Children in Japan continue to suffer poor mental health, with the country ranking 32nd among 43 developed and emerging nations due to high suicide rates and other factors, a UNICEF report released Wednesday showed. The country improved from 37th in 2020 when the ranking was last published, although this time the suicide rate among Japanese youth was the fourth highest among wealthy states surveyed, worsening from 12th.
Japan’s parliament on Wednesday enacted a bill that will allow people to pick up over-the-counter drugs at convenience stores and other outlets without pharmacists. The bill to revise the pharmaceuticals and medical devices law was approved at a plenary meeting of the House of Councilors, the upper chamber of the Diet, the country’s parliament, following its passage through the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, last month. The revised law will require consumers to listen to explanations from pharmacists online before purchases. It will take effect by around spring 2027. The government expects the new system to be used also in areas with few pharmacies, such as remote islands and mountainous areas.
A 15-year-old male student arrested for the alleged murder of a woman in Chiba, near Tokyo, said that he wanted to go to juvenile reformatory to escape his complex home environment, according to investigative sources. This year, a parent of the junior high school third-year student consulted police about him running away from home for a short time, police and other sources said. Subsequently, meetings were held between the student and a consultant. A meeting session had been set also for Monday, when the student was arrested.
A woman, aged in her 80s, lives in the city of Suzuka in western Japan’s Mie Prefecture. She has an artificial bladder due to cancer and so is unable to work. Her son, with whom she lived before he passed away, suffered from an intractable disease and required canes to walk. Both had disability certificates. The woman had been receiving welfare since August 2019, but in September 2022, the payments abruptly stopped. Subsequent district and high court rulings accepted the mother and son’s claims, and ordered the city to rescind its decision, although the city appealed the ruling
A pupil at a prestigious national elementary school in Tokyo quit the school this year after being the victim of bullying, a source close to the matter said Monday. It was the second straight year that the Elementary School attached to University of Tsukuba has reported a “serious” incident to the education ministry. The law to promote preventive measures for bullying stipulates incidents as “serious” if they are deemed to have caused severe physical and mental damage to students or students are forced to be absent from school for a considerable period of time.
Police in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo, arrested a 15-year-old junior high school boy in the city of Chiba, the prefecture’s capital, on Monday on suspicion of murdering an 84-year-old woman. The boy allegedly stabbed Yayoi Takahashi in the back with a knife-like object on a street in the city’s Wakaba Ward around 5 p.m. Sunday. He is admitting the allegation, investigative sources said. Police are investigating the possibility that the boy randomly attacked the woman as they did not know each other, according to the sources.
The police are still trying to confirm the identity of the victim and searching for the suspect and weapon. The woman was found around 5:10 p.m. on Sunday in a residential area about 1 kilometer east of JR Tsuga Station.
A woman, aged in her 80s, lives in the city of Suzuka in western Japan’s Mie Prefecture. She has an artificial bladder due to cancer and so is unable to work. Her son, with whom she lived before he passed away, suffered from an intractable disease and required canes to walk. Both had disability certificates. The woman had been receiving welfare since August 2019, but in September 2022, the payments abruptly stopped. Subsequent district and high court rulings accepted the mother and son’s claims, and ordered the city to rescind its decision, although the city appealed the ruling.
Japan’s Emperor Emeritus Akihito has been diagnosed with silent myocardial ischemia, a condition of an asymptomatic patient whose blood flow from the coronary arteries to the heart muscle is reduced due to excessive exercise, the Imperial Household Agency said Saturday.
The loss of a certain immune-regulating protein in the brain leads to a decrease in the levels of amyloid beta, which causes Alzheimer’s disease, and improves cognitive function, a group of researchers including from Kyoto University has found. The group confirmed that the TIM-3 protein, which exists in microglia, a type of immune cell in the brain, increases as the brain ages. When it removed the protein from a mouse with Alzheimer’s disease by genetic modification, the accumulation of amyloid beta decreased by 50 to 60 pct, and the mouse showed an improvement in cognitive function.
Barrier Free Japan