JAPAN: Cherry-Picked Nuclear Safety Data & more – 8th Jan 2026

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 8th of January twenty twenty-six. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Kicking off this edition, on Sunday the 4th, after the US attack on Venezuela, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae said that Japan’s main priority is to make sure Japanese nationals currently in the country are safe. She said Japan will also work with other allies to help Venezuela restore its democracy and become stable again because Japan is committed to freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and diplomatic efforts.

China, on the other hand, condemned the US, saying that taking President Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody was a violation of international law and the UN Charter. China demanded their immediate release and said the US should address issues through dialogue and negotiation, not fighting.

The Japanese people also had something to say about the attack. On Wednesday the 7th in Nagasaki City, southwestern Japan, local labor groups and the Japanese Communist Party’s prefectural committee organized a protest attended by about sixty people.

The protestors said the US violated international law. Speakers at the protest heavily criticized the US and said that letting powerful militaries act freely undermines global legal norms.

In other news, the Chubu Electric Power Company said on Monday the 5th that employees may have cherry-picked earthquake data to pass safety screenings at its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan. It apologized, but Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said it was a major breach of trust.

The Hamaoka plant, shut down since twenty eleven, is in a region where there tends to be a lot of big earthquakes. The government is seeking to resume operations under stricter rules. A whistleblower alerted regulators in February twenty twenty-five, and the Ministry of Economy told Chubu Electric to submit a report.

The online reaction has been pretty strong, with many saying the company should be charged criminally since nuclear reactor safety can affect an entire prefecture, as seen from the Fukushima disaster in twenty eleven. The more cynical, however, said that considering how many companies are caught lying about safety data, this is just business as usual.

That same day, at Tokyo's Toyosu Market, the New Year’s tuna auction beat a nineteen ninety-nine record price in selling a 240-kilogram or 500-pound tuna from Oma, Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan. Tsukiji Kiyomura, the operator of a popular sushi chain, bought the tuna for 510 million yen, which is three million dollars and about 1.5 times higher than the nineteen ninety-nine price.

The person who caught the tuna was Toyokazu Ito, a sixty-year-old fisherman. He said that the price was dreamlike and hopes that everyone enjoys eating tuna from Oma.

In an update to a story from a previous show, a Japanese court fined actress Ryoko Hirosue 700,000 yen, about 4,000 dollars, for negligent driving and injuring a man. Recall from our show in April last year that Hirosue rear-ended a trailer truck on the Shin-Tomei Expressway in Shizuoka Prefecture, injuring a man who was riding in her car. Apparently, she was going about 185 kilometers or 115 miles per hour at the time.

There was also another incident where, after she went to the hospital, she allegedly attacked a nurse, but police did not prosecute her over this.

Hirosue is a well-known actress who became famous in the nineties, and online opinion is that she got off with a slap on the wrist because she’s a celebrity, when she should have been arrested and her license suspended.

Speaking of car injuries, Osaka police in western Japan are looking for a man in his fifties on suspicion of attempted murder after he drove about 700 meters or almost half a mile with a traffic officer on his car’s hood in Kishiwada City. The incident happened on Wednesday the 7th in a shopping arcade where vehicles were banned.

The officer suffered bruises before falling off the car, and the driver fled. Police later found a similar car abandoned in a neighboring city.

Next up, Casey Baseel, a journalist for SoraNews24, wrote about a nationwide survey of Japanese mayors asking for their opinion about foreigners immigrating or traveling to their towns and cities. Seventy percent of the mayors said rising numbers of foreign residents and visitors have an impact, mostly a mix of positive and negative.

The biggest benefit that mayors talked about was that foreigners boosted tourism, helped ease labor shortages, and increased diversity. However, cons were cultural clashes, public safety, and overtourism. More than half of the mayors considered foreign residents essential, and many supported government programs that help foreigners integrate into Japanese society.

Check out the full essay in English with the link in the show notes!

On a related note, there have been some mayors in Mie Prefecture, western Japan, who pushed back against a recent prefectural proposal to stop hiring foreign staff in government. Two of these mayors, Noriko Suematsu, the mayor of Suzuka, and Narutaka Ito, the mayor of Kuwana, each held separate press conferences on Tuesday the 6th and said that they will keep hiring foreigners as they see fit, saying that it was a good way to get diverse talent, support coexistence among Japanese natives and immigrants, and address labor shortages.

Suzuka, home to residents from sixty-eight countries, has allowed permanent residents to apply for certain city jobs since two thousand one. The mayor of Iga also put in his two cents, saying on Monday the 5th that Mie Prefecture’s proposal sends the message that Japanese people should exclude or even shun foreigners.

Meanwhile, an upper five-magnitude earthquake hit Tottori and Shimane Prefectures in western Japan on Tuesday the 6th. The shaking was bad enough that some people got injured when they fell down, at least five of them had to go to the hospital. Some places lost power temporarily, but fortunately, there were no tsunamis.

In science news, researchers at Gifu University in Gifu Prefecture, central Japan, are inventing new ways to collect and analyze airborne DNA. They showed that vacuumed air from a sealed room can contain enough genetic material to identify people several yards away. Moving around or coughing a lot increases the amount of DNA thrown around. More importantly, the researchers said that the DNA can stay on surfaces for years, which can reveal who was present in a given room, where they were, and for how long.

They said that these findings could be very useful for criminal investigations and wildlife detection, but there are still some problems they have to figure out in collecting the DNA before it’s ready to be used in the field.

In news regarding a more old-school type of tech, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun recently wrote that Fukuda Hamono Kogyo, a century-old knife-making company in Seki City, won the Chubu Science and Technology Center’s grand prize for creating the world’s first mass-produced kitchen knives made of cemented carbide, a material second only to diamonds in hardness.

The knife in question is called KISEKI, which in Japanese means miracle. The company launched it in twenty twenty-three, and it became very popular despite high prices and long delivery waits. The company spent two years perfecting materials and sharpening methods.

And to wrap up this edition, Japan began twenty twenty-six with a record low in the number of New Year greeting cards being sent. There were only around 360 million deliveries, twenty-six percent fewer than last year and roughly one-sixth of the peak level. Sending New Year cards has been a long-time tradition in Japan, similar to sending Christmas cards in the US, but fewer people have been keeping that tradition in recent years.

There’s less reason to buy premade cards because people in Japan nowadays can easily customize one through any of the many apps designed specifically for creating postcard-size greeting cards. And, since an image of the card can be sent through messaging apps like Line or over social media, it’s much cheaper than buying a bunch of physical cards and paying for postage.

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

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Mata Ne!