The number of leisure facilities, bars and restaurants declined by nearly 10 percent across Japan following government requests to suspend or curtail operations to prevent novel coronavirus infections, according to industry surveys.
OSAKA When a massive dead whale was found drifting in Osaka Bay, local authorities took the rare step of burying the carcass, rather than cremating it, to harvest the skeleton for display at a museum.
Officials of the Osaka prefectural and Osaka city governments gather before going on patrol around restaurants and bars on April 5. (Jin Nishioka)
OSAKA Government officials started night patrols here to ensure bars and restaurants were engaged in “mask dining,” an anti-virus protocol that has caused confusion over enforcement and the consequences for failing to follow the rules.
The Osaka prefectural government has made mask dining mandatory for restaurants and bars under the central government’s pre-emergency measures issued for Osaka city to halt the resurgent spread of the novel coronavirus.
The prefectural government requires diners to unstrap one side of a mask or pull down the mask to around their chin while eating and drinking. They are required to pull up the mask when talking among each other.
A house in Takaishi, Osaka Prefecture, where a woman starved to death and her son was weakened from malnutrition in 2020 (Issei Yamamoto)
TAKAISHI, Osaka Prefecture The water meter kept running and the indoor lights were on at a house believed to have been left “unoccupied” after the homeowner in his 70s died five years ago.
City officials could find no heir to the property.
But on the morning of Sept. 22 last year, a neighbor reported to prefectural police that a corpse was inside the house. The skeletal remains of an elderly woman were found lying on a bed, and a police autopsy determined she had died of starvation.