Free Republic

Mount Fuji is the tallest peak in Japan, with a height of 3,776 meters (12,388 feet). Image credit: Tomáš Malík/Shutterstock.com The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has released a video containing AI-generated imagery to warn what would happen if Mount Fuji erupted in the 21st century. While there’s no suggestion the volcano is set to blow any time soon, an eruption within the next century would not be totally unexpected – and the impact on Tokyo would be significant. The video (below) was released by Japanese local authorities on August 22, 2025, as part of the newly designated Volcano Disaster Preparedness Day,...

On that Monday, 6 August, Americans who had survived the Battle of Okinawa were not celebrating the final rout of the Japanese defenders seven weeks earlier. They were still stunned at the carnage they had both unleashed and endured. For 82 days without letup, Okinawa—one-third the size of Rhode Island—had been shredded by a maelstrom of bombs, artillery shells, and small-arms fire. The casualties on both sides were horrific. In all, nearly 250,000 people died in the battle, including 12,520 American servicemen, 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders, and more than 100,000 Okinawan civilians caught in the crossfire. The American...

The United States has always been particularly formal about how it accepts the surrender of defeated enemies. Each time it happens, the event is charged with deliberate—and sometimes inadvertent—symbolism. Such was the case on October 19, 1781, when General George Washington and his colleague, French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, accepted the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis’s British forces at Yorktown. The whole event was highly ritualized—although Cornwallis refused to appear, sending his subordinate Charles O’Hara out instead—with Rochambeau and Washington sternly directing O’Hara to tender his sword to American General Benjamin Lincoln, who had the...

I had no idea things were this bad in Japan, it looks like Dublin on a Friday afternoon.

If larger-scale trials in the US prove successful, the drug could go on the market in about two years, the Kyoto University team saysA team of Japanese scientists has developed a new painkiller they say is as effective as fentanyl but without its addictive properties, a breakthrough that could reshape the fight against the global opioid crisis if clinical trials succeed. The team from Kyoto University has been working on the project for 13 years, with phase one clinical trials already proving successful and phase two trials due to start soon. Masatoshi Hagiwara, a professor of pharmaceutical medicine at...

NAGOYA The statue of 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi located at the entrance of a shopping arcade in Nagoya has been beheaded, a local association said Tuesday. A local resident notified the shopping center association on Saturday that the statue was missing its head. The neck has since been covered with duct tape to prevent further damage, according to an official of the group. The association, which regards the statue as a symbolic figure of the arcade, is considering filing a damage report with police, the official said. The defacement of the statue, made of reinforced plastic, comes after previous instances...

TOKYO - The Japanese government asked European and Asian countries to refrain from attending a military parade and other events that China will hold next month to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, diplomatic sources said Sunday. Japan seeks to prevent China's interpretation of history from spreading, with the parade slated to be held in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3 to commemorate what Beijing calls its victory in the 1937-1945 "War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression" and the "World Anti-Fascist War." According to the sources, Japan conveyed to other nations through its embassies abroad...

Under the initiative, the Japan International Cooperation Agency has assigned Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture as the hometown for Nigerians, Nagai in Yamagata for Tanzanians, Sanjo in Niigata for Ghanaians, and Imabari in Ehime for Mozambicans. Announced on the sidelines of the 9th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD 9), held in Yokohama from August 20–23, 2025, the initiative forms part of Japan’s strategic effort to strengthen bilateral ties with African nations, promote cultural exchange, and address labour market challenges arising from its rapidly declining population. Special Visa Program for African Talent Director of Information at the State House, Abiodun...

n his book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Doolittle Raid pilot Ted Lawson recalls the moment his B-25 bomber reached the coast of Japan – the first land he had seen, he tells us, after being at sea on the USS Hornet for nearly three weeks. "It looked very pretty," he writes:"Everything seemed as well kept as a big rock garden. The little farms were fitted in with almost mathematical precision. The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads. A...

The submarine that sank a train: the U.S.S. Barb | 8:28 The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.57M subscribers | 663,144 views | May 18, 2017

Silence on the official history of 1939 to 1945 has led to a flowering of creative interpretations. When did World War II end? Or, when will World War II end? This may seem a rhetorical question to most, with Aug. 15 marking the 80th anniversary of V-J Day (Victory Over Japan Day). On that date, Japan supposedly surrendered unconditionally. Few realize, however, that the state of war between the Allies and Japan did not legally end until years later with the Treaty of San Francisco, which was signed in September 1951 and took effect in 1952. That treaty did not...

A hiker attacked by a wild brown bear was found dead in northern Japan on Friday, officials said, a day after the bloody encounter that reportedly saw him dragged into a forest. The hiker in his 20s tried to fight off the large animal but was pulled into the nearby woods with his legs bleeding profusely, local media outlets including the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said. The man was attacked while walking a trail on Mount Rausu on the northern island of Hokkaido on Thursday morning, a local police spokesman told AFP. On Friday afternoon, he was found and taken to...

The defeat of Japan in August 1945 has become a footnote to Allied victory in Europe. But the world we inhabit today was forged in Asia 80 years ago.

In 1945, Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs was grim—but it ended a war that could have cost millions more lives on both sides and unleashed even greater horrors. Disinformation and the Dropping of the Atomic Bombs Legitimate disagreement about the wisdom of dropping two bombs on Japan to end World War II in 1945 persists even 80 years later, as reflected in discussions this past week. But recently, there has often been no real effort even to present the facts, much less to consider the lose-lose choices involved in using such destructive weapons. In an age of revisionist...

With the passing last week of the 80th anniversary of the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (on August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (three days later), familiar questions once again arise about our having done so. These include whether it was absolutely necessary in order to bring an end to the war, and whether or not there was any alternative to the two bomb attacks? Addressing the second question first, an alternative option had been discussed. It involved providing the Japanese with a demonstration by dropping an atomic bomb on an uninhabited island. But such a...

Well, it's that time of year again, when the media run their annual stories from Japan about the biggest yearly population fall since records began. From the BBC:Almost a million more deaths than births were recorded in Japan last year, representing the steepest annual population decline since government surveys began...Yeah, I already said all that. As I've been writing for twenty bollocking years, the demographic death-spiral is the biggest story of our time. So just give us the sodding numbers:Japan recorded 686,061 births - the lowest number since records began in 1899 - while nearly 1.6 million people died, meaning...

IN 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists. No demographic forecast expects anything else. Decades of research studying Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas tell a clear story of declining birth rates. The fall in global birth rates has lasted centuries. It began before modern contraception and endured through...

The population of Japan shrank by 0.75% in 2024, marking a record high since records began in 1968, according to official data. The decline amounted to 908,574 people, the largest population drop since records began in 1968. This is the 16th straight year in which the Japanese population has shrunk, reducing it to 120.65 million people down from a peak of 126.6 million in 2009, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry. Japanese nationals aged 65 or over made up 30% of the country's population, while 60% of Japanese nationals were between 15 and 64. Although many more economically developed countries...

There are not many people who have survived a nuclear attack. There is only one person who officially survived two. On this day, 80 years ago, young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the horrors he had seen in the Japanese city of Hiroshima when the room went blindingly white. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he told UK Newspaper, The Independent. Yamaguchi was an engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi, then 29, was in Hiroshima for a business trip...

Taiwan has a “far more robust” claim to statehood than Palestine does, former British prime minister Boris Johnson said during a conference in Taipei, Taiwan, according to a Tuesday report by British outlet The Telegraph…. “Never in the wildest dreams of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, can he have believed – when he and his colleagues instigated the horror of October 7, 2023 – that only 22 months later the United Kingdom itself would be so craven and pathetic as to fall for Hamas propaganda and to turn against Israel,” Johnson wrote in his column in the UK outlet Daily...