-building rather than naval operations.

What began as a response to constitutional constraints on military engagement has now evolved into a deliberate strategic choice. Japan diffuses norms through operational and technical practices like shared exercises, legal guidance and reporting procedures. This contrasts with Western conditionality and China’s more coercive maritime posture, making Japan’s model well suited to Southeast Asia.

The Philippines illustrates the centrality of legal harmonisation to Japan’s approach. Through Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Maritime Safety Capability Improvement Project, Manila has strengthened evidence-handling procedures, vessel operation standards and coast guard practices in line with international norms. Instead of altering the strategic balance, Japan’s capacity-building assistance has raised the practical costs of defecting from shared standards, shifting the operating environment.

Vietnam demonstrates Japan’s success in consolidating regional cooperation networks. As an early ReCAAP participant and a core partner in Japan–ASEAN coast guard cooperation, Vietnam has been integrated into real-time incident sharing systems and capacity-building networks. These efforts thicken the region’s governance architecture by building familiarity and routinising information and standards-sharing, raising the costs of strategic defection.

During Takaichi’s May 2026 meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Le Minh Hung in Hanoi, the leaders agreed to advance economic security and maritime law enforcement capacity-building to secure regional stability. Both these domains operate through civilian frameworks, shared technical standards and inter-agency trust. The same institutional tissue that Japan has built over two decades of coast guard cooperation will extend to supply chains if POWERR Asia develops as planned.

But Tokyo’s model is not without its limits. It falls short where non-alignment is valued — in Indonesia, public trust in Japan fell from 61.5 to 47.9 per cent between 2025–26 amid concerns over Tokyo’s alignment with Washington. And whether this remains sustainable as Japan’s military profile rises is an open question, but the JCG’s institutional separation from the defence establishment continues to do significant diplomatic work.

Japan’s approach nevertheless shows how a middle power can shape regional order through predictability, professionalisation and shared standards rather than force. Tokyo’s anti-piracy cooperation with ASEAN states offers a template for regional order-building — one now broadening into critical supply chains.

Nguyen Truong Giang is Doctoral Researcher in International Relations at the Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University.

https://doi.org/10.59425/eabc.1781820000

EAF | Japan | Japan’s maritime strategy quietly reshapes Southeast Asia’s security

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:44 JST, June 11, 2026

The proposal for adopting new members into the Imperial family is expected to involve revisions to Article 9 of the Imperial House Law, which currently prohibits such adoption, and to Article 15, which stipulates that no person outside the Imperial family can become a member except when a woman becomes Empress as the wife of the Emperor or marries a male member of the Imperial family.

However, because the proposal limits eligible adoptees to male descendants in the male line of the 11 Imperial branches that lost their Imperial status in 1947, there is deep-rooted criticism that this constitutes “discrimination in family origin,” which is prohibited under the current Constitution.

“Even if they are planning a hereditary Imperial family system, the Constitution does not permit the creation of new members of the Imperial family, based on lineage, from among people born as ordinary citizens,” said Hajime Yamamoto, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Keio University.

Hirotane Shikanai, former head of the Compiling Division of the Imperial Household Agency’s Archives and Mausolea Department and currently a visiting researcher at Ochanomizu University, criticized the plan from a historical perspective.

“The Imperial throne has passed to someone as many as five generations away from the previous Emperor in the past, but there is no precedent for making ordinary citizens from a lineage separated by more than 20 generations into members of the Imperial family,” Shikanai said.

Since the end of World War II, Imperial family members have stood by the people from a position of equality and neutrality. In contrast, members of former Imperial branches have been permitted to engage in activities involving the pursuit of private interests.

This has led to problems, and some have even engaged in political activities by advocating for the preservation of the male-line succession. Consequently, anyone seeking to be adopted into the Imperial family would face strict scrutiny from the public.

Asahiro Kuni, a former Imperial family member who lost his Imperial status, takes a cautious stance on the adoption proposal.

“Becoming an Imperial family member is no simple matter. It requires a considerable amount of education,” Kuni said.

Members of the Imperial family other than the families of the Emperor, the Emperor Emeritus and Crown Prince Akishino are said to be eligible to act as adoptive parents for new members.

At a 2002 press conference, the now Emperor said that living with his parents and growing up watching them was “truly a blessing.” Prince and Princess Hitachi, who are included among the potential adoptive parents, are in a position to align with that sentiment.

However, Prince Hitachi is 90 years old, and Princess Hanako is 85. Other Imperial family members are relatives of Prince Mikasa, the youngest brother of Emperor Showa, and do not belong to the Emperor’s direct line under the system that the Emperor shall be the symbol of the state.

A former senior official of the Imperial Household Agency, who has served the Imperial family since the Showa era (1926-1989), said: “Education for adopted children — regarding how to be an emperor or member of the Imperial family — will be indispensable. The adoption proposal must be handled cautiously, taking into account the wishes of the Imperial family as a whole.”

Discuss core issues

Isao Tokoro, a professor emeritus at Kyoto Sangyo University who is an expert on the Imperial family system, said: “It is praiseworthy that a certain conclusion was reached as a draft summery. The proposal allowing female members of the Imperial family who were born and raised within the Imperial family to retain their status after marriage should be institutionalized promptly.

“However, it is regrettable that the draft summary does not address the status of their husbands or children.”

Tokoro also said: “It was unavoidable to leave some ambiguities in the adoption proposal — which involves many historical and constitutional issues — in order to reach a conclusion. However, the still-ambiguous elements about the eligibility for the throne of female Imperial family members, adopted children and their respective children are at the heart of a stable Imperial succession. That stable succession is the starting point of the discussions.

“It’s necessary to continue talking about this.”

By Makoto Hattori

8:00 JST, June 6, 2026

Digital technology now provides instant access to a variety of information and handles tasks such as summarizing, translating and analyzing it. As the technology advances, however, one thing that is increasingly important is the human capacity to keep asking, “Is this really the right thing to do?” Beyond simply using digital devices for convenience, people must be able to interpret information, evaluate it critically, think about it independently, and put it to meaningful use. Discussions surrounding Japan’s next national curriculum standards are raising a fundamental question: How can schools cultivate these abilities through expanded information education at the elementary, junior high and high school levels?

In late May, I visited the elementary school attached to Miyagi University of Education in Sendai. I chose to cover the school because it has been offering an experimental subject called Information Studies since 2023 as part of a national research and development project for schools. In doing so, it is already putting into practice the systematic information education that is expected to be introduced in the next national curriculum revision.

Students in the first through fourth grades receive 20 hours of Information Studies each year, while fifth- and sixth-graders receive 35 hours. Younger students learn basic computer operations, camera functions and introductory programming through hands-on activities. In the middle grades, they study networks and search systems, and in the upper grades, they progress to topics such as computer architecture, data utilization, AI fundamentals and information ethics. The focus is not merely on using information and communication technology (ICT) devices but on systematically and progressively understanding information technology and the information society itself.

When arranging my visit, I specifically requested to observe a sixth-grade class. My reason was simple: I wanted to see what elementary school students were like after receiving several years of cutting-edge information education.

However, the school also invited me to observe first- and fifth-grade classes. After visiting them, I understood why. The essence of the school’s information education cannot be seen by looking only at sixth graders. Their growth is the result of learning that has accumulated year after year.

In a first-grade classroom, students were engaged in a group activity called “Human Copying,” in which they verbally communicated information contained in pictures. The goal was to help them understand their roles within a group and learn the importance of communication.

One student from each group went into the hallway to view a model illustration posted on the wall. Returning to the classroom, the student described it to teammates, who then colored a picture accordingly. The children repeatedly walked back and forth between the hallway and the classroom, often forgetting colors or making mistakes.

After the activity, the students said things like “It was hard” and “I couldn’t explain the colors very well in words.” At that point, their teacher Narumi Sudo asked, “Can we solve this problem using tablets?” The students quickly replied, “We could take a picture. Then we could communicate the information accurately and quickly.”

Watching this lesson, I felt I was seeing the true starting point of information education. This was not simply a lesson on how to use a camera. Rather, it encouraged students to experience firsthand why information needs to be recorded and what it means to share information accurately. It taught the very role that information plays as a means of communication in human society.

According to Yota Kon, the school’s chief of research, the framework of thinking fostered through Information Studies is “understanding events in daily life and society through the lens of information and its connections.” Unless students engage with the reality that lies behind information, they cannot truly understand information itself.

The sixth-grade lesson reflected that philosophy even more clearly. To understand how computers work, students dismantled old computers and identified the five major components: input, processing, control, memory and output. After the lesson, teacher Yoshitada Nitta explained, “Our goal was to help students realize that a computer is neither a magical box nor a black box.”

Principal Yukimi Kase added, “We want our students not only to adapt to a rapidly changing society but also to become adults capable of steering it themselves.” As I recalled the students excitedly exclaiming, “So this is the CPU!” when they discovered the central processing unit inside the computer, I found myself thinking that this is what information education ought to be.

Today, information literacy is regarded as a foundational competency on par with language ability, and educators are exploring ways to develop it systematically from elementary school through high school and beyond. The current national curriculum standards introduced programming education and the high school subject Information I. Yet implementation varies widely among schools, and in many cases instruction remains limited to operating ICT devices.

Under the next curriculum standards, a new elementary school course tentatively called the “Information Domain” is expected to be established. One distinctive feature is that it aims to develop three elements in an integrated manner: practical use, appropriate handling and understanding of the characteristics of information technologies. This approach builds directly on the practices already being implemented at Miyagi University of Education’s attached school.

A glimpse of what this educational vision could eventually become can be seen at Hinode Gakuen Junior and Senior High School, a private school in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture.

I observed a third-year high school Information II class in which students used generative AI to develop applications. Although the content was highly advanced, what impressed me most was that it went beyond mere programming instruction. Teacher Noriyuki Takeyoshi emphasized, “Information studies is not the same thing as computers.”

During app development projects, students are required to think carefully about whose problems they are trying to solve. “All students in the school” is considered too vague. Instead, they must identify specific users, such as “new students struggling with anxiety” or “teachers having difficulty tracking attendance.” As Takeyoshi explained, “When the target audience is too broad, the people you want to help become blurred.”

The school also offers a unique elective course called Humans and Machines. Drawing on philosophy, psychology and religion, the course examines the relationships among humans, AI and robots. Students are challenged with questions such as: “Humans and machines are different. But are they really?” The course is not simply about technology; it is about reflecting on the relationship between humans, technology and society itself.

Student Noa Nagafuchi, 17, who developed an attendance-management app, remarked: “AI gives general answers, but humans can come up with that one unique idea.” Her classmate Ryusei Nakamura realized that app development couldn’t move forward unless the students first decided what they wanted to create. “We can’t just use the AI’s answers as they are,” he said. “We have to verify whether they’re actually correct.”

I also encountered criticism of information education. An American scholar I once interviewed argued that ICT devices can have harmful effects on children’s physical and psychological development and insisted that learning how to use such technology could wait until university. A French neuroscientist similarly maintained that human brain development depends on building interpersonal relationships and even suggested that highly stimulating digital information may hinder brain development.

Yet whether we like it or not, advanced digital technologies have become embedded in everyday life. Operating digital devices becomes easier every year. Generative AI, once used only by a limited group of people willing to navigate complicated registration procedures, now provides answers in response to simply typing a question into a search box.

AI will undoubtedly become even more capable in the years ahead, taking over an increasing number of tasks that humans currently perform. But that does not mean people should abandon their own questions, aspirations or curiosity.

No matter how rapidly information technology evolves, human beings must continue to judge information within the context of their relationships with others and with society and then act accordingly. I strongly hope that schools will become places where such abilities are nurtured.

Political Pulse appears every Saturday.

Makoto Hattori

Makoto Hattori is a staff writer at the Yomiuri Research Institute.

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:36 JST, June 10, 2026

Digital textbooks can now be recognized as official textbooks after a bill to revise the School Education Law and related laws was passed and enacted by a majority vote of both ruling and opposition parties in a plenary session of the House of Councillors on Wednesday.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry plans to formulate ministerial guidelines as early as this autumn specifying the grades and subjects in which digital textbooks can be introduced. The official use of textbooks under the revised legislation is set to begin in the 2030 academic year or later when new curriculum guidelines take effect. However, there remain numerous outstanding questions regarding the impacts on health and learning.

Under the legislative revision, there are three possible formats for an official textbook — paper, hybrid and digital. Boards of education and other bodies will make decisions regarding the choice of format. The hybrid format is expected to involve scanning QR codes in a paper textbook using learning devices to access related videos and audio.

It has been pointed out that “shallow reading” tends to be a greater problem when using digital formats. Regarding hybrid textbooks, educators have raised concerns that children’s concentration would be disrupted by the need to switch between paper and digital formats. Combined with the impact of smartphones, the increased time spent looking at digital devices could lead to children becoming “overexposed to digital media.”

The guidelines will be reviewed by the education ministry’s panel of experts, which includes elementary, junior high and high school principals, representatives from the textbook industry and cognitive science experts. Ten topics were identified at the first meeting in April, including “discussions based on cognitive science,” “concerns about the decline in handwriting,” “impacts on health such as deterioration in vision” and “the burden on textbook publishers and boards of education.”

Prior to these discussions, Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister Yohei Matsumoto indicated in April that fully digital textbooks would not be permitted for any subject in the fourth grade of elementary school or below, nor for the subjects of Japanese language, social studies and ethics in the fifth grade or above. However, details regarding the balance between the paper and digital components of hybrid textbooks, which are expected to be the most common format in schools, remain undecided.

The Yomiuri Shimbun conducted a survey of elementary school principals who serve as executives in prefectural school principals’ associations in May and received responses from 149. When asked about textbook format, “a hybrid format centered on a paper textbook but supplemented with digital material” was chosen by 80% of the principles as being the most suitable for first and second grade students, 77% for third and fourth grade students and 53% for fifth and sixth grade students. Among educators, there have been many calls for “paper-centered” textbook-based learning.

Going forward, textbook publishers will begin the editing process and new textbooks will undergo screening by the government in fiscal 2028. Boards of education and other bodies will select textbooks in fiscal 2029 and their use will begin sequentially starting with elementary schools in fiscal 2030.

Currently, all the officially recognized textbooks in schools are paper textbooks. These have been reviewed by the government and distributed free of charge. In April, the government approved a bill in a Cabinet meeting to designate digital textbooks as official textbooks, making them subject to screening and free distribution.

By Miho Naganuma / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

6:00 JST, June 6, 2026

Amid the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, the government and oil wholesale companies are increasing the amount of crude oil procured through routes other than via the Strait of Hormuz.

The government has estimated that the oil supply that can be secured, which includes oil released from the national stockpile, should be enough to last until spring next year. Now the government will make efforts to dispel worries over oil supplies because anxiety itself can slow down the economy.

The amount of crude oil procured for Japan in 2025 was 2.36 million barrels per day. Of that amount, 2.22 million barrels, or 94%, came from the Middle East. Most of the oil transported to Japan last year passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Since the effective closure of the strait, the government and oil wholesale companies have expanded procurement of Middle Eastern oil through other routes and have secured more oil in regions other than the Middle East, such as the United States, Latin America and Central Asia.

According to the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry, the amount of oil procured through those alternative routes and sources as of April remained low at 590,000 barrels per day, or 25% of total daily oil procurement last year. However, the amount more than doubled in May to about 1.4 million barrels per day, or 60%.

In mid-May, the government said the amount of oil acquired through the alternative procurement efforts in June would account for more than 70% of total oil supplies. On May 25, Prime Minister Sanae Takachi said the amount would rise further, to about 80%.

In June, the government expects to procure more than eight times as much crude oil from the United States as it did last year. Apparently, the government has secured a new prospect of procuring oil from Africa as well.

Holding down oil reserve releases

As of May 23, Japan’s domestic oil reserves stood at 203 days’ worth. Since the amount left as of April 24 was 212 days’ worth, the amount of stockpiled oil released in one month from late April was nine days’ worth of reserves. This means that alternative ways of oil procurement are holding down releases of national oil reserves.

“We decided to release no more oil from the national stockpile,” Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa said at the House of Councilors’ Economy, Trade and Industry Committee on May 26, stressing the government policy to make no more additional releases of oil from the national reserve.

In addition to the alternative oil procurement, the fact that there have been some cases of crude oil tankers passing through the strait and coming to Japan is also helping to conserve national oil reserves.

One such vessel was the Idemitsu Maru, a crude tanker owned by a subsidiary of major oil distributor Idemitsu Kosan Co. The tanker delivered 2 million barrels of crude oil, which is worth about 80% of the Japan’s daily consumption of crude oil, to an oil refinery in Aichi Prefecture on May 25. A tanker owned by a group company of Eneos Holdings, Inc. also passed through the strait and is now heading toward Japan.

Still, it remains impossible to foresee when all tankers will be able to pass through the strait safely and regularly.

“Japan relies on overseas [sources] for almost all of its oil, so the country must be prepared in case the current situation is prolonged,” said Prof. Koichi Iwama of Wako University, who is well-versed in energy matters. “We must learn lessons from the current crisis and raise our awareness for energy saving.”

By Yukiho Takaichi and Tomoharu Mizuno / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers

16:46 JST, May 19, 2026

Due to the situation in the Middle East, Japan is facing a shortage of naphtha, a petroleum product used as a raw material for many everyday products. The shortage has forced manufacturers to change their food packaging designs or raise prices. Despite the government’s efforts to diversify sources, bottlenecks in the supply chain remain unresolved.

Calbee, Inc. notified major supermarkets and other retailers on May 8 that it would switch to black-and-white packaging for its potato chips and other products due to an unstable supply of printing ink made from naphtha. The snack maker said printing in black and white will halve its ink usage.

Additionally, Nisshin Seifun Welna Inc. will stop printing the cooking time in red on its spaghetti bands.

Lawson, Inc. has switched the lids for its small hot coffees from plastic to paper. The convenience store chain plans to replace the lids at 100 stores this fiscal year.

“We are reviewing all packaging materials,” Lawson President Sadanobu Takemasu said.

Aeon Co. plans to cut back on the use of trays and the number of colors used in packaging for its Topvalu brand.

Restaurant chain Gyoza no Manshu stopped selling refrigerated gyoza dumplings, which come in plastic trays, in the Kanto region this month.

“I can feel the ripple effect,” said a woman in her 60s who came to a store in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture, on Monday, referring to the impact of the naphtha shortage.

Hoarding

Naphtha is refined from crude oil just like gasoline and kerosene. It is processed into ethylene and other products that are then used as raw materials for plastics and synthetic rubber.

The Japan Printing Ink Makers Association said demand for organic solvents used in ink has surged. “There are signs of hoarding,” said Yuichiro Wakatsuki, president of Nippon Paint Holdings Co. A spokesperson for packaging manufacturer Toppan Holdings Inc. said the company has not been able to receive the solvent it ordered.

Japan has long imported over 40% of the naphtha it uses from the Middle East. Supplies have been disrupted by the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The Finance Ministry’s March trade statistics showed imports of naphtha and other volatile oils from the Middle East fell by 36.9% from the previous year. Domestic prices have also risen; the Bank of Japan’s Corporate Goods Price Index in April showed a naphtha price that was 83.2% higher than in February.

Charging for ice packs

The impact is beginning to be felt in retail prices as well. Mizkan Holdings Co. will raise the price of its Kinnotsubu natto as much as 20% from June, due to soaring costs for plastic film and sauce packaging. Takanofoods Co. will raise prices for its Okame Natto brand by 15%.

Many chemical product makers are small and midsize enterprises. Trycompany Co., an ice pack manufacturer in Shizuoka Prefecture, will raise prices by around 20% from June due to rising costs for the nylon and polyethylene used to wrap refrigerants.

From June, Patisserie Framboisier’s store in Gifu will begin charging ¥40 for large ice packs to keep cakes cool. “We want customers to consider whether they really need them and use fewer,” the store said.

Kazutaka Kobara, a senior researcher at the NLI Research Institute, said: “There are many companies downstream of the distribution sector, making it difficult for the government to keep track of them. Financial and other forms of support are needed for small and midsize businesses with little purchasing power.”

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:38 JST, May 29, 2026

The number of international students studying in Japan exceeded 400,000 for the first time in fiscal 2025, a recent survey showed.

Conducted by the Japan Student Services Organization, an independent administrative agency that provides support for international students, the survey also showed that more than 60% of the students were enrolled in Japanese language schools and vocational schools.

It is the first time the figure has exceed 60% since fiscal 2011, the earliest year with comparable data.

The increase has been attributed a growing number of international students aiming to find job opportunities in Japan.

According to the survey, a record-high 408,069 international students studied in Japan during the fiscal year, up 71,361 from the previous year. A breakdown by educational institution showed that 140,174 students were enrolled in Japanese language schools and other Japanese language education institutions, up 32,933 from the previous year, while 106,829 were enrolled in vocational schools, up 30,427.

Meanwhile, 156,593 students were studying at universities and graduate schools, an increase of 7,692 from the previous year.

By country or region of origin, the largest number of students came from China at 131,097, an increase of 7,612 from the previous year. Students from Nepal totaled 100,239, an increase of 35,423, and students from Myanmar came to 29,413, up 12,817, demonstrating significant growth in students from South and Southeast Asian countries.

In 2023, the government announced a plan to raise the number of international students to 400,000 by 2033, looking primarily to attract highly skilled foreign professionals.

Countries such as Nepal and Myanmar have few domestic job opportunities, so many young people aspire to find employment abroad, according to Yuriko Sato, a member of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry’s committee on programs to promote employment of international students.

Vocational schools are popular among such students, requiring fewer years of study than universities and offering hands-on training courses that can lead to employment in Japan, Sato added.

“Partly due to the weak yen, tuition and living costs in Japan are lower than in Europe, the United States and other countries,” said Sato. “Japanese companies, facing a severe labor shortage, are increasingly eager to hire international students. Given the cooling of Japan-China relations, the number of international students from Asian countries other than China is likely to continue rising.”