Japan's core consumer prices rise by 3.1 pct in 2025

Japan's core consumer prices rose 3.1 percent on average in 2025, marking the fourth straight annual increase, government data showed Friday.

For the whole of 2025, rice prices soared 67.5 percent, the biggest rise since 1971 when comparable data became available, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

In December 2025 alone, the nationwide consumer price index, which strips out prices of fresh food, rose 2.4 percent from a year earlier, slowing for the first time in four months from three percent in November, helped by government subsidies for gasoline, the data showed.

Energy prices fell 3.1 percent in the reported month from the prior year, reversing from a rise of 2.5 percent in November, while prices for food, excluding fresh items, increased 6.7 percent, decelerating from a 7 percent gain in November.

The core-core consumer price index (Core-core CPI), which strips away both energy and fresh food to reflect underlying price trends, eased to 2.9 percent in December from 3 percent a month earlier.

Russian forces attacked Ukraine's energy infrastructure overnight on Saturday, for the second time in less than a week, Ukraine's Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said.

The strikes targeted the Burshtyn and Dobrotvir thermal power plants in western Ukraine, as well as substations and overhead transmission lines, the minister said.

He further said personnel unloaded units at nuclear power plants as a precautionary measure.

Ukraine's state-run energy company Ukrenergo has requested emergency assistance from Poland in the wake of the attack, Shmyhal added, while the company said it has imposed emergency power outages across most of the country.

The previous attack on Ukraine's energy facilities was carried out on Tuesday.