JAPAN: Nationals Abducted by North Korea & more – 8th May 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 8th of May twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Back in the seventies and eighties some Japanese nationals were abducted by North Korea, and now their relatives have returned from Washington after seeking US support in helping their loved ones return home.

Takuya Yokota led the group; his sister Megumi was abducted at thirteen years old, and if still alive, would now be sixty-one. Yokota spoke to reporters in Japan on Sunday the 4th shortly after returning from the US. He said that in the US, the group met with senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, and members of Congress. The US officials said they would offer support on the issue.

With twelve abductees still unreturned, the families urged Japan to show stronger resolve and develop a concrete rescue plan. Yokota said that the US support gave him hope, but he added that Japan still had to lead efforts to pressure North Korea.

On another note, police arrested two men who broke into Daisan Elementary School in Tachikawa, Tokyo, on Thursday the 8th. The men smashed a window and injured five teachers, but did not hurt any children.

Investigators said the mother of a second grader at the school called the suspects, but did not give many details, only saying that the mother wasn’t happy with one of the teachers.

Online speculation about what made the mother upset is rampant, with some suggesting that the second grader was being bullied and the teacher wasn’t doing anything about it. However, the overriding argument was that it didn’t matter what the reason was, and that resorting to violence would only make things worse.

In imperial news, on Thursday the 1st, the Imperial Household Agency said that it fired an employee in their twenties for stealing almost four million yen, which is 25,000 dollars, from the Emperor’s personal expenses fund. The thefts happened between November twenty twenty-three and March twenty twenty-four during night duty at an agency office on Imperial Palace grounds. The employee said they did it because they were having a hard time financially.

This may be the first theft involving the Imperial family's personal funds. The agency also penalized a chamberlain for poor cash management and pledged to prevent future incidents.

That wasn’t the only imperial news. Emperor Akihito Emeritus was hospitalized in the University of Tokyo Hospital on Tuesday the 6th for a heart examination. This follows an examination the Emperor took on Sunday the 4th, where the doctor said he needed to go to the hospital to get a more detailed exam to see if he had myocardial ischemia, a condition where the heart doesn’t get enough blood flow.

Though he has a history of heart issues, including right heart failure in twenty twenty-two and coronary bypass surgery in twenty twelve, this is his first hospital stay in thirteen years.

On a lighter note, Princess Aiko gave her first official speech on Saturday the 3rd at an international medical conference in Tokyo, highlighting the growing importance of disaster and emergency medicine. She said Japan needs inclusive support systems, especially for vulnerable groups, and also talked about the importance of long-term mental health care.

Princess Aiko has previously worked at the Japanese Red Cross Society and studied disaster medicine with experts.

Speaking of medicine—in health news, the Japan Institute for Health Security said on Wednesday the 7th that whooping cough cases hit 11,900 in late April, nearly triple the 4,000 cases in all of twenty twenty-four. The weekly case count hit a record 2,176 between the 21st to the 27th of April, marking five weeks in a row of record highs.

Experts said that one of the reasons for the huge number of cases may be antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. The illness spreads through coughing and sneezing, and can be fatal for infants. The Institute for Health Security said that children should be vaccinated starting at two months old.

In international news, a Chinese helicopter violated Japanese airspace near the Senkaku Islands on Saturday the 3rd. The helicopter launched from a China Coast Guard ship intruding into Japan’s territorial waters. The aircraft remained in the air for about fifteen minutes before returning to the vessel.

Japan scrambled two fighter jets in response and lodged a strong protest with China. This marks the fourth Chinese airspace violation this year, three of which occurred near the Senkaku Islands.

Meanwhile, even though North Safari Sapporo, a private zoo in Sapporo, Hokkaido Prefecture, northern Japan, is set to close by September, a recent city inspection found that only forty percent of the zoo’s 640 animals have been rehomed in other facilities. The city is worried the zoo will still have animals present even after closing.

This story got attention because magazines and travel sites often called North Safari Sapporo, the most dangerous zoo in Japan, because it let guests directly interact with animals, like going into a tiger cage to feed a tiger. Ironically, it’s not shutting down for any reason relating to danger, but because it’s in a specific zone where certain buildings require city permission to be constructed. However, the zoo didn’t have official permission to construct buildings housing animals before it opened.

Though the zoo attracted a lot of tourists, it likely won’t be missed. Quite a few visitors in recent years said the zoo treated its animals poorly, placing them in tiny cages.

In sports, police referred Louis Okoye and Daiki Masuda, two baseball players for the Yomiuri Giants, to prosecutors on Thursday the 8th for allegedly gambling via illegal online casinos. Between twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-four, Okoye reportedly bet seven million yen, which is 48,000 dollars, while Masuda bet three million yen, 21,000 dollars. Online casino gambling is illegal in Japan, where an estimated three million people participate annually.

The punishment for the players’ crimes will likely be a fine. The Nippon Professional Baseball Organization imposed its own fine recently on sixteen players across eight teams for similar offenses.

In science news, ispace, a company based in Tokyo, announced on Wednesday the 7th that its Resilience lunar lander successfully entered the moon’s orbit. They are planning a landing attempt on the moon in early June.

While ispace developed the lunar lander, SpaceX launched it in January alongside another lander from a US-based company called Firefly Aerospace. Firefly achieved a successful landing in March, and was the first privately-owned company to land on the moon without crashing or falling over.

The Resilience lunar lander will be ispace’s second attempt after a crash in twenty twenty-three. Resilience carries a mini rover with a scoop for collecting lunar soil and conducting experiments.

In tech, the Fujitsu and Riken Research Institute have developed a 256-qubit superconducting quantum computer, the first of its kind in the world. Quantum computers work in a different way from regular computers, which allows them to be much faster. For instance, in twenty nineteen Google said that it used a quantum computer to solve a problem in under four minutes that would’ve taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to solve.

The new system that Fujitsu and Riken made is based on a sixty-four-qubit model from twenty twenty-three and will be available in June. They hope to release an even bigger and better 1,000-qubit version by fiscal twenty twenty-six.

In entertainment, Rintaro, an anime director best known for his work on Astro Boy, won the Manga Grand Prix at the twenty-ninth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for his autobiographical manga, My Life at Twenty-Four Frames Per Second, which in Japanese is Ichi-byo Nijuyon-koma no Boku no Jinsei. This prize honors influential manga works.

Other winners included Shiho Kido’s When the Chameleon Flowers Bloom and Shunji Enomoto’s The Kinks. The award ceremony will take place on the 5th of June, where organizers will give bronze statuettes and cash prizes to the winners.

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

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Mata Ne!