English test cheating and photo-only weddings: Our 5 most-read stories from last week
Social inequality in China may be behind English test proxy cases in Japan
TOKYO -- A slew of suspected cheating cases have been uncovered in the Test of English for International Communication, known commonly as TOEIC, held in Japan. A Chinese student has been arrested over his alleged involvement, and is suspected to have acted as part of an exam cheating ring. A closer look into these cases reveals circumstances unique to China. Full story.
Edging Toward Japan: Japan's greatest gift to the world may yet be Mister Donut
By Damian Flanagan
Whenever I am in Britain, I generally attempt to steer clear of any conversation about Japan as this will often take the form of someone innocently remarking how very "strange" and "alien" Japanese culture must be and how intense must be the culture shock for a British person, presumably hoping that I will respond with a long list of extravagantly weird things. Full story.
New Japanese citizen in int'l marriage confronts single-surname rule for married couples
FUKUOKA -- A man who acquired Japanese nationality two years ago has reflected on the Japanese system requiring married Japanese couples to share a single surname -- following years in an international marriage in which he and his wife retained separate surnames. Full story.
South Korean-style photo-only weddings gain popularity in Japan
TOKYO -- "Instagrammable" South Korean-style photo-only weddings are gaining popularity in Japan amid the trend of young couples moving away from lavish ceremonies and receptions. Full story.
2 women thanked by Tokyo Fire Dept. for saving life of teen in cardiac arrest on train
Airu Shiozaki, second from left in front row, and Megumi Saiki, third from left in front row, who received the fire commissioner award for saving a teenager who collapsed on a train, are seen in Tokyo's Meguro Ward, June 29, 2025. (Mainichi/Yuka Asahina) Full story.
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4 hours ago
Lagging in Language Skills: Foreign Children Being Left Behind in Education
According to the Immigration Services Agency of Japan, the number of foreign nationals living in the country as of the end of 2024 was 3,769,000. This represents an increase of 358,000 from the end of 2023 and is 1.8 times higher than a decade ago. A particularly fast-growing category is foreigners with the 'engineer/specialist in humanities/international services' visa, which includes a wide range of occupations such as technicians, interpreters, designers, language instructors, and more. Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare data shows that the number of foreign workers in this ESHIS category reached 411,000, a 3.9-fold increase in the 10 years leading up to 2024. ESHIS visa holders are permitted to bring their families to Japan, just like those with visas for work such as university teaching, legal services, and accounting. Naturally, this has led to a rise in the number of foreign children living in Japan. It's within the context of these structural changes that the urgent need for Japanese language education for foreign children has arisen. The number of foreign children enrolled in public elementary and junior high schools reached some 129,000 in fiscal 2024, a 9.0% increase from the previous year, according to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). The problem is that many schools lack the staff needed to teach JFL, or Japanese as a foreign language, to these children. As a result, more and more children are growing up without sufficient Japanese language skills. Without a shared base in language, which is crucial for communication, their academic and career prospects will be adversely affected and they will tend to be isolated in their communities. 70,000 Children in Need of Japanese Instruction In MEXT's statistics for fiscal 2023, there were almost 70,000 students that require JFL instruction in public schools, double the number from a decade earlier. In Matsudo, a city in Chiba Prefecture adjacent to Tokyo, 23,000 of its approximately 500,000 residents as of the end of 2024 were foreign nationals. To address their needs, the city's Board of Education set a policy to establish JFL classrooms in elementary schools with at least 18 students requiring instruction in fiscal 2022. As of fiscal 2025, 15 out of the city's 45 public schools had established these classrooms. From fiscal 2024, a school readiness program was established, where foreign children receive 20 days of intensive instruction before entering school, covering Japanese language essentials for school life such as greetings and reporting health issues. The Board of Education has assigned 33 staff members for this language education and has also secured 37 paid volunteers. Matsudo's efforts are relatively comprehensive. In urban parts of Japan, such as the Tokyo metropolitan area and Aichi Prefecture, where there are many students requiring this instruction, it is easier for schools to provide adequate support. Growing Crisis at Regional Schools On the other hand, the situation is particularly serious in more rural areas, where foreign children are more thinly dispersed. In terms of the rate of increase of foreign children requiring JFL instruction from 2021 to 2023, Tottori Prefecture was the highest, seeing growth of 2.4 times, from 18 to 44 students. It was followed by Ōita (2.3 times, from 50 to 114), Kōchi (2.3 times, from 12 to 27), Kagoshima (1.9 times, from 28 to 53), and Saga (1.9 times, from 40 to 74). Because the number of foreign children in these areas is much smaller than in urban areas and securing teaching staff is more of a challenge, local governments tend not to have sufficient systems in place. In fiscal 2023, roughly 30% of public elementary and middle schools across Japan (9,241 schools) had students who needed JFL instruction. According to Wakabayashi Hideki, a visiting associate professor at Utsunomiya University's School of International Studies who has been involved with the education of foreign children, 70% of these schools had four or fewer foreign children, demonstrating the situation of foreign children being thinly dispersed. Looking at the breakdown of children requiring JFL instruction by their native tongue, the highest is Portuguese-speaking children, many of whom are of Japanese-Brazilian descent. The number of children native in Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese languages is also rising quickly, and some regions are seeing an increase in those with Nepali and Burmese backgrounds. 'The problem is more likely to go unrecognized when only a few students need support, and municipalities often can't secure budgets and staff,' says Wakabayashi. 'Homeroom teachers and other staff are often left to handle the situation alone. And when students come from multiple linguistic backgrounds, that can make the challenge even greater.' Many children are unable to keep up with classes taught in Japanese through school instruction alone. That's why, in urban areas, an increasing number of Japanese language classes are being offered outside of schools by public organizations, NPOs, and local governments to support their learning. By contrast, such programs are often lacking in certain regional areas. MEXT has issued a Guide for Accepting Foreign Children , and included Japanese instruction in the national curriculum guidelines starting in fiscal 2018. While the government sets staffing standards, it leaves decisions about actual staffing levels and local JFL programs to municipalities, offering mainly subsidies. The Limits of Keeping It Local There is also the more fundamental issue of children not attending school. In fiscal 2023, a record 970 foreign children of school age were not enrolled, a 24.6% increase from the previous year. Adding also children whose enrollment status could not be confirmed, MEXT puts the number of such children who may not be attending school at 8,601. The Constitution of Japan guarantees children the right to receive an education and stipulates that guardians must ensure their children are educated. Legally speaking, this applies only to children with Japanese citizenship, but based on the International Covenants on Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, foreign children are guaranteed the opportunity, if desired, to receive the same education as Japanese children. Japan's foreign population is expected to hit 9.39 million in 2070, making up 10% of the nation's total, according to 2023 projections by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. However, the inflow of foreign nationals is already outpacing these projections, making it likely that the 10% mark will be reached as early as 2050. 'In Japan, there is little awareness of the need to build social infrastructure with the settlement of foreign residents in mind,' says Menju Toshihiro, visiting professor at Kansai University of International Studies. 'As a result, the education system for foreign children has largely been left to local governments and individual schools, leading to significant regional disparities. To ensure that foreign children, who will help support Japan's future, can acquire the same academic abilities as Japanese children, the national government must establish a clear policy and restructure the education system.' (Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo © Pixta.)
The Mainichi
10 hours ago
- The Mainichi
Editorial: Japan gov't must quickly return remains of WWII victims to families
Sayoko Yamamoto, an 81-year-old resident of Hyogo Prefecture, has never seen her father. He was drafted to war in December 1943, six months before she was born, and reportedly died in a field hospital in Burma, present-day Myanmar, the following year. A government notice of his death in battle arrived two years after the end of World War II, but a white wooden box his family received only contained a piece of wood. Her parents' married life lasted just a little over four months, and few could share their memories and mementos of her father. As Yamamoto got older, her desire to know the truth about her dad, who passed away at age 26, grew. She examined his war records and family registry to follow in his footsteps. Yamamoto believes that if only her family had received her father's remains, they could have served as mementos to remember the deceased kin. "I miss my dad, who remains buried in a foreign land. To me, the war has not ended yet," she told the Mainichi Shimbun. During World War II, approximately 3.1 million people of Japan died. Of them, roughly 2.4 million perished overseas, or in Okinawa or Iwo Jima (now Ioto Island), but the remains of only around 1.28 million individuals are said to have been retrieved. Of the remainder, the Japanese government considers the remains of about 590,000 people as "retrievable," except for those that are sunk at sea. Retrieval becoming more difficult The work to recover the remains of the war dead began in 1952, the year Japan restored its sovereignty. From the very beginning, however, the government's stance was that "it is impossible to bring all of them back." The retrieval work has since continued, with the bereaved families protesting every time the government suggested discontinuing it. It was not until 2016 that a lawmaker-sponsored bill stipulating the retrieval as a state responsibility was passed into law. The investigation system has since been strengthened and budgets increased. However, it is becoming more difficult to discover the remains as time passes. Over the nine-year period up to fiscal 2024, the remains of fewer than 4,000 people were newly collected. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there are approximately 3,000 locations overseas where the remains of the war dead are said to have been left but no investigation has been carried out yet. There is an urgent need to act while approaching other countries hosting those sites. The original objective of the retrieval work is to identify the remains and return them to their relatives. In recent years, an examination method of extracting DNA samples from teeth, femurs and other parts of the bodies of the war dead and comparing them with those of their kin has proven successful in determining their blood relationship. While the government had long limited this method to cases where there were personal belongings that could help identify the fallen, it relaxed the conditions in 2016 and expanded the coverage to all remains in 2021. Consequently, the remains of more than 20 people have been returned to their families from Okinawa and the southern fronts, where the personal effects of the war dead are rarely found. There are remains of more than 13,000 people from which DNA samples have been collected. The government should widely publicize information such as where those remains were recovered and whether they accompanied personal belongings, to make the data more accessible to bereaved families. It has also proven effective to approach the surviving families. In 2020, the welfare ministry sent out notices to some 2,700 relatives of those who perished on the Tarawa Atoll in Kiribati in the central Pacific as part of a pilot project to call for DNA testing. Of them, some 400 relatives came forward, leading to identifying two victims. The government is against expanding this initiative to other areas, citing excessive burdens on local bodies to be tasked with the family searches. However, in some former battlefields the scope of the families subject to the searches could be narrowed down based on the troops their kin belonged to. The government is urged to pursue effective methods and continue approaching the relatives. Witnesses to the reality of the war's devastation In Japan, there are also many victims of atomic bombings and air raids whose remains have not been found. In the aftermath of the Great Tokyo Air Raids in 1945, the bodies of victims were tentatively buried at some 150 locations according to records, but more than half of these sites have not been identified. The government must extend support to civil groups that have continued investigations throughout the country. An issue has also arisen where the remains of those who died in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa are treated carelessly. The Ministry of Defense's Okinawa Defense Bureau has cited the southern part of Okinawa's main island, where fierce battles took place during the war, as a candidate site for collecting soil for the land reclamation work off the Henoko district of Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, for the construction of a U.S. military base there. Although the governor of Okinawa and the prefectural assembly have urged that any soil containing the remains of the war dead be not used in the project, the ministry has stopped short of clarifying its stance, stating, "We haven't decided on where to procure the soil from." Photojournalist Natsuki Yasuda has compared the history of Okinawa with the realities facing people in Fukushima Prefecture who have been unable to search for the bodies of their loved ones who lost their lives to the tsunami in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, as the families remain evacuated from their hometowns due to the nuclear disaster. "Is it right to achieve 'recovery' based on someone else's sacrifice? I don't think a nation that disregards the deceased and their remains can protect the dignity of people alive today." The remains of the fallen are "witnesses" to history. In April this year, a group of volunteers unearthed the remains of an almost entire body in the mountains of Itoman, Okinawa Prefecture. The remains are thought to belong to a young soldier who was buried amid an intense battle. The late anthropologist Shuichiro Narasaki, a leading expert in examining human remains, wrote down that in some cases the circumstances leading up to the person's death could be conjectured based on the condition of their bones and personal effects. We must learn lessons from the realities of the war as told by the remains of the fallen, and ensure our pledges against war.
Asahi Shimbun
14 hours ago
- Asahi Shimbun
VOX POPULI: Despite politics, stateless folks can build happy lives in Japan
When she was in junior high school in Gunma Prefecture, a single remark from the back of the classroom cut Rurika Hasegawa like a blade. A classmate's voice—offhand yet cruel—carried across the room: 'Her skin is dark because she eats nothing but curry.' She couldn't understand why anyone would say such a thing about her, or what it was meant to prove. 'In that moment, I was truly, deeply hurt,' she recalled. Hasegawa was born in Myanmar to Rohingya parents, members of a persecuted Muslim minority. Her family fled and came to Japan in 2001 when she was in the sixth grade. Each day she brought to school a lunch her mother had carefully packed. She was the only student there who wore a hijab. With her family's steady support, high school marked a turning point. She made more friends and found places where trust could grow. She went on to a vocational college, married, found work and eventually became a Japanese citizen. Now in her mid-30s, she is raising five children, ages 5 to 14. 'Before I know it, the day is over in a flash,' she cheerfully said of her crowded, happy routine. What, after all, is a nationality? The question has stayed with her. Guided by it, she now co-leads the nonprofit Stateless Network, which supports people facing problems of nationality and legal identity. Japan's recent drift toward exclusion and xenophobia alarms her. 'I'm very worried,' she said. Part of her would even like to meet that former classmate again. Did he ever realize how those words he tossed off that day hurt her? He probably didn't; no one around him had likely taught him how a throwaway line about racial differences could harm someone. If they met now, she'd want him to see how she has grown—the life she has built and the person she has become. She'd want him to know that we are the same human beings, sharing the same earth, learning—however imperfectly—to live alongside one another. There is a Japanese expression she especially loves: "junin toiro" (10 people, 10 colors). If there are 10 people, there are 10 distinct hues, 10 ways of being, each worthy of its shade. 'What a beautiful phrase,' Hasegawa said, her voice calm and her smile gentle. —The Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 18 * * * Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.
