JAPAN: Diplomacy & more – 7th May 2024

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 7th of May twenty twenty-four. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

It was a busy week for international diplomacy. First, on Thursday the 2nd, the defense chiefs from Japan, the United States, Australia, and the Philippines met in Hawaii over China's continued efforts to block Philippine ships in the East and South China Sea. The four nations pledged to work together to make the Indo-Pacific region free. Japan, the US, and Australia also agreed to conduct joint fighter-jet training, while the US and Australia will support Japan in creating counter-strike measures.

Japan and the US discussed extended deterrence, including nuclear weapons, as part of their defense cooperation.

Japan wants to strengthen its ties with the Global South, a region that includes South America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

To do so, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited Brazil to meet with President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. They held their meeting on Friday the 3rd, marking the first time in eight years that a Japanese prime minister has visited Brazil. Kishida aimed to strengthen cooperation between the two countries on global issues, especially regarding climate change, as Brazil holds the presidency of the Group of Twenty this year.

During the talks, Kishida said he supported protecting the Amazon rainforest and wanted to provide financial aid to prevent deforestation and restore degraded land in the region.

Just as Kishida left for South America, Yoko Kamikawa, the Foreign Minister, returned from her five-day tour of Africa on Wednesday the 1st. She visited Madagascar, Cote d'Ivoire, and Nigeria and talked with the foreign ministers from each country about possible economic exchanges and maintaining international order in the Indo-Pacific region.

Kamikawa said she wanted to work with African nations to create peace, stability, and mutual wealth.

On economic news, on Sunday the 5th, during the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Tbilisi, Georgia, Shunichi Suzuki, the Finance Minister, announced that Japan would donate over a billion dollars to the bank to help poorer nations fight climate change.

Suzuki said that Asia-Pacific countries’ economies are important in helping global economic growth, but the nations face many difficulties, including poverty and climate change-induced disasters. He said Japan wanted to help these countries, especially fellow island nations, and that the Asian Development Bank played an important part in regional prosperity. He also said that Japan planned to host the bank’s sixtieth annual meeting in twenty twenty-seven, which would be the first time Japan has hosted the gathering in ten years.

Not all international news was so positive, though. On Sunday the 5th, Song Kim, the North Korean Ambassador, condemned the US, Japan, and other nations’ pledge to put sanctions on his country.

The UN Security Council imposed sanctions on North Korea fifteen years ago, but they expired on the 30th of April after Russia vetoed renewing them. After that, the European Union and forty-nine other countries issued a joint statement saying they needed to create something new to monitor North Korea, which has recently been developing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The North Korean ambassador warned the US and its allies to stop being so hostile or face defeat, though he didn’t make any outright threats.

Moving on to domestic news, on Tuesday the 30th, the Immigration Services Agency changed some of its student residency rules after a Tokyo University reportedly lost contact with over 1,600 foreign students in twenty nineteen. They eventually found the students working illegally with only student visas.

Under the new rules, schools must have a system that tracks students’ attendance and part-time job records. If a school doesn’t meet these standards, it won’t be able to give student residence status to foreigners until it fixes its system. Also, anyone applying for student visas by learning Japanese has to enroll in a government-certified language school.

The Immigration Services Agency put these rules in place after the number of international students in Japan rose above pre-pandemic levels to over 167,000 in twenty twenty-two.

In business, some construction companies started using digital twin technology to build virtual copies of buildings and their surroundings.

One construction company called Taisei used digital twin tech to recreate Tokyo's Shinjuku Station area, taking into account building height, tree placement, and the nearby road. They could even put high-rise buildings into the program to figure out how the new structures might impact their surroundings, like blocking sunlight.

Shimizu, another construction company, collaborated with Eiheiji Temple in Fukui Prefecture to digitally recreate temples. By looking at detailed, 3D images of the temple, they could plan the best way to preserve the historical buildings.

In entertainment news, an anonymous source discovered a silent, animated film from nineteen twenty-three among the belongings of a recently deceased movie fan. The film showed children eating and seemed to be an educational film about dental health.

A company known for selling daily necessities produced the film, and Seitaro Kitayama, an animator from the early twentieth century, animated it.

Since most Japanese films from that era no longer exist, examining this century-old movie can help people learn about early anime production techniques and how much animation has changed over the past century.

That wasn’t the only classic in the news. A record store in Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, held an auction on Monday the 6th where they sold a copy of a Beatles vinyl music album for over a million yen, or nearly 8,000 dollars. The album had a brown Japanese translation strip that made it especially valuable.

Japanese collectors often base the value of Beatles vinyl albums on the color of the translation strip, and brown is especially rare. Yasuhiro Honda, a Beatles expert, said he’d only seen three other albums with a brown strip in thirty-five years. One of the auction’s attendees said that the album was a bargain, even though it cost one million yen.

On Thursday the 2nd, the Fujiko Hemming Foundation announced that Fujiko Hemming, a famous classical pianist, died at the age of ninety-two from pancreatic cancer on the 21st of April. She had been studying the piano ever since she was young and officially debuted at seventeen years old. In nineteen ninety-nine, news network NHK aired a documentary about her life around the same time as Hemming released her debut album, La Campanella, which sold over two million copies.

Hemming performed worldwide for famous orchestras, even after turning ninety years old.

Speaking of turning old… bitter taste receptors may have been around a lot longer than science originally thought. Japanese researchers published a study in the scientific journal Current Biology saying that some species of sharks and rays have taste receptors that can detect bitterness, similar to human taste buds. The researchers believe these receptors originated around 450 million years ago. Sharks and rays evolved from a fish species that had these receptors. The fish developed them to tell the difference between toxic and non-toxic as they began eating new and different foods.

Evolution can happen anytime and anywhere - including right now. An international team of researchers, including scientists from Japan, found an ocean alga in an early evolutionary stage that can take nitrogen from the air and use it. While some microorganisms like bacteria have been able to convert nitrogen this way, it’s the first time scientists have found animals or plants that can do it.

Adding nitrogen to soil is extremely important in farming, and with this discovery, farmers might not need to use fertilizers anymore.

And that’s it for this week! Thanks your joining us!

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Mata Ne!