Broadcasters led with reports on yesterday’s meeting of the National Governors’ Association, during which the participants expressed a sense of crisis over the rapid spread of the Delta variant (NHK, NTV), the heatwave across Japan (TBS), the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee’s denial of a link between the Games and the surge in the number of new cases of COVID-19 (Fuji TV), and Japan’s Kaya Kazuma winning the bronze medal in the men’s gymnastics pommel horse at the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday (TV Asahi). 

Main front-page items in national papers included paradrop training conducted in Guam by GSDF troops, a report on Afghan interpreters who are in danger due to the expedited U.S. military withdrawal, the rapid increase in the number of seriously ill COVID-19 patients in their 40s and 50s, the reinstatement of a COVID-19 state of emergency for Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama, and Osaka starting today, and the National Governors Association’s call for people to avoid inter-prefectural travel during summer holidays.