JAPAN: Massive Expressway Pileup & more – 31st Dec 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 31st of December twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Friday the 26th, a massive pileup on the Kan-Etsu Expressway in Gunma Prefecture, in Japan’s east, killed two people and injured twenty-six. Five of those twenty-six had serious injuries. The crash involved sixty-seven vehicles, including twenty that caught fire.

The accident began when a truck skidded. Another car hit it from behind, and partly because of the heavy snow and icy conditions, it started a chain reaction. Officials shut the expressway down for two days to clear the 300-meter or almost 1,000-foot-long stretch of road. They reopened the road on Sunday the 28th.

If only the tragedy stopped there. Also on Friday the 26th, a former employee of a rubber factory in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, went on a stabbing spree at the factory. He stabbed and sprayed people with an unknown liquid that might have been bleach, injuring fifteen people in total. Five of the victims needed emergency care, but all remained conscious. Police arrested the thirty-eight-year-old suspect, who wore a gas mask and carried a survival knife.

Some online blamed Japan’s harsh work culture for the former employee going ballistic, saying that the country is known for having a terrible work-life balance that pressures workers and causes stress. However, other users said that all modern societies have these kinds of violent attacks, even those with better work cultures.

Meanwhile, Japan’s Cabinet approved a record-high defense budget on Friday the 26th. The budget is over nine trillion yen, which is fifty-seven billion dollars, a nine percent increase compared to last year. It’s focused on strike-back capability, coastal defense, and unmanned systems, and is done following the recent rising tensions, particularly with China.

The plan is part of a five-year program to raise defense spending to two percent of GDP.. Funding prioritizes long-range missiles, drones, southwestern island defenses, and joint development of fighter jets with Britain and Italy, while boosting the domestic defense industry. However, China has criticized this move.

That wasn’t the only record-setting budget. The draft budget for fiscal twenty twenty-six as a whole is 122 trillion yen, which is 780 billion dollars, reflecting Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s promises to increase the money supply through government measures. Part of the funds will come from issuing new bonds worth twenty-nine trillion yen, about 185 billion dollars.

Takaichi needed other political parties’ help in order to push this budget, so it also includes measures from those parties, such as the Democratic Party for the People's policy to raise the nontaxable income.

While some are optimistic about the new economic measures, plenty of people are skeptical. Many online say that creating a huge budget is the same thing the government has been doing over the last several years. So, as for whether it will improve the economy, many say they will believe it when they see it.

For a different kind of record-setting, the Environment Ministry said that there were 9,800 bears captured between April and October across thirty-one prefectures, the highest since tracking began in two thousand six. About seventy percent of these captures took place in the northeastern prefectures of Akita, Aomori, and Fukushima.

The central government plans to offer financial support to local governments to hire hunters, increase bear captures after hibernation, and create areas separating human communities from bear habitats.

On a related note, Chiba Prefecture in eastern Japan is the only prefecture on the main, central island of Honshu with no wild bears and no evidence that they ever lived there. Hokkaido Prefecture in the north has brown bears and almost all of the rest of the country has moon bears, but Chiba remains bear-free because of its unique geography.

Tourism officials recently said that they believe this is the reason why they have seen a rise in visitors this year, especially when compared to other places that have had a drastic increase in bear sightings.

Bears aren’t the only animals being captured. The Tama Zoological Park, located in Hino, Tokyo, said on Tuesday the 30th that one of its wolves escaped from its enclosure on Sunday the 28th. The wolf likely climbed the plants growing on the wall to get out, and the zoo had to evacuate guests while they found the wolf and put it back.

The zoo said they are going to take measures to prevent another escape, and will reopen on Friday the 2nd of January.

Meanwhile, Hiroki Sugita, a professor and author of a book about Japan’s nuclear weapons policy, recently wrote about the remarks that a security advisor made about Japan needing nuclear weapons. Recall from last week’s show that many anti-nuclear groups protested those remarks.

That same advisor later rolled back his statement by saying that Japan possessing nuclear weapons was unrealistic, but Sugita wrote that this was not actually as reassuring as it sounded.

He pointed out that the fact that someone working so closely with the prime minister talked to her about getting nuclear weapons suggests that this is something the government is seriously considering. However, both China and the US would be unhappy about this, and since the Japanese public is largely anti-nuclear, Japan’s government would have an uphill battle trying to arm itself.

You can read the full article with the link in the show notes!

In an update to a story from last week’s show, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA said on Thursday the 25th that the second stage of the H3 rocket and the satellite it was carrying likely reentered Earth’s atmosphere within about four hours after the failed launch. JAXA said that most of the parts probably burned up in the atmosphere, but some of the debris might have fallen into the ocean. Fortunately, no one has reported any damage from falling objects.

In other news, the NHK Foundation, created by the broadcasting network of the same name, presented proposals aimed at preventing misinformation and disinformation amid growing information overload. The proposals came from the general public, with 246 people across Japan submitting their ideas.

NHK gave prizes to the best proposals, with Natsuki Furui receiving the top prize for an idea encouraging people to save impactful news and social media posts, record their thoughts and feelings about those, and come back to them a year later when the full facts of that news story are already out and over with. Furui said that this would help people judge things more calmly and think about the long-term effects of stories rather than just reacting emotionally in the moment.

Other awardees included TDAI Lab, a company that proposed a tool to detect logical flaws in emotionally driven social media posts.

Closing this edition with some health updates, doctors studying evacuees after the twenty twenty-four Noto Peninsula Earthquake found that cardboard beds helped reduce blood clot cases. Among nearly 1,300 evacuees examined in four hard-hit locations, nine percent had blood clots, far above normal levels. However, Noto Town, which introduced cardboard beds about two weeks after the quake, had the lowest rate at six percent.

The doctors said that not sleeping directly on the cold floor and being able to stand up more easily kept evacuees more active, likely lowering the risk of blood clots. They said people with fewer resources and those with lower incomes tend to suffer the most during emergencies since their only option may be to stay in an evacuation shelter for a long time until they can find a new place. However, making sure that shelters have a lot of cardboard beds can help such people.

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

Before we head out, we just want to wish you an awesome twenty twenty-six! Thanks so much for listening, sharing the show, and being part of the Rorshok community.

Mata Ne!