JAPAN: First Female Prime Minister & more – 23rd Oct 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 23rd of October twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Tuesday the 21st, Japan officially elected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. This was mainly thanks to the Liberal Democratic Party partnering with the Japan Innovation Party a few days before, which gave the ruling party enough votes to ensure Takaichi’s victory.

After becoming prime minister, she announced plans for a stimulus package to ease rising living costs, including abolishing the provisional gasoline tax and raising the nontaxable income threshold. She also said she would address the impact of US tariffs, talk with other political parties on shared policies, and begin revising Japan’s security strategy. She plans to meet world leaders at upcoming summits and hopes to build trust with US President Donald Trump.

Sohei Kamiya, the Sanseito party leader, criticized the growing number of national university graduates joining foreign companies. During a rally in Sendai, northeastern Japan, on Saturday the 18th, he said taxpayer-funded education should serve national interests, not foreign-owned corporations operating in Japan.

However, many online blasted him for this speech, saying that Japan’s national universities are not publicly funded, and only receive some government subsidies, such as research grants.

Particularly on Twitter, some pointed out that this is the same political party that says it will establish national universities in every prefecture, making this speech calling for reduced university funding very contradictory.

Meanwhile, the Environment Minister said on Friday the 17th that Japan will strengthen measures to control its growing bear population after a record number of fatal attacks this year, which we have reported on in previous shows The government had introduced new population control efforts in April twenty twenty-four, but even so, bear sightings and attacks have only gone up, with seven deaths so far this fiscal year.

The announcement follows several incidents, including a suspected fatal attack in Iwate Prefecture, in the north, and an attack on a tourist in Gifu, central Japan. In September, the country eased restrictions to allow emergency shootings of bears entering populated areas, with Sendai becoming the first city to shoot a bear under the new rule.

That same day, on Friday the 17th, the farm ministry released a report on a survey of over 8,000 rice farmers in Japan and found that about twenty-nine percent plan to expand their acreage for next year’s harvest, while fifty-six percent will maintain current levels. The remaining fifteen percent either said that they would decrease acreage or hadn’t yet decided.

Rice prices remain near record highs despite government stockpile releases. This is a slight drop compared to this year’s crop, where fifty-nine percent kept the same acreage and thirty-four percent expanded.

Even though there’s a high demand for rice, some of the problems farmers are facing include labor shortages, price uncertainty, and high equipment costs. Looking ahead five years, eleven percent plan to scale back or quit farming, with nearly half saying the reason is that they don’t have anyone to pass the farm to.

Speaking of looking ahead, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department is looking for new ways to reduce fraud, and recently developed a new feature for its Digi Police app to block suspicious overseas calls. This move follows the increase in scam phone calls made from abroad.

The new feature will be officially added in December, and will mute calls from international numbers not saved in a user’s contacts. Police hope this will help reduce phone fraud, which caused almost sixty billion yen, which is nearly 400 million dollars, in losses between January and June — over twice as much compared to last year. About seventy percent of scam calls came from overseas.

Police said that while the app’s new function might cause a little inconvenience, they said it could greatly lower the risk of getting scammed over the phone.

In other legal news, the Chiba District Court in eastern Japan sentenced Yuta Ishino, a judo instructor, to twenty-two years in jail for sexually assaulting and abusing students at his judo school. The court found that between twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-four, Ishino drugged several girls under thirteen with sleeping pills at judo training camps and assaulted them while they were unconscious.

Overall, those online were happy that Ishino was being sent to jail, saying that it was a sign that Japan as a whole was starting to take sexual assault more seriously, even though it has an unfortunate history of ignoring or minimizing victims of sexual assault. However, it also raised the issue of whether the sentence was long enough, considering his crime and the age of the children involved, saying that Japan still has a way to go in properly punishing sexual predators.

Two other men will soon be seeing punishment. Tokyo police recently arrested two demolition workers, one of whom was a former director of a demolition company, for allegedly dumping over 420 kilograms or 926 pounds of industrial waste at a demolition site in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward in November twenty twenty-four.

An anonymous source tipped police off in February, and they found debris, glass, and plastic buried about 1.5 meters (five feet underground). The suspects deny the charges.

In a complete one-eighty compared to last week, the Nikkei stock index closed at a record high on Tuesday the 21st, rising to almost 50,000 points, and experts say it’s mainly because investors are optimistic over the new prime minister’s economic measures. There’s still some market uncertainty over how the Japan Innovation Party, the ruling party’s new partner, will influence the economy.

In science news, Yui Kimiya, a Japanese astronaut, photographed Comet Lemmon from the International Space Station and shared the images and a time-lapse video on Twitter on Tuesday the 21st. The video shows the comet’s glowing tail and nearby satellites. Check it out with the link in the show notes!

The US Mount Lemmon Survey discovered the comet in January, and found it’s approaching the sun for the first time in about 1,300 years. It will be closest on the 8th of November. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan says it may be visible in Japan around that time in the western sky.

You know what else is visible? Snow on top of Mount Fuji. The first snowfall was spotted on Thursday the 23rd, twenty-one days later than average. However, it was fifteen days earlier than last year, which, at the time, set the record for the latest snowfall on Mount Fuji since records began in eighteen ninety-four.

People online said that it used to be normal for the mountain’s snowfall to begin in late September or early October. Many also said that autumn felt very short, since only a few days ago, many parts of Japan were experiencing warm days, but in the past week temperatures seemed to drop suddenly as if winter were already starting.

Good news for those with a sweet tooth out there: Meiji plans to launch chocolate-flavored foods made with cell-cultured cacao in the US as early as twenty twenty-six. They’re turning to the lab for cacao because cacao prices have tripled since twenty twenty-three due to poor harvests in West Africa caused by extreme weather, disease, and market speculation.

Partnering with US startup California Cultured, Meiji is developing products using lab-grown cacao cells. The company hopes the technology will help create more supply and lower prices. However, the lab-made cacao isn’t perfect yet, as it still tastes and smells different from natural cacao. Researchers are still working to improve it.

Finishing off with an update to a sports story from last week’s show, Grand Champion Hoshoryu won the five-day Grand Sumo Tournament in London on Sunday the 19th, defeating fellow Grand Champion Onosato. Both wrestlers entered the match without losing any other battles during the tournament.

Hoshoryu thanked fans in Britain, Japan, and beyond, and called London a wonderful place. Hakkaku, the Japan Sumo Association Chairman, said he was relieved that no one suffered any injuries and that overseas tournaments help wrestlers grow.

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

This past Saturday, we held a trial of a new kind of gathering. Highly structured but radically equal, very wild. No keynote speakers, no talking heads. Those who join decide who they talk to, but without knowing the identity of who they will meet, they propose and decide what they will discuss. Like we said. Wild, interested in what it was, check the show notes and if you’re interested, we can help you hold one in Japan.

Mata Ne!