On August 10, 2025, Kōryō High School of Hiroshima withdrew from the national summer high school baseball tournament at Kōshien. The team had won its first game, 3 to 1. It gave up its second-round game.
In January of that year, several members of the school’s baseball club had committed violent acts against younger members. In March, the Japan High School Baseball Federation had given the school a formal warning.
On December 2, 2019, the grand prize of Japan’s annual New Words and Buzzwords Awards went to ONE TEAM. It was the slogan of the national rugby team at the Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan, coached by Jamie Joseph.
Under captain Michael Leitch, the squad of 31 players included 15 players from seven other countries. The team won all four of its pool matches and reached the knockout stage for the first time.
In April 1962, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers launched a magazine for the factory floor, Genba to QC. In its first issue, Ishikawa Kaoru introduced the QC circle, a small group in one workplace that carries out quality control on its own initiative.
The definition describes managing and improving the workplace continuously, with everyone taking part.
Hōrensō means spinach. It is also made of the first syllables of three workplace words: hōkoku (report), renraku (inform) and sōdan (consult).
Around 1982, Yamazaki Tomiji, president of Yamatane Securities, started a “spinach campaign” in his company. His book on it, Hōrensō ga kaisha o tsuyoku suru (Spinach Makes a Company Strong), appeared in 1986. One account says the idea came from his father.
Japanese railway workers point at a signal and call out what they see. The practice, shisa koshō, began with steam locomotive drivers of Japanese National Railways who checked signals this way.
In 1994, the Railway Technical Research Institute tested it. Without pointing or calling, the error rate was 2.38 percent. With both, it was 0.38 percent, about one sixth.
On November 24, 1997, the president of Yamaichi Securities, Nozawa Shōhei, faced reporters at the Tokyo Stock Exchange as the firm announced it would close. In tears, he apologized and said: Shain wa waruku arimasen kara! The employees are not to blame!
Accounts of his exact words differ. Another version has him say: “We are the ones at fault, so the employees are not to blame.”
In July 1964, Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder of Matsushita Electric, met the sales companies and dealers that sold his products at Atami. After the meeting, he gave his conclusion: Matsushita Denki ga warukatta, kono ichigo ni tsukiru. Matsushita Electric was at fault, and that says it all.
In August, he took over the duties of head of sales himself. A new sales system started in February 1965.
On September 7, 2025, Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru announced his resignation. Newspapers reported that he was taking responsibility for his party’s heavy defeat in the House of Councillors election. Support inside the party for what amounted to a recall of the party president had been growing.
An article on Nippon.com described a kind of unwritten rule in the Liberal Democratic Party. A party president who loses an election takes responsibility and steps down.
On September 8, 2008, Kitanoumi, chairman of the Japan Sumo Association, announced his resignation. Two Russian wrestlers, the brothers Rōhō and Hakurozan, had been banned from sumo for life for alleged marijuana use. Kitanoumi was Hakurozan’s mentor. He resigned to take responsibility for the scandal.
A bureikō is a banquet held without regard to rank or etiquette. The most famous one in Japanese history was held by Emperor Go-Daigo in the Kamakura period. He used it to gather people of different ranks and plot in secret. One guest told his wife, and the plot leaked.
The same source notes that, in practice, rank does not disappear at a bureikō. Communication at company drinking parties has its own coined word, nominication, from nomu (to drink). It first appeared in the media in the 1980s.