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London – The International Court of Justice said Monday that Judge Yuji Iwasawa from Japan was elected president by his peers. Iwasawa is the second Japanese to assume the ICJ’s presidency, behind Hisashi Owada, the father of Empress Masako, who served as the Hague-based court’s president between 2009 and 2012. Iwasawa’s predecessor, Nawaf Salam, resigned in January this year to become prime minister of his country, Lebanon. Under ICJ rules, Iwasawa will serve as president until Feb. 5, 2027, the original scheduled end of Salam’s term. Yuji Iwasawa is the second Japanese to assume the ICJ’s presidency, behind Hisashi Owada, the father of Empress Masako. | Jiji Iwasawa became an ICJ judge in June 2018 in a by-election following Owada’s retirement. An expert on international law, Iwasawa has served as professor at the University of Tokyo and chaired the U.N. Human Rights Committee. The Hague also has the International Criminal Tribunal, which handles serious international crimes. It is headed by Tomoko Akane, also from Japan. The ICJ, established in 1945, is the main judicial body of the United Nations. It deals with disputes between states based on international law, and its rulings are legally binding. It consists of 15 judges elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council. Judges serve a nine-year term. Source link

Pastimes long associated with Japanese grandparents are booming on social media as young people look for new (old) ways to relax. Source link

The solo performance is a popular theatrical genre that rarely translates to film, at least in its original form. When Chazz Palminteri brought his hit one-man show “A Bronx Tale” to the screen in 1993, it was with a full cast, not just a single actor on a stage. So Kazuyoshi Okuyama’s mesmerizing one-woman film “Reveal” is an outlier and, as Okuyama himself describes it, an experiment. The fact that it works so well is mostly due to the bravura performance of Kumi Takiuchi as a prostitute who lays bare her soul with a smiling detachment, confessing both her struggles and crimes. Source link

WASHINGTON – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada will definitely take effect on Tuesday, raising fears of a trade war in North America and sending financial markets reeling. “They’re going to have to have a tariff. So what they have to do is build their car plants, frankly, and other things in the United States, in which case they have no tariffs,” Trump said at the White House. He said there was “no room left” for a deal that would avert the tariffs by curbing fentanyl flows into the United States. Trump’s comments sent U.S. stocks down sharply in late afternoon trading. The dollar rose against the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar following his remarks. Source link

Hiroshima Global Academy, a full-time boarding school on a remote island in Hiroshima Prefecture, is sending off its first graduating class this March. The junior and senior high school was established by the prefecture in April 2019 on the island of Osakikamijima as a model for education reform, and uses the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum — a globally recognized program that prepares students for international studies. The school, which has 255 students, including international students, says it focuses on fostering independent learning, aiming to nurture future leaders who have both a global perspective and a sense of maintaining ties with the local community. Source link

Japan’s financial regulator is surveying life insurers to examine risks tied to their growing practice of transferring policy liabilities to reinsurers backed by global investment firms, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The Financial Services Agency is asking life insurers about the scale of the practice and the type of contracts they have in place, the people said, asking not to be identified because the inquiry is private. The FSA is also interested in the concentration of reinsurers operating in the U.K. territory of Bermuda. The FSA didn’t immediate reply to a request for comment. Japan is one of the world’s largest insurance markets, with individual life and annuity policies in force totaling almost ¥900 trillion ($6 trillion) as of March 2024. Reinsurance involves transferring policy liabilities to another insurer to reduce risk. However, in recent years, Japanese life insurers have increasingly entered contracts in which assets underwritten by reinsurance companies are invested to obtain higher returns. Reinsurers controlled by U.S. investment giants including KKR & Co. and Apollo Global Management are doing deals to manage billions of dollars backing the policies, which they are largely investing in high-yielding, low-liquidity private credit. The arrangements can also help life insurers free up balance sheets ahead of new capital regulations being introduced in Japan in the fiscal year starting April 1. Last December, the International Association of Insurance Supervisors pointed to risks stemming from structural changes in the life insurance industry, including an increase in cross-border asset-intensive reinsurance transactions. Source link

Sapporo – A central government-mandated cap on overtime hours has come into effect for Japan’s trucking industry, leading to decreased revenue among Hokkaido transportation firms and concerns for the future on how prefectural goods, especially seafood and agricultural products, will reach consumers around the country. Without the well-developed road infrastructure of many parts of Honshu and being forced to cover long distances across Japan’s second-largest island and largest prefecture in terms of landmass — almost 40 times the size of Tokyo and nearly equivalent to Austria — it has never been easy to be a Hokkaido trucker. Narrow roads in many parts of the prefecture often mean slow-moving traffic, while winter blizzards can make driving on icy roads dangerous or force road closures. Both issues can mean trucks arrive later, sometimes much later, than scheduled. Source link

In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world. Among its key points: “no aggrandizement, territorial or other”; “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”; “freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” The charter, and the alliance that came of it, is a high point of U.S. statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer U.S. President Donald Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House. Source link

Japanese stocks have been stuck for about eight months, languishing below all-time highs hit in July last year and failing to convincingly break the curse of the ’80s. “Broadly speaking, concerns about tariffs and expectations for a rate increase by the Bank of Japan seem to be weighing on stock prices,” said Nozomi Moriya, an equity strategist for Japan at UBS Securities. The 225-issue Nikkei average broke the previous high of 38,915.87 — set in 1989 — on Feb. 22, 2024 and then made its way as far as 42,426.77 in July, before falling back and settling range-bound between about 38,000 and 40,000. Source link

When a CBS News medical correspondent claimed recently that we’re accumulating a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic in our brains, her colleagues looked horrified, and for good reason. Surely, that much plastic would gunk up our cognitive machinery. You probably don’t have quite that much of the stuff in your brain, but the idea of any plastic piling up there is still unnerving. The correspondent was referring to a new study of the amount of plastic our bodies absorb. Researchers from the University of New Mexico and other institutions examined organs collected from autopsies of 91 people who died over the last quarter century. The scientists tested small samples from different organs, including the brain, liver and kidneys, to measure the amount of plastic present. The results, published in the journal Nature Medicine last month, concluded that plastic is lodged primarily in our brains. Source link