JAPAN: Human Trafficking & more – 13th Nov 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 13th of November twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Let’s start this edition with a shocking case that recently came to light in Japan, where a Thai mother allegedly sold her twelve-year-old daughter into sexual slavery at a massage parlor in Tokyo. Police first found out when the daughter went to them last week and told them that she had been forced to do sexual acts for the past six months while the massage parlor took money for her services.

Tokyo police arrested the parlor’s manager for coercion under the Labor Standards Act, while Taiwanese authorities at some point arrested the girl’s mother—who left her there before fleeing Japan—for overstaying her visa in Taiwan. Meanwhile, Thai police arrived in Japan on Tuesday the 11th to assist in the investigation.

That’s not the only investigation going on. On Monday the 10th, in the Hyogo prefecture, western Japan, police arrested Takashi Tachibana, the NHK Party leader, for allegedly defaming Hideaki Takeuchi, the late assembly member of the Prefecture who investigated workplace harassment allegations against Governor Motohiko Saito and later committed suicide.

Police said that Tachibana made false public remarks and social media posts in December and January, implying that Takeuchi was under police investigation and facing arrest. Police said the case was very serious and arrested Tachibana because he might try to destroy the evidence.

Trying cases for defamation of those who have already died is rare in Japan, with only two similar cases over the past decade. Tachibana denies wrongdoing and plans to run for mayor of Ito, a city in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan.

Meanwhile, on Friday the 7th, during a Lower House Budget Committee, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi took a firmer stance on Taiwan than previous prime ministers, saying that Japan would respond if the Chinese military took action such as imposing a naval blockade. Takaichi said that, in most cases, she would consider it a threat not just to Taiwan, but to Japan’s security as well.

Jian Xue, the Chinese consul general in Osaka, western Japan, posted a message on Twitter the next day implying Takaichi should be beheaded for her remarks on China.

Minoru Kihara, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, criticized the post, saying it was highly inappropriate for a diplomat. Japan’s Foreign Ministry and its embassy in China officially demanded its removal, and Jian removed the post that same day.

Kihara said Japan has repeatedly raised concerns over Xue’s behavior and will continue pressing Beijing for an explanation and appropriate action.

Other people have a dose of criticism for Takaichi, as well. Some have expressed disappointment that Takaichi became the first female prime minister, criticizing her for not focusing on labor reform and women’s economic struggles.

One writer in particular, Shizuka Wada, argued that Takaichi, despite breaking a gender barrier, holds mostly conservative views. Takaichi’s past remarks on welfare, silence on political corruption, and stance against work-life balance make it hard for feminists to root for her. The author said that symbolic female leadership is hollow without real commitment to improving women’s lives and protecting the socially vulnerable.

Others online disagree, saying that true feminism is about empowering women, whether their views are progressive or not, and that Takaichi becoming prime minister in a society with very few women in power is a huge step forward.

In other news, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun recently talked about a draft of the upcoming economic stimulus package, to be approved by late November. The package will feature rice coupons, expanded wage grants, and subsidies to ease living costs amid inflation.

The plan will likely exceed last year’s nearly fourteen trillion yen budget, equal to about ninety billion dollars. The new stimulus package includes measures like aid for small firms, food banks, utilities, and school lunches, plus a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income households. The government will also invest in industries that are likely to boost the economy overall, like semiconductors, and increase defense spending.

Most economists talking about the drafted plan agreed that the package should be bigger than last year, and it seems like it might be.

Tragically, on Wednesday the 12th, a late-night fire in an Osaka apartment building, western Japan, killed three people, including a caregiver and two residents. The blaze started in a fifth-floor unit. Three men between their sixties and eighties were rescued from the upper floors. Many residents were elderly or disabled.

On a lighter note, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs announced on Tuesday the 11th that a UNESCO advisory panel has recommended adding six Japanese cultural items to some Intangible Cultural Heritage categories. The items include four festivals—from Ibaraki, Niigata, Shiga, and Toyama prefectures—and two crafts: Echizen handmade paper and a special type of high-quality tatami mat weaving. UNESCO will formally review them in December during its meeting in New Delhi, India.

These additions will bring Japan’s total intangible cultural heritage entries to twenty-three. Japan has also nominated a type of calligraphy called shodo for the twenty twenty-six evaluation.

In tech news, the railroad company JR East is testing facial-recognition ticket gates on the Joetsu Bullet Train between Niigata and Nagaoka stations in Niigata Prefecture, central Japan. A tunnel-style gate at each station scans passengers’ faces against pre-registered data, showing green for matches and red for mismatches.

The trial will run through March twenty twenty-six, and the company will check to see if the gates can accurately identify commuters regardless of walking speed or the angle of their face. JR East plans to roll out ticketless gates across all lines within ten years, using facial recognition and smartphone location technology to streamline travel.

Speaking of trains, Osaka Metro reported record profits for the first half of fiscal twenty twenty-five, a lot of the earnings was thanks to the huge number of people who took the subway during the World Expo earlier this year. Operating revenue rose by twenty-five percent to 127 billion yen, which is 820 million dollars. Net profit jumped forty-one percent to twenty-three billion yen (about 150 million dollars)—both the highest since the metro became a private company in twenty eighteen. Passenger numbers reached 528 million, a thirteen percent increase.

In entertainment news, this week, broadcasting network NHK said that about 130 pages of unpublished scripts and creative notes by Isao Takahata, the late animation director, were discovered at his home in June. Written in his twenties, they include early scripts based on folk tales or adapted from other stories. Even though the works are from early in his life, they showcase the director’s rejection of simple good-versus-evil themes, instead focusing on moral nuance and empathy.

Seiji Kano, a scholar, called the find a major discovery, saying it shows the origin of many of the famous movies he worked on later in his life.

Other valuable art that stole headlines this week includes a centuries-old painting of a woman standing in the snow. The painter was the famous Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his Edo-period woodblock prints and paintings.

The painting sold for a record 621 million yen, which is four million dollars, at a Tokyo auction, the highest price ever for his work. The buyer was Nitori, a major home furnishings retailer based in Sapporo. The painting will be displayed at the Otaru Ukiyo-e Museum in Hokkaido Prefecture, northern Japan.

Also in Hokkaido, many residents across the prefecture got to see a red aurora borealis on Wednesday the 12th caused by a geomagnetic storm. Even though northern lights usually appear at latitudes between sixty and seventy degrees (about 250 miles or 400 km south of the North Pole), this particular aurora was around forty-three to forty-four degrees.

Observatories, including the Rikubetsu Space and Earth Science Museum and one in Nayoro, took pictures of the aurora. Check out one of the pictures with the link in the show notes!

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

And now....listen carefully listeners....we mentioned this last week...Rorshok needs to pull in some revenue and if you are hearing this you like what we are doing. So....just in time for the holidays....we are selling t-shirts. Very cool ones. However, there's a problem. The normal way to sell t-shirts is digital ads, which is code for handing money to oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg. The Rorshok you know and love will not do that. So we will sell via personal collections, where real people like you who like the t-shirts, can set up personal collections.....and.....whoever sells the most, will get a free trip to Lisbon in early April. So help us out, be cool, and check the show notes.

Mata Ne!