2026年10月21日（水）辛坊治郎ズームそこまで言うか！

The Great Ano-chan / Non-chan Mix-up

Shinbo Jiro had been quietly looking forward to something the previous day: he had heard that Ano-chan would be a guest on the preceding program, Nights no Radio Show (ナイツのラジオショー), and he made a habit of watching guests appear at the Nippon Broadcasting System logo photo spot just a few meters from the round table where he reads newspapers before his own show. When a slender, model-like woman arrived, he thought she looked beautiful—but something did not match his mental image of Ano-chan. After furiously searching the internet, he realized the person he had been picturing all along was actress Non (能年玲奈, now professionally known simply as Non).

Co-host Masuyama Sayaka revealed that on his way out the previous evening Shinbo had said in the elevator, "Non-chan's coming tomorrow, right?"—proof that the confusion had already taken root before the day even began. Shinbo laughed at himself, recalling how his father's generation had once failed to tell apart singers Ishikawa Hitomi and Kurata Mariko, and noting that he had mocked them for it—only to now find himself in exactly the same position.

Soaring Vegetable Prices and the Okonomiyaki Debate

Listener mail brought price reports from around the country. Even at a relatively cheap supermarket in Shiga Prefecture, a small head of lettuce was ¥120, a cabbage ¥400, and a whole head of napa cabbage ¥750. A listener in Saitama reported that cabbage had briefly hit ¥500 before easing back to around ¥300.

One listener wrote in about her husband making what he called "Osaka-style modan-yaki," prompting Shinbo to correct her on the spot: a dish with noodles layered into the base is Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. He noted that people in Osaka call it "Hiroshima-yaki," a term that irritates people from Hiroshima. When another listener mentioned substituting potatoes, boiled udon, and macaroni for scarce cabbage, Shinbo quipped, "At that point, isn't it just a completely different dish?"

A Paris Riot, Reported Live from the Scene

A listener going by the handle "Koshigaya no Radio-zuki Hanseiki" (越谷のラジオ好き半世紀, male, 63) filed a vivid report from Paris, where he was on a business trip. Shortly after arriving on a Saturday, his metro train stopped mid-journey and service was suspended; he then found himself walking through a protest march of mostly young people demanding better school facilities and working conditions.

The following morning's jog took him past smashed storefronts, overturned cars, and a heap of still-smoldering bicycles. By evening, roughly 30 young people dressed head-to-toe in black—with only their eyes showing—were prowling the streets around his hotel. Police had been reinforced and patrol cars circled the neighborhood throughout the night. Hotel staff advised him to go out only when absolutely necessary, but his work obligations left him no choice. He wrote that he planned to leave Paris the day he sent the email.

Shinbo commented that the last time he had personally witnessed this kind of civil unrest was around 1970, during the Anpo protests. He also observed that when local television broadcasts riot coverage non-stop from morning to night, the sheer volume of footage can paradoxically make it harder to grasp the overall picture.

The Takaichi Cabinet Enters Year Two with a Weakening Approval Rating

October 21 marked the start of the Takaichi (高市) cabinet's second year in office. It had launched with a striking 64.4% approval rating—higher than the opening figure for Abe's second administration—but a Kyodo News poll taken October 17–18 showed it had slipped to 49.1%, the lowest since the cabinet was formed and the first time it has fallen below the 50% threshold. The cabinet's top legislative priority for the current Diet session is a consumption-tax reduction support-payment bill that would provide payments to roughly 20 million people with annual incomes of ¥3.5 million or below.

Japan's Infrastructure Crisis: One Cave-in an Hour

A road cave-in in Yashio City, Saitama Prefecture, in January of last year killed a male truck driver whose vehicle fell into the hole; his bereaved family has filed suit against the prefecture seeking damages exceeding ¥100 million. Shinbo noted that the driver had still been able to speak with rescuers when the hole suddenly expanded during the rescue operation, swallowing him—a detail he said made the family's grief entirely understandable.

The national scale of the problem was illustrated by a striking figure: 11,227 road cave-ins were recorded across Japan in fiscal 2025, which works out to roughly one every hour. In Shiga Prefecture alone, 1,922 bridges have no identifiable owner, meaning no one even knows who is responsible for repairing them. Shinbo attributed part of Shiga's outsized count to its geography—countless rivers flow into Lake Biwa—but warned that Japan's infrastructure aging "will become irreversible if we don't take it seriously."

The Zoom Flash segment closed with a brief item: Elon Musk has established special committees at both SpaceX and Tesla to explore a merger of the two companies, signaling that discussions are under way even if no decision has been made.