On January 21, 2025 (Japan time: January 22), baseball history was made. Ichiro Suzuki (51), who starred for the Seattle Mariners and other teams, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He is the first Japanese player ever to receive this honor, and the first player from Asia to enter Cooperstown.
On February 15, 2025, news flashed across the world: a Japanese teenage boy had been rescued from the depths of Southeast Asia’s criminal underworld. The 17-year-old was freed from a fraud compound in Myanmar’s border region, operated by an international cyber scam organization. According to authorities, he had been lured to Myanmar by a Japanese man and forced to participate in fraud schemes once there.