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Objections from the country’s 1% came as Japan debated extending voting rights to all men over the age of 25. Source link

Two recent releases — a sci-fi dating sim and a souped-up dress-up simulator — are starting to change the conversation around previously dismissed genres. Source link

U.S. President Donald Trump failed in his first term to bend the Pentagon to his will, facing delays and defiance from a group of military leaders who were determined to uphold its reputation for staying out of politics. Ten days into his second term, that barrier has washed away. In a break with his predecessors, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has become a major driver in Trump’s agenda with leaders carrying out actions that were seen as unthinkable in the first term, including deploying military planes to deport migrants and studying whether to detain as many as 30,000 of them at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Source link

The Tokyo metropolitan area’s net population inflow in 2024 rose by 9,328 from the previous year to 135,843, close to the 148,783 marked in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the internal affairs ministry said Friday. The net population inflow, or the number of people moving into Tokyo and neighboring Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures — the country’s largest metropolitan area — minus that of those moving out, grew for the third straight year. The government aims to reverse the trend in fiscal 2027 to address the issue of overconcentration in the Tokyo area. By prefecture, Tokyo saw a net population inflow of 79,285 in 2024, up 11,000 from the previous year. The net inflow was 5,433 in 2021 but grew largely in the following three years to return to prepandemic levels of around 70,000 to 80,000. The prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama, Osaka, Chiba, Fukuoka and Yamanashi also posted net population inflows while the 40 other prefectures marked net outflows, with Shiga switching to net outflow in 2024. The Osaka metropolitan area, which comprises the prefectures of Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Nara, posted a net population inflow of 2,679, registering its first net inflow since 2014, when comparable data are available. The Nagoya metropolitan area, which is made up of the prefectures of Aichi, Gifu and Mie, logged a net outflow of 18,856. The ministry said that in 2024, 735,883 people moved into Japan from abroad and that 371,615 moved out of the country. Source link

Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian bombers flew over international waters around the country, Tokyo’s top government spokesman said Friday. “We confirmed that Russian military bombers and fighter jets flew over the high seas of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan yesterday, and we scrambled Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets” in response, Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters. “It is difficult to say clearly what the purpose of the flight was … but the Russian military has been active on an ongoing basis in areas surrounding Japan,” he said. Tokyo has raised the issue with Moscow in the past through diplomatic routes, including regarding a Russian fighter jet’s intrusion into territorial airspace in September, which Russia denied according to media reports. “We will continue to monitor (the situation) closely and do our best to take measures in patrolling and responding to airspace incursions,” Hayashi said. Russia’s defense ministry said on Telegram Thursday that two long-range bombers flew over international waters in the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. The Russian ministry also released a video of two Tupolev-95 aircraft escorted by Russian fighter jets conducting what it called a regular flight over more than eight hours. “All flights by Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft are carried out in strict compliance with international rules on the use of airspace,” it said in a statement. Source link

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told the Lower House Budget Committee on Friday that, when he meets with U.S. President Donald Trump on Feb. 7, he will get confirmation that Japan’s security treaty with the United States covers the defense of the Senkaku Islands, which are also claimed by China. Ishiba also said he intends to seek assistance from Trump in resolving the issue of Japanese nationals kidnapped by North Korea decades ago. “We have to confirm that the territorial issue and the abduction issue are both national sovereignty issues,” Ishiba said at the committee’s first session. Source link

Two months after the opposition took control of the Lower House Budget Committee, the shift is beginning to bite for a weakened Liberal Democratic Party that is wrestling with the dual challenges of a tight budget schedule and stagnating government popularity. Under these circumstances, Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Jun Azumi ー who as committee chairman has the final say on its calendar and agenda ー is expected to play a prominent role in negotiations over the coming weeks. The budget committee began deliberations on Friday, and government officials have framed passing the budget for fiscal 2025, which begins in April, in the Lower House by early March as their utmost priority. Earlier in January, LDP parliamentary affairs chief Tetsushi Sakamoto said the party would like to dedicate over 80 hours to budget deliberations over the next month. Source link

The Bank of Japan’s message on gradual interest hikes has been clearly received by financial markets, Gov. Kazuo Ueda said, adding that more hikes will take place if its economic outlook is realized. Speaking at the Lower House budget committee on Friday, Ueda said the BOJ’s policy settings are still accommodative after recent rate hikes and that would remain the case as the central bank continues to support the inflation trend. The governor said the underlying inflationary trend is below the bank’s 2% target. “We are aiming for a gradual pickup in prices accompanied by a solid increase in wages,” Ueda said. “To achieve this, at present, we believe we need to support economic activity by maintaining accommodative monetary easing so that underlying inflation will gradually rise toward 2%.” Source link

House of Representatives Speaker Fukushiro Nukaga on Friday expressed a wish to quickly finalize measures to address a decrease in imperial family members during the current parliamentary session ending in June. The Lower House head stated his view at a meeting held by the leaders and vice leaders of both chambers of the Diet for representatives of ruling and opposition parties to resume their discussions on the imperial family reform measures. Nukaga said he hopes that the discussions will focus on two options proposed by a government panel of experts — allowing female members to retain their imperial family status even after marriage with commoners, and adopting male members in the paternal line of former imperial family branches to give them royal status. But it is unclear whether an agreement can be reached among the parties because there remain gaps between their views. In an interim report released in September last year, the Lower House speaker and the Upper House president concluded that “a general consensus has been reached” over the idea of maintaining the imperial family status of female members after marriage. But opinions are divided over whether to give such status to their spouses and children. Regarding the treatment of members of former imperial family branches, the report only said that there are both pros and cons. The talks between the ruling and opposition sides began in May last year. They will meet multiple times in February and March this year for further discussions. Source link

A labor-management forum meeting hosted by the Japan Business Federation, or Keidanren, was held in Tokyo on Friday to effectively kick off this year’s shuntō spring wage negotiations, with the focus on whether the previous year’s strong pay hike momentum seen among large firms will spread to smaller businesses. The 2024 talks resulted in salaries rising by over 5% on a whole, but hikes at small and midsized companies, which account for some 70% of the country’s employment, were far lower than the average. The Japanese Trade Union Confederation, or Rengo, the umbrella organization for labor unions, is seeking an overall wage hike of at least 5%, including pay-scale increases, and a hike of 6% or more at small and midsize firms. But Keidanren, which comprises the country’s major companies, calls the target for smaller firms “extremely high,” although it acknowledges the need to raising wages of workers there amid prolonged inflation. In his opening remarks at the forum with Rengo, Keidanren Chairman Masakazu Tokura stressed that Japan is “entering a critical phase for realizing a ‘virtuous cycle of growth and distribution.’” He also called for “efforts across supply chains” to enable smaller businesses to pass rising costs on to consumers to generate funds for pay hikes. Source link