World

Japan reopened its doors to tourists Tuesday after two-and-a-half years of tough Covid restrictions, with officials hoping an influx of travellers enticed by a weak yen will boost the economy.

By mid-morning, tourists from Israel, France and Britain were already pouring in.

“It’s a long, long dream come true,” said 69-year-old Adi Bromshtine, a retiree arriving at Tokyo’s Haneda airport from Israel.

“We were planning before Covid and waiting and waiting,” she told AFP.

Itay Galili, a 22-year-old student also arriving from Israel, said he had been closely monitoring the news for word of the border reopening.

“As soon as I heard it’s going to reopen on the 11th, I started planning. Tickets were expensive… but no price (is) too heavy,” he told AFP.

Japan slammed its borders shut early in the pandemic, at one point even barring foreign residents from returning, and has only recently begun cautiously reopening.

In June, it began allowing tourists to visit in groups accompanied by guides, a requirement that was further relaxed to include self-guided package tours.

From Tuesday, visa-free entry resumed for travellers from 68 countries and territories.

Japan is also lifting a cap on the number of arrivals and ending the package tour requirement.

Some rules remain, with tourists required to present either proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test taken three days before departure.

Before Covid, Japan’s government was on track to achieve a goal of 40 million visitors by 2020, the year Tokyo was supposed to host the Summer Olympics.

Japan received a record 31.9 million foreign visitors in 2019, but that plummeted to just 250,000 in 2021.

– Demand soaring –

In Japan, tourists will find a country that is still adhering to many of the health guidelines that helped it to keep pandemic deaths to around 45,500, lower than many other developed economies.

Masks are ubiquitous, and though not mandated by law, parliament is set to pass legislation allowing hotels to deny service to customers who refuse to wear one or observe other health rules.

Masks are worn not only indoors and on public transport, but even outdoors, despite the government saying they are not necessary outside in uncrowded settings.

Hand sanitiser is placed at the entrance of most businesses, while plastic dividers are also often used in restaurants.

Another major change for tourists will be the weakness of the yen, which is hovering around 145 to the dollar, a level not seen for two decades.

The government has already had to intervene once to prop up the currency, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida cited the yen’s weakness as a factor he hoped would draw tourists when he announced the reopening.

There is certainly no shortage of demand, according to travel agents.

Since the September announcement of the planned reopening, “we’ve been absolutely drowning, we don’t have enough time to deal with all the requests,” said Antoine Chanthavong, of Paris-based travel agency Destination Japan.

Still, for now at least, tickets are not coming cheap, with fuel prices soaring and airlines forced to take circuitous routes to avoid Russian airspace.

And for all the rebound in demand, there is little expectation that tourist numbers will soon reach their 2019 levels.

Before the pandemic, travellers from Hong Kong and China made up 37 percent of all foreign visitors to Japan, and 44 percent of tourism income.

But tough Covid restrictions in China make it unlikely visitors from there will be flocking back to Japan anytime soon.

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of dozens of people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 36.

More than 3,000 rescuers were deployed in Las Tejerias, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the capital Caracas, after Venezuela’s worst natural disaster in decades.

“Unfortunately, we have 36 people dead at the moment and 56 people missing,” Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said on Twitter.

“Las Tejerias will never be the same,” said survivor Isaac Castillo, 45, a merchant in the town of some 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

“We are leaving because recovering from this is impossible.”

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow on Saturday, causing a torrent of mud that swept away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

“As much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said, as she blamed the “climate crisis.”

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather system gripping the region, as well as the effects of Hurricane Julia, which also claimed at least 26 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage from Panama to Guatemala on Sunday.

Residents of Las Tejerias used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

Firefighters used chainsaws to clear a path through knocked-down trees that had been carried into the town.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

Carmen Melendez, 55, told AFP, “The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” as she waited desperately for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

– Safety on the roof –

But President Nicolas Maduro, who visited the area on Monday, insisted the town would be rebuilt. 

“We take with us the pain, the clamor, the despair, the tears of the people, but they must know that Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn,” he said, vowing to rebuild “each and every one” of the homes and businesses destroyed. 

Rodriguez, his vice president, said 317 homes were “completely destroyed” and 757 damaged by the mudslide.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

Maduro on Sunday decreed three days of national mourning.

Crews of workers with heavy machinery worked to clear the debris-covered roads, while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to a TV antenna on the roof of his home as a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” said the 65-year-old, who barely escaped with his life.

Further afield, at least 26 people died  across Central America when storm Julia raced across the region on Sunday.

Five army soldiers on deployment in El Salvador died after a wall collapsed on them as they were seeking shelter from the storm, which killed a total of 10 people in the country and forced some 1,000 people to seek temporary shelter.

In Honduras, Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern town of Brus Laguna, said two people died when Julia capsized a boat. One more person was missing.

And in Guatemala, 14 people died, eight of them in the indigenous municipality of Santa Eulalia, in the west of the country, after their house collapsed due to a landslide. Two people were missing after being swept away by floodwater.

Nicaragua’s Vice President Rosario Murillo said Julia had affected some 7,500 people, flooding 3,000 homes and damaging the roofs of another 2,000.

Julia made landfall Sunday as a Category 1 hurricane and gradually dissipated until it was downgraded to a tropical depression on Monday as it churned toward Mexico.

At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota killed at least 200 people in Central America and caused millions of dollars in losses. 

Scientists say climate change warms the surface layers of the oceans, causing more powerful, and wetter, storms and hurricanes.

Ukraine denounced Russia as a “terrorist state” at an urgent United Nations General Assembly meeting Monday following its neighbor’s latest attacks, as Western powers sought to underscore Moscow’s isolation.

The UN called the debate to discuss Russia’s declared annexation of four partly occupied Ukrainian regions, but the debate was overshadowed by strikes on Kyiv and other cities in one of the most punishing assaults on Ukraine in months.

“Russia has proven once again that this is a terrorist state that must be deterred in the strongest possible ways,” said Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN in his opening remarks, adding his own immediate family had come under attack.

“Unfortunately, you can hardly call for a stable and sane peace as long as an unstable and insane dictatorship exists in your vicinity,” he added, telling member states at least 14 civilians were killed and 97 wounded in the attacks.

Responding, Vasily Nebenzya of Russia did not directly address the missile strikes, but defended his country’s annexation of Ukrainian regions.

“We are being accused when we are trying to protect our brothers and sisters in eastern Ukraine,” he said.

Ahead of the General Assembly session, and with tensions at a boiling point, UN chief Antonio Guterres described Russia’s attacks as an “unacceptable escalation of the war,” his spokesman said.

US President Joe Biden, meanwhile, condemned the strikes in stark terms, saying they “demonstrate the utter brutality” of Putin’s “illegal war.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed even more “severe” retaliation after the recent explosion that damaged a key bridge in Moscow-annexed Crimea.

– ‘Illegal annexations’ –

The decision to bring the annexation matter before the General Assembly, where the 193 UN members have one vote each — and no one wields veto power — was taken after Russia used its veto in a Security Council meeting September 30 to block a similar proposal.

The vote is expected no sooner than Wednesday.

“We do not and will never recognise the illegal so-called ‘referenda’ that Russia has engineered as a pretext for this further violation of Ukraine’s independence,” said Silvio Gonzato, a representative of the European Union, which helped draft the text.

The resolution condemns Russia’s “attempted illegal annexations” of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson following “so-called referendums,” and it stresses these actions have “no validity under international law.”

It calls on all states, international organizations and agencies not to recognize the annexations, and demands the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

In response to the resolution, Russia had written to all member states in a letter attacking “Western delegations” whose actions “have nothing to do with protection of international law and the principles of the UN Charter.”

Nebenzya said that given the circumstances, the General Assembly should vote by secret ballot — a highly unusual procedure normally reserved for matters like electing the rotating members of the Security Council.

– ‘A bit of desperation’ –

But Albania tabled a resolution against a secret ballot, winning with 107 votes in favor, 13 against, and 39 abstentions. Russia lost a subsequent appeal to the motion.

Guterres himself has bluntly denounced the annexations as being “against everything the international community is meant to stand for,” he said. 

“It has no place in the modern world. It must not be accepted.”

During last month’s Security Council vote, no other country sided with Russia, though four delegations — China, India, Brazil and Gabon — abstained.

Some developing countries have complained the West is devoting all its attention to Ukraine, and others might be tempted to join them this week.

The vote will provide a clear picture of exactly how isolated Russia has become. Given the high stakes, backers of the draft are going all out to win over potential abstentionists. 

On Monday, Ukrainian diplomat Dmytro Kuleba issued a plea to African nations, telling them: “Neutrality will only encourage Russia to continue its aggression and malign activities across the world, including in Africa.”

A US trio including ex-Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, who played a key role battling the 2008 financial crisis, won the economics Nobel on Monday for research on banks in times of turmoil.

Bernanke, together with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, were honoured for having “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises, as well as how to regulate financial markets”, the jury said.

Bernanke, 68, has been both credited for spurring recovery after the 2008 recession and pilloried by critics for doing little to avert it, allowing investment bank Lehman Brothers to collapse.

He received the award for his analysis, conducted in the early 1980s, of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in modern history.

In particular, Bernanke showed “how failing banks played a decisive role in the global depression,” making the downturn “not only deep, but also long-lasting,” the Nobel jury noted.

In his role as chief of the central bank, Bernanke “was able to put knowledge from research into policy” during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the Nobel Committee said.

Bernanke has been hailed for the Fed’s unorthodox response of slashing interest rates and flooding the financial system with liquidity.

He told a press conference Monday that he and his Fed colleagues were determined to prevent a financial system meltdown at the time: “I strongly believed that if that happened, that would bring down the rest of the economy.”

But Bernanke added that today’s situation is nothing like “the dire straits” 14 years ago, adding that banks are better prepared for challenges now.

– Bank runs –

Diamond, a professor at the University of Chicago born in 1953, and Dybvig, 67, a professor at Washington University in St Louis, were honoured for showing how “banks offer an optimal solution” for channelling savings to investments by acting as an intermediary.

The pair also showed how these institutions were vulnerable to so called bank runs, where a large number of savers simultaneously withdraw their money leading to the bank’s collapse.

The committee added that this dangerous dynamic can be avoided by governments providing deposit insurance and giving banks a lifeline by becoming a lender of last resort.

“In a nutshell, the theory says that banks can be tremendously useful but they are only guaranteed to be stable if they are properly regulated”, Tore Ellingsen, chair of the prize committee, said.

Diamond, speaking to reporters after the announcement, reflected Monday on the decision by US authorities not to bail out Lehman Brothers, as they later did other financial institutions.

The bank’s collapse sent shockwaves through financial markets when it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

“It would have been better to find a more accommodating way, a less unstable way and unexpected way to resolve Lehman Brothers,” Diamond said, stressing there were questions about what regulators were legally able to do.

“Had they found a way, I think the world would have had less of a severe crisis than it did,” Diamond said.

Asked about economic problems today, Dybvig told AFP he was “optimistic” these do not necessarily point to a financial crisis with a meltdown in the banking sector.

– Few women –

Of all the Nobels, the economics prize has the fewest number of female winners: just two since it was first awarded in 1969, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.

This year, only two women were among the 12 individuals and two organisations honoured, Carolyn Bertozzi in chemistry and Annie Ernaux for literature.

Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told AFP that since the science prizes generally honour research dating back decades, laureates who win “now reflect what the scientific community looked like back then.”

He said in the last five years, four women had been awarded the chemistry prize and two had received the physics prize, which has been a male-dominated field.

The economics prize, created by the Swedish central bank in 1968, was the only award not included when scientist Alfred Nobel created the prestigious awards in his 1895 will.

But like the other prizes it comes with a gold medal and an award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (around $900,000).

The winners will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel.