Im at school right now and everyone is talking about the ongoing Korea vs Czech Republic game, its an insignificant match that has nothing to do with us yet its so talked about, just shows how big soccer is
The Hub, a popular chain of British style pubs in Japan, has raised menu prices and changed the time of happy hour because of rising energy and food prices.
What shocks Japanese people the most is not the grooming gang scandals themselves.
What is truly shocking is how such problems were allowed to go insufficiently addressed for so many years,
and how they were able to grow into something so serious.
In the UK, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce alone has been involved in more than 1,100 arrests.
In Rotherham, more than 220 offenders have been convicted following investigations into large-scale child sexual exploitation.
Recently, however,
I have started to wonder whether part of the same underlying problem may already be appearing in Japan.
There are currently around 130,000 foreign students enrolled in Japanese public schools.
At the same time,
more than 8,000 children are believed to be outside the school system.
From a Japanese perspective,
that is a deeply concerning number.
When children are young, things seem fine.
They have their families.
They have their native language.
They have a place where they belong.
But as they grow older,
their world expands.
Without school,
their opportunities to learn Japanese become limited.
Their connections to the wider community become weaker.
As a result,
their lives can become centered almost entirely around family and small ethnic communities.
Isolation.
Alienation.
Uncertainty about the future.
And the surplus energy that naturally comes with adolescence.
These are not healthy conditions for any child.
Around the world,
there have been cases where young people who became disconnected from education and society drifted into delinquency, gangs, and criminal networks.
Of course,
this does not describe every immigrant family.
Far from it.
But if children are unable to attend school,
unable to fully learn the language of the country they live in,
and unable to build connections with the broader society,
then that is a problem that could contribute to future social instability.
What shocks Japanese people most is not crime itself.
It is seeing the conditions that can lead to future problems being ignored long before those problems become visible.
Japan.
The world.
If we wait until the consequences appear,
it will already be too late.
There is still time to prevent them.
Starting in 1820, around 20,000 Black people voluntarily departed from America to establish the country of Liberia in West Africa.
It was supposed to be a democratic utopia for and by Blacks.
This is Liberia 179 years after its founding: