Japanese politicians failed to pass legislation last month that would have allowed married couples to keep separate surnames, despite surveys showing majority public support for the change. Japan remains the only country requiring married couples by law to share the same surname, with women taking their husband's name in 95% of cases. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party's skepticism blocked opposition bills aimed at reforming the system. Keidanren, Japan's largest business lobby, says the current law "hinders women's advancement" as name changes complicate professional reputations. A study by NGO Asuniwa suggests reform could prompt 590,000 cohabiting couples to marry legally, potentially boosting Japan's birth rate since strong stigmas discourage births outside marriage. Some couples have developed workarounds. Teachers Uchiyama Yukari and Koike Yukio have divorced and remarried three times to sidestep the law, living unmarried most of the time but remarrying for each child's birth registration before divorcing again.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers alarmed by the Trump administration's hostile attitude to academia to relocate to the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese government aims to create an elite research environment, and has detailed a $693 million package to attract researchers from abroad, including those from America who may have seen their budgets slashed or who fear a clampdown on their academic freedom.

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Japan must stop being overly optimistic about how quickly its population is going to shrink, economists have warned, as births plunge at a pace far ahead of core estimates. From a report: Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline. The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime -- to a record low of 1.15. But public and parliamentary dismay over the latest evidence of Japan's decline was intensified by the extent to which the figures undershot population estimates calculated by government demographers just two years ago. The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births -- which does not include children born to non-Japanese people -- dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.

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Researchers in Japan have developed a plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours, offering up a potential solution for a modern-day scourge polluting oceans and harming wildlife. From a report: While scientists have long experimented with biodegradable plastics, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and the University of Tokyo say their new material breaks down much more quickly and leaves no residual trace. At a lab in Wako city near Tokyo, the team demonstrated a small piece of plastic vanishing in a container of salt water after it was stirred up for about an hour. While the team has not yet detailed any plans for commercialisation, project lead Takuzo Aida said their research has attracted significant interest, including from those in the packaging sector.

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Japanese police referred five individuals and a company to prosecutors last week for allegedly operating a website that published detailed movie plots without permission from rights holders. The Miyagi Prefectural Police Headquarters and Minamisanriku Police Station sent the case to the Sendai District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act. The Content Overseas Distribution Association described the case as having "very few precedents for a corporation being referred to the prosecutor's office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act, making this an extremely rare case." The website posted detailed content from films including "Godzilla Minus One" and four others copyrighted by Toho, "Shin Kamen Rider" and two others by Toei, "Neck" and one other by KADOKAWA, and "Shin Ultraman" by Tsuburaya Productions. The site listed more than 8,000 films with complete storylines, character names, dialogue, and scene descriptions.

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Japan Post has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. From a report: Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites. People can obtain digital addresses by registering with Japan Post's Yu ID membership service. Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: [Last] week, it was announced that Docomo's emoji designs will no longer appear on any of the Japanese mobile network's devices. This marks the end of an emoji era that first began in 1999, even though the set hasn't been updated since 2013. [...] Unlike these earlier systems, Docomo's emoji set in 1999 was explicitly tied to mobile internet use and would become the template for emoji standardization in the 2000s and 2010s, alongside emoji design sets implemented by Softbank and KDDI on their own versions of i-mode (J-Sky and EZweb, respectively). Docomo's set would receive several updates between 1999 and 2013, introducing color support and additional concepts to the keyboard. But now, as per this week's announcement, it will finally be discontinued. Spanning 26 years, it's undeniable that Docomo's emoji set played a foundational role in emoji history, even if its last incarnation remained unchanged for almost 12 of those 26 years.

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An interesting piece on Construction Physics that examines how Japan transformed discarded American wartime shipbuilding techniques into a revolutionary manufacturing system that captured nearly half the global market by 1970. The story reveals the essential ingredients for industrial dominance: government backing, organizational alignment, relentless will to improve, and the systematic coordination needed to turn existing technologies into something entirely new. A few excerpts: During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany's u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US's most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that's what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world's ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%. But the lessons from the US's shipbuilding machine weren't forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world. [...] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it's impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.

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