JAPAN: Assault Investigation & more – 3rd April 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 3rd of April twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

In an update to a story from previous shows, a third-party investigation recently concluded that in June twenty twenty-three, Masahiro Nakai, a former boy band member, sexually assaulted a former Fuji TV announcer. He then tried to pay her hush money of one million yen, which is 6,700 dollars, but she rejected it.

The investigation criticized Fuji TV executives, saying they didn’t understand sexual violence at all and didn’t do anything to help victims. They also found a lot of sexual harassment going on in the company. Fuji TV initially dismissed Nakai’s assault as a private matter, but the investigators said that Nakai targeted his victim because they were co-workers. Executives also allowed Nakai to continue appearing on TV while removing her from her TV program.

The Fuji TV president apologized at a press conference after the report came out, but many suspected that he was just trying to protect the company and wasn’t really sorry.

However, they’re not the only company feeling the heat. Sukiya, a popular restaurant chain known for its beef rice bowls, shut down a good chunk of its 2,000 outlets on Monday the 31st of March for deep cleaning after two recent incidents of customers finding pests in their food. The outlets will reopen on Friday the 4th of April.

The first instance took place a few weeks ago when a customer found a rat in a bowl of soup in Tottori, western Japan. Even though news of the rat had been going around on social media, it wasn’t until another customer found an insect in their food in a Tokyo outlet, on Friday the 30th of March, that Sukiya took it seriously.

Sukiya apologized for the incidents and said they’d implement stricter hygiene measures. The company’s stock dropped after confirming the rat incident.

Next up, a revised law came into effect on Tuesday the 1st of April to combat online defamation. The revised law says that social media platforms have to make it easier for people to report defamatory posts and comments. It also said platforms must delete reported content within a set timeframe, giving the content’s user a chance to dispute the report. For most posts and comments, it’s seven days; for election-related content, two days.

The twenty twenty suicide of Hana Kimura, a wrestler and cast member on a reality TV show, who faced online harassment, helped the law gain support in hopes of reducing harmful content online.

While many like the idea of the law, skeptics raised questions about who would be deciding what is considered defamatory and if it would be a truly fair, unbiased process that would protect individuals from online abuse.

In a different form of online abuse, someone who is likely very mentally unwell sent 8,000 threatening emails to Ayaka Yoshida, a member of the Mie Prefectural Assembly, over the course of three days. Yoshida filed a report with the police, who found the emails were sent every minute from the same address.

The emails started after Yoshida posted last week on Twitter that menstrual pads for women should be available in public bathrooms, just the same as toilet paper. The emails included death threats criticizing her post.

Reactions to this mostly included insults to the sender, accusing him of misogyny, being a bigoted extremist, and never having met a woman before.

In international news, the US said that it would impose twenty-four-percent reciprocal tariffs on Japan. Shigeru Ishiba, the prime minister, said that he was disappointed over the US’s decision, and that the move would significantly impact economic relations between Japan and the US, as well as the global economy. However, he remains open to meeting with Donald Trump, the US president, to talk it over.

That’s not the only international story. Japan has sent thirty-two medical workers, including doctors and nurses, to Myanmar on Wednesday the 2nd of April. This was done as part of its emergency aid following a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck central Myanmar last week, killing over 2,700 people. Two Japanese nationals were also injured, and one is still missing.

Before this, Japan sent 240 tarpaulin sheets and 450 tents. It also plans to send additional relief supplies, including hygiene kits and water purifiers. Takeshi Iwaya, the Foreign Minister, said Japan is committed to humanitarian support.

If only there was more humanitarian support in Japan’s detention centers. The family of Wishma Sandamali, a Sri Lankan woman who died in a immigration detention facility in Japan in twenty twenty-one, is suing the government for medical neglect and demanding the full release of security footage showing her time in custody.

Authorities detained her for overstaying her visa. While in detention, she repeatedly said that she was sick and asked for medical assistance before dying at thirty-three years old. She was the seventeenth person to die in a Japanese detention facility since two thousand seven.

Officials have only released five hours of footage, despite having a total of 295, saying that they can’t release any more because of security concerns.

Meanwhile, interest is dropping in the Osaka Expo now that Japan Airlines will no longer be making a demo flight showcasing its new air taxi. However, three other operators, including ANA Holdings, owner of All Nippon Airlines, still plan to have their own air taxi demo flights. At first, these companies were thinking of offering commercial air taxi services at the Expo, but switched to demonstrations because there were so many delays in aircraft development and safety certification.

The online response to this news was a mixture of disappointment and sarcasm, as it seems to be just another failure added to the pile leading up to the Osaka Expo, which is set to start on the 13th of April.

Shifting gears, the Cultural Affairs Agency plans to recognize chefs, brewers of traditional rice wine, specifically toji sake, and other food artisans as living national treasures. Previously, this status was only given to performing artists and masters of craft techniques. The agency will make this change in early fiscal twenty twenty-five and introduce a new category called life culture to preserve valuable food-related skills.

This follows a twenty twenty-one legal revision allowing food traditions like traditional sake brewing and Kyoto cuisine to be registered as intangible cultural assets. UNESCO’s naming of sake brewing as an intangible cultural heritage last year also likely influenced this decision.

In science, Japanese researchers from Kyoto and Nagoya universities have figured out how cancer cells spread, a discovery that could lead to new treatments.

Their study found that inside a tumor, immune cells called neutrophils gather and release hydrogen peroxide, which in turn creates hot spots. When cancer cells detect a hot spot, they detach from where they are and try to get away, moving to another part of the body—which ends up with the cancer spreading.

Researchers found that when they removed the neutrophils, hydrogen peroxide hot spots went down, making the cancer cells less likely to move.

In entertainment news, OpenAI's latest image-generation update on ChatGPT has sparked a wave of AI artwork being posted to social media in Studio Ghibli’s famous drawing style.

However, with this flood of AI work, an old clip of Hayao Miyazaki, a renowned animation film director and co-owner of Studio Ghibli, went viral on Twitter. In the video, Miyazaki reacts to an AI-generated animation, calling it grotesque and lacking understanding of human emotions. He criticizes the use of AI in animation altogether, saying he would never use it and calling it an insult to life itself.

Speaking of OpenAI, on Tuesday the 1st of April, SoftBank Group said it was making a deal with OpenAI worth up to forty billion dollars. One of the things SoftBank hopes to do with the company is to create and sell generative AI to Japanese businesses.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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Mata Ne!