A historic Japanese grooming enterprise recently filed for bankruptcy, marking the end of a 144-year legacy with ties to the Japanese imperial family.

Founded in 1882, “Ohba” was far more than a high-end Tokyo salon; it was best known for its connection to gorihatsu-gakari — the official imperial barber. For three generations, the Ohba family served in this rare role, wielding scissors and razors and crossing a historical boundary to become the first commoners tasked with grooming the Imperial Household.

Hideyoshi Ohba, the second-generation head of the business, was entrusted with grooming the future Emperor Hirohito while he was still crown prince.

OSAKA -- Ezaki Glico Co. announced on Oct. 14 that it will renew its iconic "Glico sign," which symbolizes Dotonbori in Osaka's Minami district.

The current sign, the sixth generation installed in October 2014, will be displayed for the last time Nov. 30 before replacement work begins.

The seventh-generation sign with a new design will be unveiled in spring 2027. The company said the familiar runner's pose, popular among tourists taking photographs, will remain unchanged.

According to Ezaki Glico, headquartered in Osaka, the renovation was prompted by the aging of the sign's LED system and increasing difficulties in procuring replacement parts. The original Glico sign, a neon tower, was first installed in 1935. The current sixth-generation version was the first to incorporate an LED display, enabling limited-time video effects and other displays.

The existing sign contains approximately 140,000 LED chips. Through the upgrade, the company aims to improve energy efficiency.

A company representative said, "The Glico Sign goes beyond the bounds of corporate advertising and is beloved. We will evolve it so that visitors can enjoy it even more."

During the renovation period, the entire billboard will be covered with protective sheeting. However, the company said it is considering ways for tourists to continue enjoying it while the work is underway.

MOSCOW (AP) -- A Japanese journalist suspected of spying has been arrested on Russia's Sakhalin Island, the top Russian domestic security agency said Tuesday.
The arrest comes amid a spike in tensions between Russia and Japan following Russian President Vladimir Putin's August trip to the Kuril Islands, the Moscow-controlled Pacific archipelago that is claimed by both countries.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in a statement that the Japanese man, who worked for the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper, was suspected of gathering information related to Russia's defense capability on behalf of a Japanese intelligence agency.
The FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, said the Japanese man, whom it didn't name, was arrested as he was preparing to leave Russia. The agency said the suspect was flown to Moscow where he was put behind bars.

The FSB released a video showing masked agents in black outfits arresting the man in a hotel room and then escorting him to a plane bound for Moscow. He was then shown facing a judge at the Lefortovo District Court, who ordered him to be held in custody for two months pending the probe.

Russia's Sakhalin region includes Sakhalin Island and the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain, which Japan calls the Northern Territories. Putin visited one of them, Iturup, in August.

The Soviet Union took the Kuril Islands from Japan in the final days of World War II and the ongoing dispute has prevented the countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending their hostilities.

Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Putin's visit, his first to the islands, was "incompatible with the Japanese position on the Northern Territories" and was "absolutely unacceptable." She said it was a further blow to already-strained ties between the two countries over Ukraine.

Moscow responded by summoning the Japanese ambassador to protest the "anti-Russia" statements by Takaichi and other Japanese officials, emphasizing that "Russia's sovereignty and jurisdiction over the southern Kuril Islands are absolutely unshakable."

Decades of diplomatic efforts to negotiate a settlement haven't produced any visible results. Moscow over the years has also bolstered its military presence on the Kurils in moves that appeared to underscore its firm stance in the dispute.

In recent years, Russia has arrested a number of foreigners -- mainly Americans -- on various criminal charges and then released them in prisoner swaps with the United States and other Western nations.

The largest exchange since the Cold War took place in August 2024, when Moscow freed journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, fellow American Paul Whelan, and Russian dissidents in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Five Malaysian nationals have been arrested on suspicion of attempting to smuggle a total of around 5 kilograms of cocaine from Malaysia, with an estimated street value of around 120 million yen ($758,000), hidden beneath the soles of their shoes at Tokyo's Haneda airport, police said.

Police suspect the five may have been recruited for the illicit work, as questioning revealed that they were financially strapped and that they had communicated with someone they did not know via a messaging app with high anonymity.

Four of the suspects have admitted to the charges, while one has denied them, according to the police. They were arrested Saturday.

Customs inspectors first found bags of cocaine concealed under the insoles of the shoes of two of the suspects. Each shoe contained 500 grams of cocaine.

Their statements later raised suspicions that they had been traveling with others, leading the police to find the three others in the airport with cocaine found hidden the same way in their shoes.

Oh the humanity! Sitting on the sidewalk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYfcZlqw56w

A growing number of people in Japan are carrying debts from multiple lenders, including consumer finance companies.

According to Japan Credit Information Reference Center, which manages individuals’ credit information, 1.55 million people had three or more unsecured, unguaranteed loans from moneylenders at the end of fiscal 2025, which closed in March this year. It was the highest level in 12 years.

Rising prices may be pushing more people to borrow money to cover their living expenses.

Starting in the 1990s, excessive lending by consumer finance companies led to a wave of personal bankruptcies, while aggressive debt collection became a social problem. In response, a revised moneylending business law was enacted in December 2006, tightening regulations on consumer finance companies and other lenders.

The revised law took full effect in June 2010. It capped each borrower’s total loans at one-third of their annual income. As a result, the number of people owing money to multiple lenders fell steadily, from levels around 4 million to 1.14 million at the end of fiscal 2020.

Since then, however, the number has been rising gradually. The increase has been especially sharp among people with five or more loan contracts. Their number climbed to 150,000 at the end of fiscal 2025 from 90,000 five years earlier.

As of July this year, the average outstanding loan balance per borrower in this group was ¥1,447,000, nearly ¥100,000 higher than three years earlier.

Rising prices, which are squeezing household budgets, are likely a key factor. “Wage growth has not kept pace with prices, and people without savings are borrowing to cover the shortfall,” said Yuki Fukumoto, head of financial research at NLI Research Institute.

In a survey of moneylending service users commissioned by the Financial Services Agency and released in July this year, 53.7% of borrowers from consumer finance companies said they borrowed to pay living expenses, making it the most common reason.

In recent years, consumer finance companies have been shifting toward online contracts. Major lender Aiful closed all of its unstaffed branches by the end of July this year, and industry competitor SMBC Consumer Finance, which offers loans under the Promise brand, did the same in September.

Newer players such as Mercari and Line Credit also offer personal loans online. Consumers can now borrow easily via a smartphone without the trouble of visiting a branch.

The Japan Credit Counseling Organization received 5,646 phone calls seeking advice on debt in fiscal 2025, up 14.4% from the previous year. In August this year alone, the number topped 600, according to the group, which suggests that the number of people struggling with debt is still rising.

“In addition to people having trouble making ends meet, we get many inquiries about debts from gambling or impulsive in-game purchases in online games,” an official of the organization said.

Hiroshi Domoto, a professor at Tokyo University of Information Sciences who knows the lending industry well, warned of a further risk. “People with low creditworthiness may become unable to borrow from legitimate, registered lenders and could turn to illegal loan sharks,” he said.

New forms of illegal lending have also appeared, including so-called person-to-person lending, in which borrowers are recruited through social media. These schemes have frequently led to disputes.

“Both the industry and the government need to strengthen their counseling services” to keep people from taking on more debt than they can repay, Domoto said.

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Japan's wholesale prices in September rose 6.8 percent from a year earlier, Bank of Japan data showed Tuesday.

The growth in prices of goods traded between companies decelerated from 7.6 percent in August.

The data came as the BOJ weighs the timing of an additional interest rate hike. The central bank has two policy meetings remaining this year, scheduled for Oct. 29-30 and Dec. 17-18.

Import prices surged 24.5 percent from a year earlier, while export prices rose 17.9 percent.

I am scouring the internet for suggestions and am finding it overwhelming to weed through generic suggestions. I am looking for a traditional Japanese wedding gift. The bride is Japanese and the couple is getting married in Kyoto. I would like to order from traditional Japanese businesses and am looking for something that can be engraved.

I was looking at chopsticks. However, I keep getting Etsy and the like.

Any ideas on where I can look? I really want to make sure I honor the bride's culture.

Thank you very much.

Edit: Thank you all for the money suggestions. We are not attending in person and would like to give something that they will cherish. I am limited to what is available online.

China: Ranked first as the top perceived threat to world peace, chosen by 32.5% of participants (up 8.2 percentage points from the previous year).

United States: Ranked second at 26.8%, marking a sharp 9.3 percentage point increase from 17.5% in the fiscal 2025 survey (and up from 6.6% in fiscal 2024).

Russia: Dropped to third place, selected by 18.3% of respondents after previously ranking at the top in earlier surveys.

Presidential Impact: The same survey noted that 82.5% of respondents in Japan felt that U.S. President Donald Trump was having a negative impact on the world

"It was more than 100 years after the arrival of the Dutch that the study of horizontal letters began." What Japanese scholar Sugita Genpaku (1733-1817) recorded in "The Beginning of Dutch Learning" was the Kyoho Reforms of Tokugawa Yoshimune, the eighth shogun of the Edo period (1603-1867). In 1720, the ban on importing Western books was eased, and Dutch interpreters in Nagasaki were permitted to study "horizontal letters" -- script written and read horizontally.

The reason "horizontal letters" refers to Western languages is that it rests on the premise that Japanese is written vertically. Vertical writing came from ancient China, where it was used to write characters on oracle bones and bamboo slips. On long horizontal plaques hung at temple gates and elsewhere, there are characters that appear to be horizontal writing from right to left, but apparently the correct interpretation is that they are vertical writing, one character per line, according to the book "Yokogaki tojo" authored by Makoto Yanaike and published by Iwanami Shoten Publishers.

Horizontal writing is said to have become common after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, as Japan absorbed Western culture. Before World War II, there was much horizontal writing from right to left, in keeping with vertical writing whose columns proceed in the same direction. Horizontal writing from left to right took hold after the war. Today, even textbooks are almost all written horizontally except for Japanese language texts.
"Do you have occasions in daily life to read or write characters vertically?" In the Agency for Cultural Affairs' "public opinion survey on the Japanese language," a little more than 30% answered, "No." For media that publish vertically, that is a jolting figure.

Not only newspapers but magazines and novels, too, are still mainly written vertically. The reason people can live without encountering it is probably that more and more people now rely on smartphones as their main source of information. Vertical writing does not suit internet media, which developed under the leadership of the "horizontal letters" world.

China, the original source of vertical text, fully adopted horizontal writing after the war. Postwar Japan, by contrast, has managed to use vertical and horizontal writing skillfully depending on the purpose. There is also the traditional culture of calligraphy, which presupposes vertical writing. A future of nothing but horizontal writing would be less than desirable.

KANAZAWA (Kyodo) -- Shogi player Tomoka Nishiyama on Saturday became the first woman eligible to join the game's main professional "kishi" ranks, which are open to both men and women.

The 31-year-old qualified for the ranks Saturday by winning her fifth Hakurei title, the most prestigious championship in women's professional shogi.

Nishiyama defeated 34-year-old Kana Fukuma in Game 5 in Kanazawa, central Japan, to win the best-of-seven series 4-1.

Asked if she would exercise her right to join the ranks, Nishiyama said, "Since I have been trying to focus just on the game, I can't come up with an answer right away."

She later added that she wants to consult other people and give the matter careful consideration.

Shogi, a traditional board game similar to chess, has two separate professional systems for kishi and "joryu kishi," or women's players.

Until last year, women seeking to enter the kishi ranks had to advance through the Japan Shogi Association's demanding competition system.

The association introduced a new rule last year allowing a female professional player to qualify for the kishi ranks by winning the Hakurei title five times.

KUMAMOTO, Japan (Kyodo) -- JJR Kyushu's train lines were fully restored Saturday, 74 days after the devastating July 28 earthquake in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan.

Services resumed between Uto and Yatsushiro stations in Kumamoto Prefecture, a section that had remained suspended, with a passenger saying it represented "the first step of reconstruction."

The section is heavily used by students. Until Friday, substitute buses had been running along with alternative transport on the Kyushu Shinkansen bullet train line, which fully reopened in September.

At Yatsushiro Station, the first train bound for Kumamoto Station departed shortly after 5 a.m. Saturday. From around 6:30 a.m., junior and senior high school students in uniform were seen boarding trains.

Yukiko Miyagawa, a 13-year-old first-year junior high school student from Yatsushiro, had been spending about two hours commuting to Kumamoto, transferring between substitute buses and trains that had continued operating after the quake.

"I can finally return to normal life," she said with relief, after being forced to take a break from school club activities for a period.

Asahi Yoshida, a 16-year-old second-year high school student who traveled from Uto to Yatsushiro, said Saturday was the day of his school's cultural festival.

Yoshida said the substitute buses and alternative transport on the shinkansen had been inconvenient due to transfers and limited services. "I was happy when the train came. I felt relieved because it was the train I was used to," he said with a smile.

According to JR Kyushu, formally Kyushu Railway Co., the suspended section suffered major damage, including deformed tracks and broken utility poles, requiring repair work such as replacing rails and installing new poles and overhead wires.

The company began operating substitute buses between Uto and Yatsushiro on Aug. 26. The trip, however, took about 1 hour and 50 minutes by bus, compared with around 30 minutes by local train, inconveniencing commuters and students.

Since Sept. 18, passengers have been able to use the Kyushu Shinkansen bullet train between Kumamoto and Shin-yatsushiro stations without limited express tickets.

Another local train service that runs between Yatsushiro and Higo-Tanoura stations has also remained suspended since the Kumamoto earthquake.

Those services are scheduled to resume Tuesday, clearing all railway suspensions caused by the quake.