JAPAN: Prime Minister to Resign & more – 11th Sep 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 11th of September twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Sunday the 7th, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced that he plans to resign soon, following pretty much everyone telling him that he should ever since his party, the Liberal Democratic Party, lost its Upper House majority in July.

Ishiba was reluctant to resign. Apparently, Yoshihide Suga, a former prime minister, and Shinjiro Koizumi, the agricultural minister, had to sit him down on Saturday the 6th to convince him not to dissolve the Lower House to prevent people from challenging his leadership, and instead to step down, saying it would be better for the party.

Since many called for a new leadership vote, the party decided to hold an election on the 4th of October.

Speaking of new leadership, Prince Hisahito, who is second in line to the throne, celebrated his coming-of-age ceremony at the Imperial Palace on Saturday the 6th, his nineteenth birthday.

The highlight of the ceremony was when Emperor Naruhito presented him with traditional headgear, a ritual last held forty years ago for Hisahito’s father, Crown Prince Fumihito. Dressed in both court attire and Western formal wear, Hisahito promised to fulfill his responsibilities as an adult member of the imperial family.

On the other side of the world, a US immigration raid took place on Thursday the 4th at a Hyundai Motor plant in Georgia, in the southern US, and three Japanese nationals were among over 470 workers detained.

Around 300 detainees were South Koreans, so Yoshimasa Hayashi, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, said Japan has contacted South Korea, which plans to send a chartered plane to bring its citizens back to their country. Hayashi said Japan would continue working to protect its nationals but left out a lot of details to protect the individuals’ privacy and not harm diplomatic talks.

Meanwhile, police in Saga Prefecture, southern Japan, said on Monday the 8th that they fired a forensic DNA analyst for over 100 acts of misconduct, including faking test reports and losing evidence.

The analyst has made mistakes in 130 cases since twenty seventeen, falsely saying tests were done in nine and losing evidence that he replaced with similar materials in four. The analyst said he thought that “the process would be finished more quickly that way,” apparently not caring about whether his actions landed an innocent person in jail or a criminal on the streets.

Most other cases were comparatively minor mistakes, like writing the wrong dates on official documents.

Police sent papers to prosecutors for falsification and destruction of evidence. They have begun retesting the 124 cases that still had DNA evidence. So far, they have found discrepancies in eight, but the new results so far haven’t changed the cases’ outcomes.

In other news, Maki Takubo, the mayor of Ito City in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, dissolved the city assembly on Wednesday the 10th. The assembly gave her a unanimous no-confidence vote over allegations that she lied about graduating college, so Takubo had to resign, be removed, or dissolve the assembly. An election for new assembly members will be held within forty days.

However, most online users are cheering Takubo on. She is the main person standing in the way of a project by Mega-Solar, a major power company, that would involve cutting down a lot of the local forests. Many online believe that Mega-Solar is the one pushing these accusations, which started as magazine gossip, as a way to remove Takubo as mayor, so they could go through with the project.

Also in Shizuoka, a tropical storm struck the prefecture on Friday the 5th, causing widespread damage in the city of Makinohara. The storm overturned cars, knocked over powerlines, and damaged over 200 buildings.

About twenty people went to a local hospital for storm-related injuries. Authorities set up disaster response centers in Makinohara and nearby Yoshida, where a fire broke out. The Meteorological Agency said that, considering how violent the winds were, the storm might have created a tornado, which might have been the cause of the damage. The agency also warned that there might be more tornadoes in Shizuoka and nearby Ibaraki Prefecture.

Once the storm and possible tornado passed, residents talked about how Makinohara was in complete chaos, with debris covering roads and outages disrupting traffic signals.

That wasn’t the only extreme weather event. The Meteorological Agency issued a short-duration heavy rain advisory for Tokyo and nearby Kanagawa on Thursday the 11th. Four different wards in Tokyo saw between 100 and 134 millimeters (four to five inches) of rain in an hour, a record-breaking amount, while Yokohama and Kawasaki, two cities close to Tokyo, also had around 100 millimeters.

Planes had to pause at Haneda Airport because of lightning, and many trains also had to temporarily stop. The rain caused flooding in some streets and over 7,000 Tokyo homes had blackouts.

In business news, on Wednesday the 10th, the Japan Fair Trade Commission launched its first criminal investigation in three years into eight petroleum companies suspected of forming a diesel price-fixing cartel. The commission believes that the companies might have secretly worked together to buy fuel from oil wholesalers and raise prices, even when the wholesale oil prices went down or stayed the same.

The eight companies hold the majority of the oil market, and they reportedly held regular meetings so they could coordinate prices and blame the soaring costs on things like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the Japanese government has been subsidizing oil for the past three years, spending eight trillion yen (about fifty-four billion dollars), this could be a very serious matter if it turns out the companies really were price-fixing.

On a more international note, a woman sued the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Osaka, western Japan, last week, and recently spoke at a press conference about the case. She said that the medical center illegally overcharged her late Chinese mother for treatment in twenty twenty-two. The hospital billed almost seven million yen, which is 45,000 dollars. This was three times the amount that an uninsured Japanese patient would have been charged.

The daughter has already paid 2.5 million yen (about 17 million dollars): the amount that would have been charged if her mother had been Japanese and not foreign. She filed the lawsuit in Osaka to make sure she doesn’t have to pay the remaining four and a half million yen (about 30,000 dollars). She argued the hospital’s practice is discriminatory and violates international human rights and Japan’s Civil Code.

In cultural news, a special exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum called Expressing Prayer, Capturing Form opened last week, showcasing seven Buddhist statues from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. They are all national treasures normally kept in the Kofukuji Temple in Nara, western Japan. Among the statues are Seated Miroku Nyorai and two other masterpieces by Unkei, a famous sculptor.

The exhibition recreates the Kofukuji Temple’s interior and marks the first public display of Miroku Nyorai since its recent restoration, and its first showing outside its home temple in sixty years. The exhibition will continue until the 30th of November.

In sports, Japanese wheelchair tennis players swept up singles titles at the US Open tennis tournament. In the men’s final, Tokito Oda, a nineteen-year-old, beat Argentina’s Gustavo Fernandez and became the youngest player to achieve a career Golden Slam by winning all four majors and the Paralympics.

In women’s singles, Yui Kamiji defeated China’s Xiaohui Li, claiming her third US Open crown.

On a sad note, Haru Urara, a racehorse famous in Japan for never winning a single race and known as the star of losers, died last week at the age of twenty-nine from colic.

Haru Urara raced in Kochi Prefecture, southwestern Japan, until two thousand four, retiring with 113 straight defeats but winning the hearts of Japanese people everywhere as a symbol of perseverance when many were going through hard economic times. Her betting tickets became lucky charms, and lawmakers even talked about her in a parliamentary debate in two thousand four.

Haru Urara spent her retirement at Matha Farm in Chiba Prefecture, eastern Japan, where the farm’s head said she lived a happy life supported by many fans.

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

Do you want to send an episode? You can download any show at www.rorshok.com/japan as an .mp3 file. Link in the show notes!

Mata Ne!