North Korea Delivering Weapons to Russia & more – 31st Oct 2023

Konnichiwa from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Japan Update from the 31st of October twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Japan.

On Thursday, the 26th, Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa made a joint statement with the US and South Korean ministers condemning North Korea for delivering weapons and ammunition to Russia. They said this would only create more casualties in the ongoing war in Ukraine and that it deliberately went against UN resolutions telling North Korea to stop all nuclear and ballistic missile activity. The same resolutions, mind you, that they’ve been sending out nearly every year since two thousand and six.

Back on the 13th of October, the US said they had satellite photos of North Korea sending over a thousand shipping containers of military supplies to Russia between the 7th of September and the 1st of October. North Korea hasn’t yet responded to the current denouncement, but this isn’t the first time this issue has come up. Back in September twenty twenty-two, the US found out that North Korea was selling weapons to Russia, but North Korea denied it at the time.

In economic news, despite inflation slowing a little bit last month, it picked back up again in Tokyo. Tokyo’s inflation had been steadily going down for the past four months, but this month, it increased slightly from 2.5 to 2.7%. It may not sound like a big increase, but inflation shot up quite a bit around the same time last year, so it has worried some experts. The cost of food went up by seven percent, not including fresh foods, which tend to go up and down like crazy. While electricity costs dropped by eighteen percent, they didn’t go down as much as in September since the government reduced subsidies. Since Tokyo is Japan’s capital, many experts see it as an indicator of nationwide trends, so the rest of Japan will likely see inflation go up as well.

With inflation still wildly out of control, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida proposed tax cuts to make things easier for people. On Friday the 27th, he said that the government’s revenue from income taxes had hit seventy-one trillion yen or 474 billion dollars, a new record and the third year in a row it’s continuously gone up. Kishida said he planned to finish the new budget on the 13th of December. It’s very different from his plans earlier this year when he wanted to increase taxes to bolster Japan’s defense budget, but he said people are facing too many hardships with sky-high prices to bear the burden of higher taxes, too.

The Self-Defense Force must make do with its current budget. They’re carrying on with business as usual by holding a large-scale drill in different civilian airports from the 10th to the 20th of November. They carry out these drills every two years to make sure their troops know what to do in case a military base is attacked and they’re forced to use normal-people airports. They’ll use Okayama Airport, Oita Airport, and two airports in Kagoshima Prefecture, Amami and Tokunoshima. The drill will include 30,000 Self-Defense Force members and 10,000 US troops.

Meanwhile, on Sunday the 29th, the Group of Seven or G7 trade ministers finished a two-day meeting in Osaka. They invited trade ministers from five non-G7 countries to strengthen supply chains for important trade materials like semiconductors and lithium. At the end of the meeting, they put out a statement outlining how they wanted to help bolster supply chains and keep the global market fair. They also called for countries to stop weaponizing trade restrictions to make other nations bend to their will. They specifically mentioned the bans on Japanese seafood that China and Russia put in place as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant released treated water into the ocean following the World Health Organization’s guidelines.

Speaking of the treated water release, the Fukushima plant has been making an awful lot of noise for a place that’s supposed to be out of order. On Wednesday, the 25th, five workers were accidentally splashed with radioactive liquid while cleaning out pipes at the plant. They were all wearing protective gear, and three were okayed as radiation-free that day. The other two, though, went to the hospital to be decontaminated since their radiation didn’t fall below a certain level. Unlike the other three workers, the operator didn’t require those two to wear waterproof suits because they were supposed just to be watching the cleaning and not doing it themselves.

After some investigation, the plant owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the accident happened because gas built up inside the hose during the cleaning work and made the hose tip fly off when it burst out. They said it was the first time something like that happened, and they would make sure everyone wore waterproof suits from then on.

Moving onto the subject of tourism, Japan and ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met in Tokyo on Saturday, the 28th, to talk about sustainable tourism in local communities. Japan’s tourism minister said it was important to present high-quality experiences rooted in each region’s culture and natural landscape. In other words, more genuine cultural attractions, fewer cheap tourist traps.

The ministers also talked about promoting lesser-known destinations and using digital technology to enhance tourist experiences. Above all, they said there was a lot of potential to create more jobs and wealth in local communities through sustainable tourism that showed off each place’s unique charms. They also said that the people in the communities should try to use eco-friendly transportation and renewable energy sources as much as possible so they don’t destroy their own homes.

If you found this story interesting and want to know more, head over to the Rorshok Multilateral Update! Link in the show notes!

There have been some domestic updates in terms of travel and transportation, as well. Railway company JR East showed off some new multi-purpose lockers to news outlets on Monday the 30th. Travelers often use these coin lockers to store their belongings at train stations while out and about. Starting on Tuesday the 31st, people will be able to use the lockers for package deliveries.

Online shopping has gotten big in the last few years, and many delivery companies are struggling thanks to a lack of drivers. With the new lockers, people can choose to have their packages delivered to a secure locker instead of their homes.

JR East plans to set up these lockers in a thousand locations in Tokyo over the next three years.

In tech news, US tech giants Microsoft and Amazon are both dipping their toes into Japan’s generative AI market. Microsoft said it plans to use forty million dollars to help its Japanese corporate clients introduce its AI program. A representative from Microsoft Japan said they think the Japanese market has a lot of potential.

Amazon, meanwhile, invested six million dollars toward Japanese companies developing their own AI programs using Amazon’s technology.

Moving onto science, a team of Japanese researchers has been looking into how baby mammals might develop in space. To do this experiment, they took 133 frozen mouse embryos to the International Space Station in August twenty twenty-one. The scientists put half into a control group by letting them develop under artificial gravity, similar to Earth, and had the other half develop under microgravity. Twenty-three percent of the microgravity embryos and thirty-one percent of the artificial gravity embryos developed into a fetus and placenta. The researchers said that microgravity didn’t have a significant effect on how the embryos developed. They also said that, when it came to DNA and genes, there was no difference between the two groups of embryos.

This was the first time anyone had shown that mammalian embryos could develop normally in space. Their next step is to implant the fetus into mice and see if they can give birth okay.

And that's it for this week!

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