Kyodo News Digest: July 20, 2025
----------
Voting underway in Japan for upper house race, with focus on majority
TOKYO - Voting got underway on Sunday in Japan's House of Councillors election, with all eyes on whether the ruling coalition can maintain its majority amid public frustration over rising prices and growing support for emerging parties.
The outcome of the election will have a strong bearing on the fate of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's minority government, as failure to retain control of the upper house would make parliamentary deliberations even more difficult and could potentially cost him the premiership.
----------
Ishiba seeks last-minute voter support, raps "irresponsible" politics
TOKYO - Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Saturday made a last-ditch attempt to secure voter support for his struggling ruling party, warning that short-sighted and "irresponsible" politics will decay Japan, in an apparent swipe at opposition forces.
Ishiba made the remark as media polls indicate his Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, the Komeito party, may lose their majority of the House of Councillors in Sunday's election.
----------
Japanese man provided info to intelligence agency: Chinese court
BEIJING - A Japanese businessman, who was convicted earlier this week by a Chinese court for engaging in spying, provided information to an intelligence agency and received rewards, sources familiar with Sino-Japanese relations said Saturday.
On Wednesday, the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court sentenced the Astellas Pharma Inc. employee in his 60s to three years and six months in prison for espionage activities, but the verdict did not touch on specific details of how he acted illegally in China.
----------
Japan eyes tariff talks in U.S. next week before Aug. 1 deadline
OSAKA - Japan's top tariff negotiator Ryosei Akazawa said Saturday he intends to visit the United States possibly early next week for an eighth round of trade talks, before a 25 percent tariff on Japan comes into effect on Aug. 1.
"I want to continue working to find common ground that both sides can agree on," Akazawa told reporters at the World Exposition in Osaka where he was accompanying U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, his counterpart in the talks.
----------
S. Korea ex-president Yoon indicted for power abuse over martial law
SEOUL - South Korea's former President Yoon Suk Yeol was indicted on Saturday on additional charges of abuse of power over his declaration of martial law last December.
The special counsel team investigating Yoon, led by special prosecutor Cho Eun Suk, said the former president is accused of violating the voting rights of Cabinet members by summoning only a select few to a meeting where the imposition of martial law was decided.
----------
Ichiro expects to get nervous in Hall of Fame speech
SEATLE - Baseball Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki said Friday he expects to get nervous when he makes a speech in English during the July 27 induction ceremony at Cooperstown, New York.
"I'm the type of person who gets really nervous when speaking in front of people, so I'll definitely get nervous," the former Seattle Mariners icon revealed in an online press conference.
----------
Video: Beat the heat with grilled eel on "doyo-no-ushi-no-hi," or the midsummer day of the ox
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
41 minutes ago
Wedding Woes: The Real Crisis Facing the Imperial Household
For decades, ensuring a stable succession to the throne has been one of the most stubborn challenges facing the Japanese political system, with the law allowing only males born to a father from the imperial lineage to succeed, and only one male child—Prince Hisahito, who arrived in 2006—being born into the family since the birth of his father, Crown Prince Fumihito, in 1965. The only child of the current emperor and empress is Princess Aiko, now 23. As a woman, she is not eligible to take the throne. Following lengthy talks between the ruling and opposition parties, it was hoped that the leadership of both chambers of the Diet could get a proposal for reforming the Imperial House Law through the regular session that ended in late June 2025. But these talks broke down, and the prospects for a short-term resolution of the issue have receded. The main points of the proposals have been twofold: first, to allow female members of the family to retain their royal status after marriage, and second, to adopt male descendants in the male lineage of former branches of the imperial line back into the family to increase the number of male heirs. By the end of May, the two leaders of the discussions—Asō Tarō, senior advisor to the Liberal Democrat Party, and Noda Yoshihiko, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party—had agreed to shelve the second proposal because of constitutional concerns and widespread public disagreement, and decided to prioritize the idea of allowing female members of the family to retain their status after marriage. Even on this proposal, however, the two men differed on a number of key issues, including whether retaining royal status should be optional or automatic, and whether the woman's husband and children should also be granted royal status. Nevertheless, they agreed to push forward in the hope of making at least some progress on an issue that has remained stagnant for years. Then, at the start of June, progress ground to a halt when Asō suddenly announced that he couldn't agree to shelving the second proposal after all. He remained wedded to the idea of bringing back descendants of former royals to the imperial family. Noda responded by accusing his counterpart of overturning the negotiating table and undoing all the progress they had made. Nukaga Fukushirō, speaker of the House of Representatives, has declared that he hopes to reach an agreement during the extraordinary Diet session in the fall, but frankly this seems unlikely. Having followed the political debate over the imperial succession for the past 20 years, I believe that the real position of the LDP, swayed by the staunch convictions of party conservatives who are insistent on male succession, is to do nothing. From their point of view, the current Imperial House Law, which clearly enshrines the principle of patrilineal male succession, represents the best possible arrangement, and there is no need for any change. But if the ruling party continues to insist on male-line succession, it is quite likely that the imperial house will dwindle into extinction. The number of imperial family members is already clearly in serious decline. Public opinion surveys consistently show high levels of support for a female emperor. The LDP knows that it can't simply do nothing. To give itself political cover, it goes through the motions of assembling expert panels and holding discussions with the opposition, only to end up by grumbling at the results, derailing the talks, and postponing a decision until some unspecified time in the future. Although it frequently raises the possibility of reinstating male descendants of former branches of the imperial family, it has not carried out any meaningful studies on how this might work, or shown any other evidence of genuine enthusiasm for the idea, almost certainly because it has no intention of actually seeing the plan through. This doesn't mean that they are prepared to simply sit and wait for the imperial house to go extinct through natural decline. My guess is that deep down, most of them feel that the issue is not their responsibility. They are happy to let the politicians of the future deal with it when the situation gets really serious. For anyone genuinely concerned about the future of the imperial family, it is a dispiriting situation. The samurai and painter Watanabe Kazan (1793–1841) once said: 'Don't get so caught up in short-term maneuverings that you forget to plan for a hundred years in the future.' Unfortunately, few of our politicians today have the wisdom to heed this advice. Prince Mikasa's Prescient Warning Realistically, however, what would have happened even if this latest series of talks had led to an agreement to revise the Imperial House Law to allow women to succeed in the future? I don't think it would have done much to change the reality of the crisis facing the imperial succession. Why? Because the biggest problem is not really whether the person who succeeds is male or female, but whether that person is able to marry. The real crisis is that members of the imperial family—of both sexes—struggle to find suitable spouses. Japan's total fertility rate, as published by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in June 2024, was just 1.15, the lowest ever. Research suggests that 80% of the decline in births is due to people not getting married. As well as economic factors, changing views of marriage and the family also play a role. Around 1990, the proportion of people who remained unmarried throughout their lives was around 5% for both men and women. In a survey in 2020, this had risen to around 30% for men and around 20% for women. Until the war, the extended imperial family and aristocracy provided a ready supply of potential marriage partners. Today, the imperial family has to seek partners from the general population. It is therefore unavoidable that the 'marriage ice age' will affect its members just as much as anyone else. One of the first to warn about the coming lack of marriage partners was the late Takahito, Prince Mikasa, one of the elder statemen of the imperial family. Appearing on a radio program in 2004 to mark his eighty-eighth birthday, Prince Mikasa spoke about the hardships endured by his mother, Empress Teimei, when she entered the imperial family and had to adapt to palace customs and protocols. He warned that, with the modern mass media stirring up such a fuss about the imperial family, most ordinary people would shrink from taking on such a role in the future. He foresaw that things were only likely to get worse. 'For a person from ordinary society to marry into the imperial family is an extremely difficult thing. In the United Kingdom, a nation somewhat similar to ours in terms of having a royal system, in the case of Queen Elizabeth, they were able to look for suitable candidates from the royal families and nobility. But Japan's old aristocracy was scrapped after the war. Looking back on it now, this was a move undertaken on the fringes of efforts to reform Japan's emperor system. As a result, though, even if we allow female emperors, the problem is that it might be difficult to find anyone willing to marry them in modern Japan.' Prince Mikasa was in favor of a female tennō , saying that 'obviously it would be no problem to have an empress,' but he had his doubts about how successful the system would be. 'As a practical issue, how would it work? There wouldn't be much point in allowing women to take the throne if the system petered out after just one empress. I think this is the major problem,' he said, predicting that a shortage of marriage partners would soon become the biggest challenge facing the imperial family. There has been an increase in public discourse around the possibility of a female emperor in recent years, partly driven by the rising popularity of Princess Aiko, the only child of the current emperor and empress. Many people now openly support the idea of changing the law to allow Aiko to succeed her father one day. Perhaps conscious of this, many Diet members, people particularly in the opposition parties, have taken to hedging their bets by claiming that although they support the idea of an empress regnant, they remain opposed to the idea of a female line of descent. It seems likely that this fudge is designed to avoid accusations of gender discrimination. This position is one that would be welcomed by most of those who insist on maintaining male-line descent. Under this scheme, although Princess Aiko would be allowed to take the throne as an empress regnant, any children she had with a commoner husband would be barred from inheriting the throne. This kind of 'cul-de-sac' empress would therefore bring about no real change to the principle of descent through the male line. Making the Palace a More Human Environment But the people who advocate this position do not seem to realize that it would involve ignoring the human rights of imperial successors and their spouses, and that this would only make the constricted path of succession even narrower than it already is. If children born to an empress regnant are not allowed to inherit the throne, how will she, her husband, and their children understand the meaning of their roles? Perhaps some of these people should ask themselves how they would feel in the same situation. The issue is equally serious for both men and women, but the challenges are likely to be especially acute in the case of men who marry an empress regnant or other female royal, given that there is no precedent for male commoners to marry into the imperial family. A look at the situation in other countries gives us an idea of what might happen. In the Netherlands, before the present king took the throne, there were three successive queens. Prince Claus, the husband of Queen Beatrix, suffered from depression. Prince Bernhard, the consort of her predecessor, Queen Juliana, was embroiled in a scandal when it was revealed that he had accepted bribes during the Lockheed affair. I don't mean to suggest that because of all these potential difficulties we should simply give up on the idea of an empress regnant as too difficult. However, in a society like Japan's, where for generations women have been confined to the role of housewife, we need to think more carefully about what it might mean for men to marry into the imperial family as consorts to a reigning empress or other female royals. Likely challenges would include lingering ties from a man's previous life and career, along with deeper existential concerns about his place and purpose. The position of Masako, herself a diplomat and career woman before she married into the family, may offer an idea of the kind of difficulties that male consorts might face in the future. She suffered well-documented mental health issues and, as the law currently stands, her only child is barred from taking the throne. To repeat: the shortage of suitable spouses is a problem for men and women alike. In addition to the concerns raised by Prince Mikasa about media attention, the situation today is made even worse by the rise of online information and social media. The weekly magazines may brazenly mix fact and fiction in their reporting, but I still believe that as part of the long history of print journalism, they retain at least a minimal sense of moral standards. Social media, by contrast, is a different beast—a space where no one takes responsibility for what is true and false. Anonymous users broadcast their views to huge audiences in a largely unsupervised space where there is no one to draw the line, no sense of responsibility, and little sign of moral scruples. Unlike ordinary citizens, members of the imperial family do not reply to criticisms and do not file lawsuits for defamation. Some people even seem to take a perverse pleasure in attacking the institution of the imperial family precisely because it cannot defend itself. We have all seen attacks in the media and online directed at Empress Michiko, Empress Masako, and Prince Akishino and his family following Princess Mako's engagement to Komuro Kei. How many people would not shrink back in fear when they imagined themselves, a relative, or a close friend, marrying into the imperial household? Perhaps we have been indifferent for too long to the obvious fact that the imperial family are human beings. And perhaps this indifference is now circling around to bring a crisis that threatens the very survival of the emperor as the symbol of national unity. If we want to see the symbolic role of the emperor continue, we must take urgent steps to transform the imperial household into a place that feels more human—one that ordinary people can enter without fearing for their happiness and mental health. If we continue to impose systems, environments, and burdens of obedience that would be intolerable to most people, we will only accelerate the demise of our long-lived imperial line. (Originally published in Japanese. Banner photos: Prince Hisahito, at left, the only son of the Akishino family, and Princess Aiko, the only daughter of Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako. © Jiji.)
SoraNews24
2 hours ago
- SoraNews24
Mobile battery fire breaks out on Tokyo's main commuter line
Battery began to burn after less than a minute of use, owner says. Tokyo's Yamanote Line, which loops around the center of the city, is Japan's most infamously crowded commuter train line, and a stressful should-to-shoulder stint on it is part of the daily trip to/from the office for many Tokyoites. The atmosphere tends to be more relaxed outside of rush hour, and on weekends in particular, but last Sunday was a startling exception. At around 4:10 in the afternoon on July 20, passengers on a train traveling on the Yamanote's 'inner'/counterclockwise route between Shin Okubo and Shinjuku Stations noticed white smoke rising from the bag of a passenger. The bag's owner, a woman in her 30s, reached inside, where she had her smartphone connected to a mobile battery for charging. She disconnected her phone, but by this time the battery itself was on fire. A passenger hit the emergency stop button while another quick-thinking individual grabbed the train car's onboard fire extinguisher and began spraying the bag. The woman sustained burns to her fingers and a total of four other passengers suffered injuries such as bruises and sprained ankles in the rush to evacuate the train, but all are expected to make quick and complete recoveries. ▼ A report showing images of the charred remains of the bag the battery was inside. In speaking with investigators from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the woman said that she'd only had her phone plugged into the battery for 'about 30 seconds' before it began to burn. While there's obviously ever a good time for a fire to break out in an enclosed space, it's fortuitous that the incident happened when it did, at a time when the train was comparatively uncrowded. During weekday morning and evening rush hours, it's the norm for the Yamanote Line to be so crowded that it's impossible to take a step in any direction unless the train is stopped at a station with its doors open and providing the bare minimum of wriggle room. The weekend mid-afternoon time also likely meant a lower ratio of sleepy, work-exhausted, on-their-way-home-from-drinking, or otherwise slow-reacting demographics that sometimes make up a sizeable amount of Yamanote ridership. Had the timing been different, the results of a fire inside a Yamanote train and subsequent hurried evacuation would have been far worse than a half-dozen or so minor injuries. The incident comes less than two weeks after Japanese airlines instituted new rules for passengers regarding mobile batteries onboard airplanes. Currently JR East/East Japan Railway Company, which operates the Yamanote Line, has no formal regulations about the use or transport of mobile batteries on its trains, but Sunday's fire may have the company considering adopting some, especially as the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation says that it has observed increased instances of mobile battery fires coinciding with higher temperatures during the summer months. Source: NHK News Web, Nihon Keizai Shimbun via Hachima Kiko, YouTube/ANNNewsCH Top image: Pakutaso ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
Tokyo Weekender
3 hours ago
- Tokyo Weekender
LDP-Led Coalition Lose Upper House Majority, Ishiba Vows To Continue as Prime Minister
A record 26 million people voted in Sunday's Upper House election, which fell in the middle of a three-day holiday. For the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Komeito, 50 was the magic number. They needed to secure 125 seats for a majority, with 75 of those seats not up for election. In the end, they missed out by three. It is a major blow for the ruling coalition which also lost control of the more powerful Lower House last October. For the first time in its 70-year history, the LDP leads a coalition that doesn't control either house. They will now need the support of at least one opposition party to pass any piece of legislation. All the major opposition parties have refused to join them in an expanded coalition. List of Contents: Ishiba To Fight on Despite Another Poor Result The Rise of Populist Parties Related Posts Ishiba To Fight On Despite Another Poor Result Following two consecutive poor election results, there will, no doubt, be increasing calls for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to step down. One of his most vocal critics within the party is Taro Aso, who served as PM from 2008 to 2009. He told TV Asahi that he 'couldn't accept' Ishiba staying on as prime minister. The man himself, however, insists that he is not ready to go just yet. Speaking to NHK two hours after the polls closed, Ishiba said he 'solemnly' accepted the 'harsh result.' He later told TV Tokyo, 'We are engaged in extremely critical tariff negotiations with the United States… We must never ruin these negotiations. It is only natural to devote our complete dedication and energy to realizing our national interests.' Asked whether he planned to continue as prime minister, he replied, 'That's right.' Sohei Kamiya and the Sanseito Party Logo | Wikimedia The Rise of Populist Parties The major opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, meanwhile, secured just 22 seats, down from 38. It was also a disappointing election for the Japan Innovation Party, which fell from 18 to seven. The notable gains in the election came for populist opposition parties like the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP) and Sanseito. The former now holds 17 seats, up from nine, while the latter secured 14. It held just one before the election. Campaigning under the slogan of 'Japanese First,' the ultraconservative right-wing party is led by Sohei Kamiya. 'If Sanseito wins 50 or 60 seats in the next Lower House election, I think it may be possible to form a coalition government with small parties, like European (governments), in the future. (Sanseito) will aim to be a part of that,' said Kamiya at a press conference on Sunday night. Having exceeded 10 seats, the party can now submit nonspending bills in the Upper House. Its target was 20 seats, the minimum requirement to submit budget bills. Kamiya has repeatedly stated that Sanseito is not a xenophobic party. Speaking at the FCCJ earlier this month, he said , 'Please understand we're not intending to exclude foreign workers who are here legally. We just believe cheap foreign labor's not the right way.' Related Posts Sanseito Explained: The Alarming Rise of Japan's Far-Right Movement Why Japanese Leftists Are Using Melonpan to Mock Sanseito Sanseito Leader Says 'Japanese First Approach Is Not Based on Xenophobia'
