TOKYO — Experts on Friday will deliberate whether to approve an oral, two-drug combination to induce an abortion for the first time in Japan, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has announced.

In Japan, the practice of abortion has been limited to surgery, and if the ministry’s expert committee approves the oral combination, it may provide a less burdensome option for women.

In late December 2021, the British pharmaceutical company Linepharma applied for approval to manufacture and market the medications as Mefeego Pack in Japan. The two drugs used in combination are mifepristone, a drug to block the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain a pregnancy, and misoprostol, a drug that causes the uterus to contract.

In clinical trials in Japan, 93% of 120 pregnant women seeking abortion at up to 63 days of gestation were able to abort within 24 hours by using the medications. Although 60% of the patients had symptoms such as abdominal pain and vomiting, most of them had mild or moderate symptoms.

Although abortion pills have been used overseas for more than 30 years, they have not been approved in Japan, where the debate on the introduction of the pills has stalled partly due to negative attitudes toward abortion.

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The post Japan’s first oral abortion option up for approval first appeared on Careers Japan.

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The post Japan’s Rise of Net Cafe Refugees and Youth Poverty first appeared on Careers Japan.

The post Japan’s Rise of Net Cafe Refugees and Youth Poverty appeared first on Careers Japan.

The coronavirus has infected over 32 million people in Japan and killed more than 65,000. Thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths continue to be recorded daily. But Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced last week that his government will downgrade the legal status of the disease to a less threatening category, saying that the country will gradually restore normalcy.

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The post What Japan’s COVID threat downgrade means: 5 things to know first appeared on Careers Japan.

The post What Japan’s COVID threat downgrade means: 5 things to know appeared first on Careers Japan.

To be fair, there had been moments in her adult life when she felt determined to embark on a once-and-for-all cleaning crusade.

Like that time in college when her boyfriend dropped by unannounced to her Tokyo apartment. Caught off guard by the surprise visit, she nonetheless let him in — except he didn’t set foot in her room. After taking a glance inside from the entranceway, he left. The next day, she was dumped.

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Inside, empty plastic cups and plates adorned with scrunched-up wet paper – to replicate the weight and texture of scallops – make their way along a conveyer belt.

To one side, concealed behind a plastic screen, technicians monitor data on computer screens, the specifics of their work deemed off-limits to the Observer and a small group of journalists granted rare access to the development “studio” belonging to Sushiro, the leading force in Japan’s multimillion dollar sushi train industry.

This is where developers make incremental improvements to the restaurant chain’s ability to deliver plates of freshly-made sushi to diners’ tables with lightning speed, and stay one step ahead of the competition in a sector estimated to be worth 740bn yen (about £4bn).

“In the past, diners used to take what they fancied from a free-for-all conveyer belt, but these days most people want to order their favourite sushi,” said Masato Sugihara, deputy manager in the IT department at Sushiro’s parent company, Food and Life.

The studio replicates a typical Sushiro restaurant. “Here we can ensure that the delivery system works properly and send the right order to the right customer as quickly as possible,” he said. “We can make tweaks, such as improving diners’ interface with the online menu, that we can’t make in real time at our restaurants.

“It’s not exactly top secret, but our neighbours have no idea what we do here.”

The holy grail of revolving sushi (or kaitenzushi) is flawless, contactless low-budget dining – a trend accelerated by the pandemic and a labour shortage that will leave Japan with an estimated shortfall of 6.4 million workers by 2030.

Not far from Sushiro’s secret nerve centre, staff are preparing for the lunch service at the chain’s outlet in the Namba district, one of about 4,000 kaitenzushi restaurants across Japan.

Diners at the 236-seat restaurant use a touch panel to choose from 150 items, from sushi and fried chicken to coffee and cake. Their bill is calculated automatically, and payment is made via a machine at the exit, where customers who have ordered takeaways online retrieve their orders from a bank of lockers.

It is a far cry from the traditional sushi joint of the popular imagination, where stern-looking artisan chefs with years of training place plates of lovingly prepared seafood on wooden counters.

But Nobuo Yonekawa, an expert on kaitenzushi, says the industry is losing its appeal amid rising prices and competition from other types of budget cuisine. “The number of customers is in decline, and to get them back the industry needs to think about technology in a different way,” said Yonekawa, who has written a book on the subject.

This robot can make 3,600 tiny blocks of rice an hour. Photograph: Food & Life Companies

While there is no shortage of high-end establishments, sushi consumption has undergone a revolution since the first kaitenzushi outlet opened in Osaka in 1958. Purists may protest, but automation has made it possible to take sushi out of the exclusive, and expensive, realm of Sukiyabashi Jiro et al and turn it into a fast food to rival burgers and fried chicken.

Mass consumption of sushi has only been made possible by evolving technology, coupled with a cultural shift from gastro exclusivity.

At Sushiro’s Namba Amza restaurant, every single plate is fitted with a tag that makes it possible to determine in real time which sushi is selling well. The tags are read by sensors below the conveyor belt, ensuring that the correct order is sent to each table. Plates that aren’t picked up, and those on a second “free-for-all” belt from which diners can help themselves, are automatically removed after they have travelled 350 metres.

“We use AI to analyse which dishes are popular at particular restaurants, and order fish accordingly,” said Yutaka Sakaguchi, director of the IT department at Food and Life. “In the early days of kaitenzushi, chefs didn’t have a clear idea of what people wanted. They had to act on instinct.

“It enables us to cut down on food waste, but it also allows managers to predict with some confidence what kind of sushi to prepare and how many staff might be needed on certain days. It also factors in the weather … for example, what dishes are more popular when it’s warm and sunny. Before we had this system, we had a lot of food waste.”

At the back of the kitchen, a robot churns out tiny blocks of rice at the rate of about 3,600 an hour. “It’s impossible for a chef to do it that quickly,” said Yurika Murai, from Sushiro’s public relations department. Each block is identical and served up, as tradition demands, at skin temperature.

“The machine is programmed to make the sushi look like it’s been formed with human hands,” Murai added. “They’re not just soulless blocks of rice.” Further down the production line, another device wraps pieces of rice in nori seaweed for the chefs to finish plating and placing on the conveyor belts.

The rule is that sushi should be in front of the customer no more than three minutes after the order has come in. Yellow and red lamps light up to warn chefs that an order still hasn’t gone out.

“Our main challenge is to grasp at peak lunch and dinner times what fish is being ordered most,” Sugihara said. “You can’t just flood the conveyer belt with lots of plates, so we count the number of customers and the average number of plates being ordered at certain points in the day, and this allows us to anticipate demand during busy and slow periods.”

A sushi chef makes a meat sushi plate at Nikuzushi (meat sushi) restaurant in Tokyo. Photograph: Toru Hanai/Reuters

But there are certain tasks that are still the preserve of humans, such as slicing the fish and placing it on rice. “Clearing the plates and cleaning the tables is also difficult for machines,” Sakaguchi said. “But the labour shortage is making it increasingly hard to find new staff, so we need more automation. Maybe the answer lies in more robots, but we haven’t got there yet.”

Sushiro’s president, Koichi Mizutome, dismissed suggestions that hi-tech sushi has robbed the dish, which has been around in its recognisable modern form for about 200 years, of its culture and artistry.

“Our world is about automation and achieving the exact same level of service in all of our restaurants, where people can eat sushi at an affordable price,” he said. “The other [world] is about the individual touch by chefs who have gone through years of training. I think those two sushi worlds can coexist.”

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The post ‘Not soulless blocks of rice’: the secret world of Japan’s appeared first on Careers Japan.

While life in Japan’s wealthier cities, such as Tokyo and Osaka, is comfortable by global standards, the country faces a demographic crisis. Rural Japan is struggling to maintain vital infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and rail links as the number of children and working-age residents shrink. There are an estimated 10 million empty homes in Japan following mass migration to the cities.

“Our biggest challenge is that the elderly here now need to go into nursing care. There are no jobs to attract young people to stay in the community,” Tachimi Kodama, 70, who lives in the Japanese town of Gojyme with his wife and 94-year-old father and 90-year-old mother. Gojyme, which has 8538 people of which half are aged over 65, is in Akita prefecture off the Sea of Japan coast.

Demographers warn China faces a similar scenario in coming decades, although its population crisis will be at a larger scale that could accelerate more dramatically than Japan’s has. Japan’s population decline has been gradual and, so far, manageable in a country that is relatively wealthy compared to developing China.

People exercise to the NHK morning radio calisthenics broadcast at a park in Tokyo Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

Japan’s population, which exploded after World War II and peaked at 128 million, has been declining since 2008 with the numbers accelerating each year. The population shrunk by 20,000 in 2008, but this increased to 640,000 people in 2021. The number of people aged 65 and over is expected to increase to 35 per cent by 2040, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

For the first time last year more than half of the 800 municipalities in Japan were ranked as being wholly or partially underpopulated. Even Osaka and Tokyo, typically the biggest drawcards for young people escaping the country, are seeing population declines.

By contrast, the United Nation expects China’s population to shrink by 109 million by 2050, which is three times more than it forecast in 2019.

Experts say Japan’s efforts to manage the decline offer lessons for China and other countries facing population declines. China also has the advantage of studying the policies that have failed in Japan.

“Recently, Chinese authorities have rushed to launch a series of policies to boost fertility, but they are likely to fail like Japan,” Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says. “What the Chinese government want to do, the Japanese government has already done.”

“Japan’s approach has proved expensive and inefficient, temporarily boosting the fertility rate from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015 and back down to 1.23 in 2022. China, which is ‘getting old before it gets rich’, does not even have the financial resources to fully follow Japan’s path.”

Japan’s advantage over China is that it did indeed get rich before it got old. The country’s economic boom in the 1980s set many of its elderly up for relatively comfortable lives in retirement, although this is not often the case in rural areas where pensions are working well into their eighties and nineties to supplement their pensions.

A man walks past a shelter containing dolls that are hand-made and placed around the village by local resident Tsukimi Ayano to replace the dwindling local population on April 22, 2016 in Nagoro village, in Miyoshi, Japan.  Gettty Images

“It is very likely that we will face a more serious population crisis than Japan and South Korea,” a commentator for China’s Mizhai Finance warned on a social media post this week.

It noted that in 2021, China’s per capital GDP was about $US12,800 ($18,500) compared to Japan’s per capital GDP of $US42,000 in 2010 when its population started declining and $US34,700 for South Korea in 2021.

“Compared with the economic development level of Japan and South Korea, the time point for the negative growth of my country’s total population is obviously coming too early,” it said.

Japan’s other challenge has been poor labour productivity, partly due to a culture of excessive bureaucracy and working long hours or not leaving the office until your boss does even when there is nothing to do. The IMF says Japan’s productivity has been the lowest of the G7 countries since 1989.

Its big advantage over China, though, is its strong social security safety net and a high level of healthcare which has contributed to Japanese people living longer than anywhere else in the world.

As Japan’s pension and healthcare costs accelerate, policymakers and business leaders are alarmed at the size of the country’s 130 trillion yen ($1.45 trillion) social security expenditure. However, business leaders say China could use Japan’s experience and data to find its own solutions to the population crisis.

“It is a huge industry of 130 trillion yen, and it is a growing industry, and Japan is the forerunner. Japan may well be able to export our expertise globally,” Kohei Takashima, executive director of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, told an online forum this week.

Like China, Japan’s cost-of-living pressures and more interest in women joining the workforce rather than being stay-at-home mothers means birthrates are declining. While China has also experienced an exodus of young workers from the countryside to its cities, Japan has become a nation economically divided between poor rural areas and the urban corridor stretching from Tokyo to Osaka on the country’s main island of Honshu.

Immigration allergy

Japan, like China, shies away from boosting its population through immigration. Murai Yoshihiro, the governor of Japan’s Miyagi prefecture last week called for the country to accept more immigrants to counter the population decline. “Now’s the time to take bold action with the assumption that the population and birth rate will keep declining,” he said. It is an unpopular proposal in a country where many residents do not favour aggressive immigration.

Back in Ohi, Hagihara says he is hopeful that the COVID-19 pandemic may have changed the mindset of young Japanese workers and encourage them to consider working remotely in rural areas.

“I have a bit of hope for a younger generation that their way of thinking may change because of COVID-19 and they realise they don’t really need to be in the city to do what they want to do,” he says.

That may be wishful thinking. Hagihara says despite the attractions of country life, he cannot convince even his own grown children to return to the town.

With Noriko Honda

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The post Lessons from Japan for China’s population crisis first appeared on Careers Japan.

The post Lessons from Japan for China’s population crisis appeared first on Careers Japan.

The research team — which aims to help both expat and local parents when choosing international schools for their children — ranked cities globally and by continent in terms of the price of one full term for a 6-year-old.

According to this year’s numbers, the median price of a Tokyo school decreased by over $2,000 from the survey conducted last year to $15,254 (about ¥1.97 million at current exchange rates), shifting the city from 8th to 10th place among Asian cities and regions and from 17th to 20th globally. Since 2019, the median has declined almost $3,000.

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If you’re arrested or jailed, the Australian Government will do what it can to help you under our Consular Services Charter. But we can’t get you out of trouble or out of jail.

See the Australian Embassy Tokyo website for more information about arrests in Japan.

Be aware that you won’t be allowed to make a phone call if you are arrested in Japan.

Drugs

Authorities can charge you if they find trace amounts of illegal drugs in your blood or urine.

More information:

Family law

Japanese family law, including divorce and child custody, is very different to Australian law. For example, joint custody of a child after divorce is not a legal option, and there are limits to access for a non-custodial parent. The Family Courts in Japan generally consider that it is in a child’s best interests for them to remain in their “usual place of residence”. Courts therefore usually give sole custody to the parent that has taken care of the child most recently.

If you’re involved in custody or other family disputes, consult a lawyer before you leave Australia or if you are already in Japan. We have produced some general information about issues around custody, child abduction and parental rights. 

Australia and Japan are both parties to The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

If you’re concerned that your child has been wrongfully removed or detained in Japan, contact the Attorney-General’s Department in Australia.

More information:

Employment law

Some employment agents may mislead and encourage foreigners to work in Japan without:

• the correct visa
• financial arrangements in place

This could leave you open to exploitation and prosecution.

Authorities have arrested Australians for working in the entertainment industry while in Japan on tourist visas.

If you want to travel to Japan for work:

• check the true nature of the work offered
• get the correct visa before arriving in Japan
• get legal advice before signing any contract

More information:

Police powers

Police can stop you on the street, demand identification and search you and your belongings.

If you’re in a public place, police can seize:

• knives longer than 5.5cm, including blades and penknives
• firearms
• any other weapons or things you could use as weapons
• drugs
• any item they reasonably suspect you stole or have unlawfully

If they find any of these items on you, it’s likely that police will detain you.

If you’re arrested, police can detain you for up to 23 days without charge, including for offences you might think are minor. Police might hold you for weeks or months while they investigate and undertake legal proceedings.

The initial police interview could last several hours. Police might record it in writing rather than electronically.

Under Japanese law, you can:

• remain silent
• access legal representation
• have an interpreter provided

However, in Japan police can question you without your lawyer present.

English interpreters may be substandard. Get a list of English-speaking lawyers around Japan from the Australian Embassy website.

Other laws

If you’re visiting Japan short-term as a tourist or for business, you must always carry your passport.

If you live in Japan, you must always carry your residence card.

It’s illegal to:

• buy or drink alcohol if you’re under 20 years old
• drive with any alcohol in your bloodstream
• allow someone under the influence of alcohol to drive a vehicle in which you’re a passenger

The following activities are also illegal:

• importing or possessing firearms or other weapons without a permit.
• smoking on the streets in some parts of Tokyo and other cities.
• using UHF-CB radios (walkie-talkies) that don’t meet Japanese standards, such as those purchased outside Japan.
• resisting arrest or other actions that obstruct an official’s duties.
• flying a drone without a permit in many areas of Japan. Strict regulations apply under new aviation laws: http://www.mlit.go.jp/en/koku/uas.html
• having illegal drugs in your body (detected by urine testing).
• drinking on the streets on specific days, such as around Shibuya on Halloween and New Year’s Eve.

Penalties

Penalties for serious crimes, such as murder, include the death penalty.

Other sentences can include:

• heavy fines
• lengthy jail terms with hard labour
• deportation

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The post Japan first appeared on Careers Japan.

The post Japan appeared first on Careers Japan.

From dazzling Tokyo to timeless Kyoto, fast-paced modernity and enchanting tradition collide in a place like no other – with a cuisine beyond compare.

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The post Japan – Luxury Escapes AU first appeared on Careers Japan.

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Not that getting there requires any feat of forensic map reading. Just steps from the busy Nishiazabu crossing and in plain view from the sidewalk, Eureka is every bit as easy to find as it is accessible to enter.

Rather, that exclamatory sign will presage your reaction as you sample the remarkable range of flavors and styles of sake served there. If you’re visiting for the first time, it’s likely to be quite the discovery.

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The post Eureka moments abound at sake sommelier Marie Chiba’s new bar appeared first on Careers Japan.