As a rule, the Yokozuna Deliberation Council recommends a sumo wrestler for the top rank, yokozuna, only after he wins two tournaments in a row as ōzeki, or achieves a record of equal value.
Under the council’s internal rules, a recommendation based on a record of equal value, not two straight wins, needs the votes of two thirds of the members present.
Ichininmae (一人前): one person’s share. The Daijisen dictionary defines it as reaching a passable level in an art or a field of learning. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten adds: reaching the level of others in a skill, and being good enough to be accepted in that world.
The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia calls it a word of evaluation for a grown adult, or for someone whose skill has reached a set level.
Japan’s official wage survey for 2025 shows pay rising with age. For men, monthly wages peak at ages 55 to 59, at 445,600 yen. That is 181.4 percent of the wage at ages 20 to 24.
By length of service, wages for all workers are highest among those with 30 years or more at the same employer, at 444,200 yen.
Since April 1989, newly appointed teachers at national and public schools in Japan have gone through shoninsha kenshū, initial training. The law requires the training to last one year from the date of hiring.
For each new teacher, a shidō kyōin, a guiding teacher, is appointed from among the vice principal, the teachers and the lecturers of the same school.
On October 31, 2022, at the Kabukiza in Tokyo, the actor Ichikawa Ebizō took the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII Hakuen. The great kabuki name Danjūrō returned for the first time in nine years, since his father, the twelfth Danjūrō, died in 2013.
He had carried other names before. In 1985, he took the name Ichikawa Shinnosuke VII.
At Tokyo Station, a Shinkansen train is cleaned in just seven minutes. As a rule, a team of 23 workers takes charge of one train. In that time they line up the seats, collect the trash, wipe the windows and tables, and clean the cabins, the decks, the toilets and the washbasins.
The work became known as the sebun minittsu mirakuru, the seven-minute miracle.
In fiscal 2016, about 130,000 trains ran on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen. Their average delay was 24 seconds per train. The figure includes delays caused by natural disasters such as earthquakes, heavy rain and heavy snow.
On December 8, 2005, Mizuho Securities received a customer order to sell one share of J-Com at 610,000 yen. The quantity and the price were entered incorrectly, and the order went out as 610,000 shares at one yen.
The company lost about 40 billion yen. On December 22, the Financial Services Agency issued a business improvement order. Tsurushima Takuo, the president of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, resigned to take responsibility for the trouble.
In May 1965, NEC launched what it named the ZD undō, the Zero Defects movement. Its president, Kobayashi Kōji, had seen the ZD mark during a visit to Hughes Aircraft in the summer of 1964. ZD stood for a slogan about doing work without defects.
Kobayashi wanted more than a movement against defects. He also wanted to awaken a sense of participation in the company among ordinary frontline employees.
Many Japanese workplaces use 5S, five words that begin with the letter s in Japanese: seiri, seiton, seisō, seiketsu and shitsuke.
A Japanese business glossary defines them in turn. Seiri is separating what is needed from what is not, and getting rid of what is not. Seiton is deciding where and how each thing is kept, so that it is easy to use. Seisō is cleaning, so that work can begin at once. Seiketsu is keeping the first three in place. Shitsuke is making the habit stick.