JAPAN: Massive Forest Fire & more – 6th Mar 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 6th of March twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

The forest fires in northern Japan continued to spread until Thursday the 6th of March, and proved to be the country’s worst wildfire in fifty years. The fires burned 2,900 hectares in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, northern Japan, damaging eighty buildings and killing at least one person. Nearly 4,500 residents had to evacuate.

Military helicopters and 2,000 firefighters spent over a week trying to put out the fire, but it was really hard because so much of the forest was dry from record-low rainfall last month.

Roki Sasaki, a baseball star who had gone to high school in Ofunato, donated 500 bedding sets and ten million yen, which is 67,000 dollars, to help evacuees.

Rainfall that began on Wednesday the 5th helped to stop the fire from spreading, but didn’t put it out entirely. Firefighters and helicopters resumed efforts on Thursday the 6th, and it now appears to be under control, although authorities have not yet made an official announcement.

Separate, smaller fires broke out in two other prefectures, Yamanashi and Nagano, both in central Japan. In Yamanashi, a fire started in late February when a resident was burning dead grass. The blaze burned 120 hectares, and it was not extinguished until Monday the 3rd of March. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Around the same time, on Saturday the 1st of March, a forest fire broke out in Nagano, and the city government had to call helicopters from neighboring prefectures to help put it out. The fire injured at least one person, a resident in his seventies.

If only fires were the only reason for anxiety; on Friday the 28th of February, Teikoku Databank, which keeps tabs on almost 200 major food manufacturers, said that the price of over 2,000 food and drink items would likely increase by an average of sixteen percent in March.

Processed foods will see the most increases, with over 1,000 items impacted. The price increases are mostly because of the weak yen, rising costs of raw materials, and higher logistics and labor expenses. This marks the fourth year in a row with over 10,000 price increases. The total for twenty twenty-five might even end up with over 20,000 items suffering price hikes, which is way more than the 12,500 items in twenty twenty-four.

Speaking of prices going up, Karuizawa, a resort town in Nagano Prefecture, announced on Thursday the 27th of February that it plans to introduce an accommodation tax on June twenty twenty-six. The tax will apply to tourists staying in hotels and inns, with rates varying by accommodation cost. Visitors may pay an additional 300 to 800 yen per night, equivalent to an extra of two to five dollars.

The tax will likely make an extra 700 to 900 million yen, which is four to six million dollars, every year. The town hopes to use the extra money to make the town look a little better by burying power cables underground, and also to make it easier for tourists to use the local medical system.

Nagano Prefecture as a whole is thinking of creating a similar tax that will apply to all of its towns and cities, not just Karuizawa.

Some places implement taxes, while others, like Russia, bandy with bans. On Monday the 3rd of March, Russia’s foreign ministry announced that it has indefinitely banned nine Japanese citizens, including Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi. The ministry said it did this in response to the sanctions that Japan has been imposing for the past three years over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.

The other eight people on the list include Japan’s ambassador to Ukraine, former ambassadors, senior officials, and business leaders from major Japanese companies.

Of course, this isn’t anything new, since Russia has banned 460 Japanese individuals over the past three years, including the prime minister.

In an update to a story from previous shows, a Hyogo prefectural assembly panel announced on Wednesday the 5th that it found some truth in the allegations of power harassment against Motohiko Saito, the Hyogo governor. The panel's report criticized the prefectural government's handling of a whistleblower document, saying they were not objective or fair, and also said that the governor should take the report more seriously.

The assembly endorsed the report, though some members opposed it. Saito accepted the findings but defended his actions as necessary for governance, and apologized to those who felt offended. A kind of I’m sorry that you felt that way response.

However, some users on Twitter raised questions about how long the prefectural assembly was going to keep bringing up this case. They said that the people of Hyogo had already decided to re-elect him, and that there were far worse politicians out there.

People were also concerned about some bullet train services being suspended on Thursday the 6th after two coupled bullet trains, meaning that they were traveling while connected to one another, disconnected near Tokyo. Fortunately, no one was injured.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. The train company, JR East, is going to stop coupling bullet trains for now until they figure out why the trains disconnected and they can put some preventive measures in place.

In entertainment news, Mino Monta, a record-breaking Japanese TV presenter, passed away at the age of eighty on Saturday the 1st of March. Born Norio Minorikawa, he began his career as a radio announcer in nineteen sixty-seven before becoming a freelance TV host in nineteen seventy-nine. In two thousand six, he earned a Guinness World Record for the most hours of live television appearances in a week.

Normally, that would be the end of this story—but on Sunday the 2nd, a day after Monta died, two unknown suspects broke into his house in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, eastern Japan. Police found the basement ransacked, and security cameras captured two suspects wearing hoods. They are still looking for the suspects, but believe that it was a robbery, done by people trying to take advantage of Monta’s passing.

Online, many fans mourned his passing, talking about how he brightened up the shows that he presented for.

Meanwhile, despite spring-like weather last week in central and eastern Japan, with Tokyo at twenty-two degrees Celsius or seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures dropped on Monday the 3rd to six degrees Celsius or forty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and snow fell heavily in many places. Cold weather and heavy snow continued throughout central and eastern Japan until Thursday the 6th.

In tech, Japan's aging population and caregiver shortage have spurred the government to fund the development of AI-driven robots like AIREC, a 150-kilogram or 330-pound humanoid prototype designed to help with elderly care. AIREC can help patients roll over to prevent bedsores, help them sit up, and even do household chores.

With Japan’s declining birth rate and high demand for caregivers, many see technology as a way to help address the issue. Experts predict AIREC may be ready for use by twenty thirty at around ten million yen, which is around 67,000 dollars.

On a happier note, cherry blossom season is coming soon—and to celebrate, the Hataoka Hachiman Shrine in Tokyo will hold a Cherry Blossom Festival and Traditional Japanese Culture event on the 30th of March. The shrine will host several different types of traditional performances, various food stalls on the shrine grounds, and a special tea ceremony on the second floor of the shrine. The performances are free to watch, but there is a fee for the tea ceremony, which you have to book in advance as there is limited capacity.

The shrine is a short, two-minute walk from Ebaramachi Station, which is easily accessible through several train lines.

For more information, check out the Shinagawa Tourism Association website, link in the show notes!

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

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Mata Ne!