JAPAN: Plastic Waste Meeting & more – 26th Feb 2026

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 26th of February twenty twenty-six. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

Japan plans to host an unofficial international meeting in Tokyo that will last three days, starting on the 1st of March to help write a draft for a potential treaty where countries agree to try to lower plastic pollution. About fifteen participants, including the US and Saudi Arabia, will likely attend. The meeting is to hopefully find compromises after official talks on the subject, like how to regulate plastic making, didn’t go anywhere.

Lately, getting nations to work together has been like pulling teeth, and it’s gotten worse since the US decided it wasn’t going to help out with international agreements on climate change. Japan hopes that the meeting being unofficial might make leaders more willing to talk and pave the way for broader agreements involving more countries to solve the problems of worsening plastic waste and microplastic pollution.

Read more about the upcoming meeting with the link in the show notes!

Speaking of nations coming together, Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies, wrote that, at the Munich Security Conference, US officials said they were going to focus on national interests, military strength, and the Indo-Pacific. Nagy argues this fits closely with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s agenda. According to the author, the Trump administration’s twenty twenty-six National Defense Strategy talks about deterring China and urges Europe to take on more defense responsibilities so the US can concentrate on Asia.

Nagy says the US’s speech at the Munich Security Conference creates an opportunity for deeper US-Japan relations in security and industry matters, especially in defense production. However, he also warns that a transactional America First approach, like potential tariffs or financial demands, could strain the alliance between the two countries.

Check out the full piece in English with the link in the show notes!

Meanwhile, twenty people, including two children, were trapped for over five hours in an elevator at Tokyo Skytree on Sunday the 22nd. Fortunately, rescuers managed to safely move them to a nearby elevator through an emergency door after midnight on Monday the 23rd. Another elevator also stopped suddenly, but luckily that one was empty.

Tokyo Skytree has four elevators in total, but the operators didn’t want to run them until they found out what was going on with the stuck elevators, so about 1,200 visitors were stranded on the observation deck for a while.

Skytree temporarily closed after that to figure out what went wrong, and found the problem. Apparently, some wires damaged a control panel after a strong wind made the building sway. Skytree is now repaired and reopened on Thursday the 26th.

If only politics could be fixed as quickly as elevators. It recently came out that Prime Minister Takaichi sent gift catalogs to 315 Liberal Democratic Party (or LDP) lower house lawmakers after the recent general election. The LDP branch in Nara’s Number 2 constituency, which Takaichi leads, used political funds to pay for the catalogs, which were worth 30,000 yen each, about 190 dollars.

Takaichi said the gifts were legal and were meant to congratulate lawmakers on their election victories and offer support. However, opposition lawmakers criticized her, saying these catalogs sounded an awful lot like when the former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba gave out high-value gift coupons to lawmakers last year.

In other news, police arrested Junho Sakai, or Simon, the music producer of the group XG, in Aichi Prefecture on Monday the 23rd along with three others on suspicion of possessing cocaine. According to the police, officers found four bags of cocaine and a bag of dried cannabis during a late-night search of their hotel room.

Sakai is a thirty-nine-year-old Tokyo resident who began his producing career in twenty thirteen under the name Jakops. XG debuted in twenty twenty-two and became the first Japanese act to enter the US Billboard’s Hot Trending Songs chart.

In a quick update to a story from last week’s show, it turns out that the reason why Yoshitaka Mizuno broke into a US naval base in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo, was because he is a huge fan of the US military. The forty-five-year-old used a fake ID to get in and said that he wanted to get closer to the military. In fact, he was only caught because police found him driving around with a US car rented from the base.

Police also found out that he went into the Naval Air Facility Atsugi, also in Kanagawa, several times since twenty twenty-three.

In business news, the Fair Trade Commission raided the Tokyo office of Microsoft Japan on Wednesday the 25th over suspected antitrust violations. Investigators believe that Microsoft may have restricted the use of its software on rival cloud platforms such as Amazon and Google, which compete with its Azure service. The Commission also thinks Microsoft Japan might have imposed fees that were unreasonably high.

It also suspects that the company may have used its all-encompassing presence in the global software market to make it harder for other companies to get customers. The commission will likely review how Microsoft Japan decided on its sales policies and look at its communications with its US parent company.

Microsoft Japan says it will fully cooperate with the investigation.

On a more positive business update, on Wednesday the 25th, the government nominated professors Toichiro Asada and Ayano Sato to become part of the Bank of Japan’s nine-member Policy Board. This marks Prime Minister Takaichi’s first nominations for the bank. Asada supports aggressive monetary easing and would replace Asahi Noguchi in March. Sato, viewed as a reflationist, would succeed Junko Nakagawa in June. Their appointments could influence debate over the pace of future interest rate hikes as the bank weighs progress toward its two percent inflation target.

Before the nominations go through, they will need parliamentary approval, including from the opposition-controlled upper house.

More on business, as Honda Motor announced on Thursday the 19th that it will launch its affordable electric scooter, the ICON e:, on the 23rd of March. Priced at 220,000 yen, which is 1,400 dollars, and about 130 dollars less than a moped running on gas, the new model aims to make it big in the electric small-bike market. Honda was able to make their new ICON e cheaper by using less expensive parts, mass-producing the model, and selling them overseas.

The scooter has an eighty-one-kilometer or fifty-mile range per charge, which is good for typical short daily trips. Japan has a lot of narrow roads, so mopeds are fairly popular, especially for delivery services. A lot of online users were excited about the lower price and the increased amount of storage space, though a few said that charging the battery for eight hours for only fifty miles wasn’t worth it.

Still in transportation, Kyoto, western Japan, is thinking of jacking up bus fares—but only for tourists. Kyoto’s mayor said it was considering lowering residents’ bus fares by thirty yen, which is twenty US cents, so that the new bus fare for locals will be 200 yen or just over a dollar. However, he said that non-locals’ bus fare might be double that, anywhere from 350 to 400 yen, which is two dollars and fifty cents. If Kyoto does this, it will mark Japan’s first pricing system that favors residents only.

The city says that it could link IC cards, which are often used by commuters, to government-issued My Number IDs to figure out who locals are and what their fare should be. However, officials are still reviewing legal concerns about discrimination and how to create a workaround for non-resident commuters.

Closing the last episode of the Rorshok Japan Update, the twenty twenty-six Winter Olympics ended on Sunday the 22nd. Norway got eighteen golds, while the host, Italy, achieved thirty medals, a personal record for the country. Japan also won the highest number of medals it’d ever gotten at a Winter Olympics, with twenty-four medals total, five of them gold.

The ceremony celebrated Italian opera, music and dance, and the Olympic flag was handed to France, host of the twenty thirty Winter Games.

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

This is our last goodbye. We are very sad that this project has to come to an end. Thank you so much for your support for our experiment. We put so much effort into making these updates, so we hope you have connected with them and with us. We are really grateful to each one of you who has stuck with us until the end.

Again, thank you so much for being on the other side.

You can still contact us at info@rorshok.com. Who knows, we might get the Japan update running again someday.

Mata Ne!