At 75 years old, Miyoko Seto is not considering retiring. “I would like to be able to continue working until I am 80,” explains this Japanese adult film actress, who debuted in the industry at 70, after spending decades dedicated to her family. Until then, she had been a housewife, but when she tried to find work after her second divorce, she encountered a barrier that closed doors on her even before she could submit her application: age. According to what she explained in an interview published in October by a local magazine, the companies she called rejected her as soon as she told them how old she was.

The Japanese government has been forced to look for new ways to hire foreign workers due to the exhaustion of the quotas it had established to limit their entry. Six months after suspending the admission of new workers with specific skills visas for the catering sector, it has proposed allowing hospitals, care centers, and schools to hire foreign personnel for cafeteria services starting in April 2027. To do this, these jobs will be classified within the food manufacturing sector, which has its own quota and is not subject to the freeze affecting the catering sector. The lack of manpower, therefore, dismantles the restrictive migratory discourse of the conservative government of Sanae Takaichi.

At some gas stations on the outskirts of Tokyo, today a liter of regular gasoline is sold for 159 yen, about 90 euro cents. The price varies depending on the establishment, but subsidies from the Japanese government help to contain it in a time of rising oil prices. Since March, Sanae Takaichi's executive has been applying aid to operators in the sector with the goal of keeping the national average price around 170 yen per liter, the lowest price of all G-7 countries.

In one out of every four couples getting married for the first time in Japan, the woman is older than the man. In 2024, these marriages represented 25.5% of the total, the highest percentage recorded to date and more than double that of the seventies, when they hovered around 10%. In couples, older men continue to be the majority, but the age difference between spouses has shortened. Even so, in many cases, the gap is small: the woman is only one or two years older than the husband.

In September, all members of the Pacific Islands Forum were connected for the first time to the global network of submarine telecommunications cables. Among them is Tuvalu, a small state made up of nine islands where the first international cable entered service last year. The Vaka connects the capital, Funafuti, with the Bulikula cable system and is funded by contributions from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan, with the participation of Japan and Google.

The forest has disappeared. Rice could not even be planted. In Kalumpang, in the center of the island of Borneo, about 200 hectares of forest were cleared last year to convert them into rice fields as part of the Indonesian government's program to achieve food self-sufficiency. Machines began working there in April 2025, and by September, almost the entire area had already been cleared. One year later, the fields remain practically abandoned. The land, largely formed by acidic peatlands, is not suitable for rice cultivation. For the inhabitants of the area, that forest had another value: it provided them with food and raw materials.

Teo's weekends are usually spent among parks, slides, and trains. At almost two years old, any outing is an adventure, especially if it includes a visit to a train station. Neus Modoro and Kiyofumi Kurata try to make the most of their free days to spend time as a family, whether playing in one of Tokyo's many green spaces, visiting a zoo or museum, or occasionally taking a trip to Osaka to see his paternal grandparents. Theirs is an apparently ordinary family life, but marked by a reality that combines languages, references, and customs from two ends of Eurasia.

The Japanese government is preparing a reform that will profoundly transform the country's immigration policy. The Ministry of Justice is working on a new system that would require foreign residents to complete digital courses on language, civics, and daily life in Japan, and would link the granting and maintenance of permanent residency to the accreditation of an advanced level of Japanese. The initiative comes at a particularly delicate moment: Japan, where almost 30% of the population is over 65 and the labor shortage has become one of the main economic challenges, is trying to reconcile the need to attract more foreign workers with a tightening of settlement requirements.

The ascent to Mount Fuji does not begin at the summit, nor even at the trail that climbs up the mountain. It begins much earlier, when it is still pitch black at the fifth station and the air retains that dry, biting cold that surprises those who have just left behind the mugginess of midsummer in Tokyo. At that hour, groups form almost in silence. Headlamps are adjusted, backpacks are checked, and the final preparations are made before starting the climb.

The quiet city of Ebetsu, on the northern island of Hokkaido, has in recent weeks become the epicenter of one of the most serious episodes of community tension experienced recently in Japan. In just over two weeks, a series of fires affected several spaces linked to the local Pakistani community, including a vehicle repair and export workshop and the mosque that serves hundreds of Muslims in the region. Hokkaido police have arrested a 37-year-old man, a resident of the neighboring city of Chitose, on suspicion of being involved in at least some of the attacks.

At more than 3,000 meters of altitude, on the Tibetan Plateau, Qinghai's landscape has ceased to be an arid and silent expanse, transforming into one of China's most ambitious energy experiments. Where until recently a cold desert with almost no vegetation predominated, today a complex of solar panels stretches out, which, along with wind turbines and hydroelectric power plants, forms one of the largest integrated renewable systems in the world.

A.J. Alfafara is 47 years old and has a life rebuilt on the ashes of a past that civil law refuses to bury. Although she hasn't heard from her husband in over a decade, the Philippine state still considers her his wife. This activist encountered the cruelty of the system when trying to buy a home: a routine procedure became a wall when the notary informed her that, without the signature of a man who had been missing for ten years, she had no legal standing to acquire her own roof over her head. Her case is not an anecdote, but a reflection of a legal structure that keeps tens of thousands of women in the Philippines – one of only two countries in the world, along with the Vatican, where divorce is illegal – trapped in marriages that now only exist on the republic's stamped paper.

Russian oil does not disappear from the global market when it leaves Baltic or Far East ports. Often, it simply reappears under another name or label. In the waters surrounding Singapore – one of the planet's main energy and maritime hubs – hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil and fuel oil from Russia are transferred from ship to ship, mixed with fuels from other origins, and subsequently re-exported to Asian markets under a new commercial identity. The process, known as blending, supported by a system increasingly reliant on the so-called “ghost fleet” of convenience tankers, dilutes the product's traceability and allows derivatives linked to Russian oil to continue circulating legally within the global energy system despite Western sanctions.

There are images that explain better than any headline what Japan's rugby growth has been. One is of Lomano Lemeki running with the ball under his arm in the 2019 World Cup, in the midst of a victory against Scotland. That day Japan ceased to be a surprise to become a competitive reality, with a team also built with players born outside the country, but fully integrated. Seven years later, some of those names are once again at the center of the focus, but for a very different reason: an uncomfortable debate that goes beyond sport and directly challenges the concept of citizenship.

In Memuro, a small town on the island of Hokkaido, there are Sunday nights when a cafe specializing in French toast relights its lamps when the city is already asleep. Inside, there are no customers looking for a last coffee before going home, but rather mothers in pajamas with crying babies. Some sit in silence while a volunteer takes the child in her arms for a few minutes. Others simply rest lying on mats after hours of sleeplessness. The place reopens at nine in the evening and does not close until six in the morning. It is one of the new yonakigoya, literally houses for night crying.

Japan is moving towards a tightening of controls in strategic technological sectors, a direction that is beginning to generate concern in the business community. Within the framework of the new economic security law and in a context of geopolitical rivalry with Beijing, Tokyo has strengthened mechanisms to protect critical infrastructure and data, especially in areas such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, or batteries. Although the legal framework does not establish explicit restrictions on international recruitment, various sectors warn that the increase in regulatory complexity and the introduction of stricter security criteria could deter the arrival of foreign talent in areas crucial for the country's growth.

In the early afternoon, the Hikawa Bridge transforms into a small, impromptu film set. A group of young women, dressed in soft-hued kimonos, take photographs while laughing and trying to capture with their eyes the gentle rain of petals falling on the river. Below them, small boats glide calmly along the Shingashi River, amidst white and pink freckles floating on the surface. On the banks, cherry blossoms create an ephemeral tunnel, making Kawagoe a living postcard of Japan's most evocative side.

At Ukedo Elementary School, time didn't freeze with the earth's tremor at 2:46 p.m., but with the ocean's agonizing pounding an hour later. The hands of the classroom clocks, connected to a centralized mechanism that ensured their synchronization, continued moving with mechanical indifference as the outside world crumbled. It wasn't the magnitude 9 earthquake, but the violent arrival of the first tsunami wave, between 3:37 p.m. and 3:38 p.m. on that March 11, 2011, that caused the final rupture. That exact instant, forever etched in the metal and glass of the stopped clocks, marks a point of no return: the moment when the force of nature decided to halt time for an entire town.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange experienced one of its most turbulent sessions in recent years on Monday. The benchmark Nikkei 225 index plummeted more than 4,000 points, a drop of approximately 7%, amid investor panic over the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a major artery for global oil trade. This plunge comes just a week after the index reached new all-time highs, a stark contrast that illustrates how quickly the energy crisis can reverse market optimism. Faced with escalating tensions, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced that the government is considering tapping into strategic petroleum reserves and implementing measures to curb rising gasoline prices, which could exceed 210 yen per liter, up from 138 yen just a few weeks ago.

Nauru, a tiny island nation in the central Pacific measuring just 21 square kilometers, has become an extreme yet revealing case study of how far the contemporary redefinition of sovereignty can go. Once, this atoll represented the epitome of Polynesian paradise: a circle of white sand and palm trees where life unfolded with almost biblical self-sufficiency. Today, however, that Eden is a memory buried beneath layers of extractive history, financial corruption, and, ultimately, a disturbing redefinition of what it means to be a sovereign state in the 21st century. Nauru is no longer known for what it produces—it no longer produces anything—but for its role as a dumping ground for the crises that major powers prefer to ignore.