JAPAN: Severe Rains & more – 14th Aug 2025

Konnichiwa from BA! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 14th of August twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Monday the 11th, severe rains tore through southwestern Japan, causing floods and landslides. At least three people are dead and others are missing in Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima prefectures. To get an idea of how bad the rain was, Kumamoto’s Tamana recorded 370 millimeters or fifteen inches of rain in six hours, nearly double its average for the whole month of August.

Victims included a woman found in a car that fell into a canal and two separate people buried under landslides. Rescuers managed to save a group of fifteen who were left stranded by a different landslide, but others were swept away by rivers and still, as of Thursday the 14th, haven’t been found. About 40,000 homes in the region lost access to water because of damaged pipes and power outages.

In business news, the Yomiuri Shimbun, a newspaper company, sued US-based Perplexity AI in the Tokyo District Court. They want the AI company to pay them two billion yen, which is fifteen million dollars, in damages and to stop using the newspaper’s online articles and images in its search results.

The newspaper alleges Perplexity’s AI search service accessed over 119,000 digital edition articles between February and June, violating Japan’s copyright law. Yomiuri argues the AI’s summaries cause zero-click searches that harm its business and undermine journalism as a whole. This marks the first lawsuit by a major Japanese media outlet against an AI company for copyright infringement.

AI companies aren’t the only ones getting sued. Kevin J. Hayes Sr, a Hawaii developer, and Tomoko Matsumoto, a real estate broker, sued Shohei Ohtani and his agent, Nez Balelo, on Friday the 8th. They said the baseball star and Balelo used celebrity influence to push them out of a 240 million dollar luxury housing project on Hawaii’s Hapuna Coast.

The lawsuit said the developers spent eleven years developing the project and brought in Ohtani to boost sales. However, Balelo allegedly made a lot of unreasonable demands, threatening to pull Ohtani when the developers refused to give in. Balelo also pressured Matsumoto and Kevin J. Hayes Sr’s partner, Kingsbarn Realty Capital, to drop the plaintiffs from the project, which would have listed houses that averaged seventeen million dollars each. Hayes and Matsumoto said that Ohtani and Balelo also undermined them in another nearby project.

In other sports news, the Japan Boxing Commission held an emergency meeting on Tuesday the 12th after two fighters, Shigetoshi Kotari and Hiromasa Urakawa, died, likely due to head injuries, during the same event following separate matches on the 2nd of August.

The commission discussed safety measures with gym officials. As an immediate step, all Oriental and Pacific Boxing Federation title fights will be cut from twelve to ten rounds to reduce the fighters’ number of injuries.

Many online users pointed out that despite boxing’s inherent danger, it has become a lot safer in recent decades as boxing officials put measures in place to protect fighters, and now it’s only about as dangerous as rugby and other contact sports. However, two deaths on the same day raised questions about what can be done to make things safer, like reducing rounds even further or not having full-contact training sessions.

Unfortunately, there are more deaths to report. On Wednesday the 13th, one person died after a transport ship crashed into a yacht off Hoto Island in Oita Prefecture in the south.

The coast guard began a search after the ship’s captain reported the yacht had disappeared. Rescuers saved Makoto Yamamoto, a seventy-year-old doctor, but he later died in the hospital. Authorities are still looking into how the accident happened and why the two ships didn’t notice each other.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s Japan apologized after a Pokémon trading card Happy Meal promotion led to lots of people crowding into stores, buying up huge orders of Happy Meals, and then subsequently tossing out a lot of the food just so they could keep the cards. Despite a five-set purchase limit, many stores ran out of cards on the first day, with some customers throwing meals away. A lot of people who bought the Happy Meals also attempted to resell the trading cards at inflated prices.

The company said that they didn’t handle the situation as well as they could have. They said that in the future, they would have stricter purchase limits and measures against repeat buyers to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

On a lighter note, the twenty twenty-five World Expo in Osaka has sold over eighteen million tickets, exceeding the break-even point for operating costs, with a target of twenty-three million. As of Saturday the 9th, the event had drawn over thirteen million visitors. Operating expenses are projected at 116 billion yen, which is almost 790 million dollars — over eighty percent covered by ticket sales.

The organizer expects clearer financial figures after September.

In entertainment news, on Wednesday the 13th, a Hong Kong court found that Kenshin Kamimura, a former Japanese pop idol who used to be part of the boy band ONE N’ ONLY, was guilty of sexually assaulting a female interpreter.

The incident happened back in March, when the interpreter said Kamimura kept touching her thigh during a celebratory dinner even after she rejected him. That same month, his agency terminated his contract for a compliance violation, but it’s not clear if it was related to this accusation.

The defense said that the interpreter was exaggerating, but the judge ruled his actions carried sexual intent. The court fined Kamimura 1,900 dollars but did not send him to jail. Many of Kamimura’s fans went to the trial, some even coming from overseas.

In science news, Takuya Onishi, a Japanese astronaut, and three crewmates returned to Earth on Saturday the 9th after a five-month mission on the International Space Station, splashing down off California about seventeen hours after undocking.

Onishi had conducted experiments on a carbon dioxide removal system for future missions and became the third Japanese International Space Station commander. He handed command to Kimiya Yui, a fellow astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, before departure.

Meanwhile, health science has seen some advances as Kyoto University researchers have developed a potential non-addictive painkiller that could match the strength of opioids like fentanyl without causing breathing problems or dependence. The drug works by boosting a pain-suppressing part of the brain and showed strong results in animal tests and a small trial of twenty lung cancer surgery patients.

Large-scale U.S. trials may begin next year, with practical use targeted for twenty twenty-eight. Experts say it could significantly reduce opioid use and may be effective for hard-to-treat chronic pain.

Hygiene is also important to health, and the public toilet accreditation system in Gunma Prefecture, eastern Japan, launched in two thousand three to promote cleanliness, safety, and accessibility, now certifies 259 facilities and has inspired similar programs in Kochi in the southwest and Nagano in central Japan.

Certified toilets, marked with the mascot Gunmachan, are inspected and renewed every two years based on about twenty-five criteria. The program even influences travel plans for people with disabilities.

Some online mocked the toilet certification system, raising questions of how weird it was that people had to throw red tape on everything, even restrooms. However, an equal number of online users were grateful that Japan was so dedicated to cleanliness.

Finally, authorities in Fukui Prefecture, central Japan, found the dead body of a dolphin believed to have bitten at least fifty-three swimmers in Fukui and a nearby prefecture between twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-four.

Spotted by a fisherman off the peninsula on Wednesday the 13th, the dolphin matched the description of the aggressive animal previously captured in June and fitted with a tracking device. However, the device got lost on the 1st of July. Officials are working with marine experts to figure out the cause of the dolphin's death.

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

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Mata Ne!