Category Archives: Japan

North Korea continues run of weapons tests with ballistic missile launch

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Firing of short-range weapon comes as the US and South Korea stage major military drills

North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile, Seoul’s military has said, in the fourth such weapons test in a week, which comes as South Korea and the United States stage major military drills.

“Our military detected one short-range ballistic missile fired from around the Tongchang-ri area in North Pyongan province at 11.05 am towards the East Sea,” South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said on Sunday, referring to the body of water also known as the Sea of Japan.

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Tokyo citizens hand in record ¥3.99bn of lost cash

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Police department says it has returned almost ¥3bn to owners, while ¥480m has gone to finders

The honest citizens of Tokyo handed in a record ¥3.99bn (£24.5m) in lost cash to police last year – an average of more than £67,000 a day.

Japan’s national police agency said the amount was up ¥600m from the previous year, and beat the previous high of ¥3.84bn declared at police stations across the capital in 2019.

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Yoon arrives in Japan for historic talks with Kishida – and beloved omurice

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Leaders expected to use first summit since 2011 to address Japan’s use of Korean forced labour, as well as threats posed by North Korea and China

Yoon Suk Yeol will be treated to his favourite dish – omelette rice – when he becomes the first South Korean president to visit Japan in more than a decade on Thursday, as hopes rise for an end to years of animosity between the north-east Asian neighbours.

Given that the menu for official dinners has been a diplomatic flashpoint between the two countries, efforts by Yoon’s hosts to accommodate his palate are evidence of the recent thaw in relations, as regional tensions rise over North Korean missiles and Chinese military activity.

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Japanese man granted retrial after 45 years on death row

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Iwao Hakamada, 87, was convicted of four murders in 1968 but granted ‘temporary release’ in 2014 after new evidence emerged

A court in Japan has granted a retrial to a man – thought to be the world’s longest-serving death row inmate – who was sentenced to hang for the murders of a family of four almost six decades ago.

The Tokyo high court ruled on Monday that Iwao Hakamada, 87, should be tried again for the crimes in a decision campaigners said was a “step towards justice”.

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Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel prize-winning Japanese writer, dies aged 88

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Fiction and essays tackled subjects including militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and trauma

Kenzaburo Oe, a giant of Japanese writing and winner of the Nobel prize in literature, has died aged 88.

Spanning fiction and essays, Oe’s work tackled a wide range of subjects from militarism and nuclear disarmament to innocence and trauma, and he became an outspoken champion for the voiceless in the face of what he regarded as his country’s failures. Regarded by some in Japan as distinctly western, Oe’s style was often likened to William Faulkner; in his own words, in his writing he would “start from my personal matters and then link it up with society, the state and the world”.

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Biden hails ‘groundbreaking’ South Korean plan to compensate victims of Japan’s forced labour

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Victims groups criticise compensation deal which aims to resolve a disagreement that has long frustrated ties between Seoul and Tokyo

South Korea said that its companies would compensate people forced to work under Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation of Korea, in a bid to improve poor relations that have impeded trade and cooperation between the two countries for generations.

The disagreements over labour and women forced into Japanese military brothels have bedevilled ties between the two pivotal US allies for years, but South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol has made a push to repair the relationship.

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Japan’s top ad agency indicted over Olympics bid-rigging scandal

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Dentsu Group charged after arrest of Tokyo 2020 committee official accused of rigging Games-related tenders

Japan’s biggest advertising agency and five other companies have been indicted for allegedly violating an anti-monopoly law, in a corruption scandal over allegations of bid-rigging during the Tokyo Olympics.

The indictment followed the arrest this month of a senior Tokyo 2020 organising committee official and three others who were accused of rigging a string of Olympic Games-related tenders.

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China and Japan meet for formal security talks to stabilise tensions

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Officials meet in Tokyo to discuss concerns at China’s cooperation with Russia and Japan’s military buildup

Chinese and Japanese officials met in Tokyo on Wednesday for formal security talks for the first time in four years, in a meeting aimed at stabilising increasingly strained relations.

In Japan’s national security strategy, released in December, China was described as “the greatest strategic challenge” to Japan’s peace and security.

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Spy balloon, UFO or Dragon Ball? Japan baffled by iron ball washed up on beach

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About 1.5 metres in diameter, the mysterious metal sphere has been the source of intense speculation online

Police and residents in a Japanese coastal town have been left baffled by a large iron ball that has washed up on a local beach, with authorities admitting they have no idea what it is – only that it isn’t about to explode.

The sphere, measuring about 1.5 metres in diameter, has been at the centre of fevered speculation since it washed up on Enshu beach in the city of Hamamatsu on the country’s Pacific coast, local media reports said.

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Truss urges west to safeguard Taiwan security ‘before it’s too late’

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In Tokyo speech to conservative lawmakers, former British PM issues warning about Chinese aggression

Liz Truss has used her first overseas speech since resigning as British prime minister to call on the west to safeguard Taiwan’s security and economy in the face of Chinese aggression “before it is too late”.

Speaking in Tokyo at a meeting of mainly conservative lawmakers that included the former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, Truss said Britain had been naive to court the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in 2015, adding that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as a warning of what happens when democracies fail to stand up to authoritarian regimes.

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Japan’s new whaling ‘mother ship’ being built to travel as far as Antarctica

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Company says vessel’s construction will help ‘pass on our whaling culture to the next generation’

A Japanese company is building a new whaling ship designed to travel as far as Antarctica, sparking fears commercial operations could resume in the Southern Ocean.

Australia’s environment minister, Tanya Plibsersek, reaffirmed the Albanese government’s commitment to a global moratorium on commercial whaling, while Greenpeace condemned the practice as “brutal and unnecessary”.

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Japan sees its number of islands double after recount

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Digital mapping leads to around 7,000 new islands being discovered though it’s unlikely to expand Japan’s territory, media reports say

It can’t be easy keeping count of the number of islands scattered around an area of more than 370,000 square kilometres, in a country that is regularly subjected to volcanic activity and extreme weather.

While Japan has seen the formation of new islands, and the quiet disappearance of another, geographers have said official statistics showing it is made up of around 6,000 islands are way off the mark.

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Japan says aerial objects spotted in recent years were likely Chinese spy balloons

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Defence ministry demands China’s government ‘confirm the facts’ after analysis of incidents since 2019 find objects were likely used for surveillance

A new analysis of unidentified aerial objects that flew over Japan’s airspace in recent years “strongly” suggests they were Chinese spy balloons, according to Tokyo’s defence ministry.

“After further analysis of specific balloon-shaped flying objects previously identified in Japanese airspace, including those in November 2019, June 2020 and September 2021, we have concluded that the balloons are strongly presumed to be unmanned reconnaissance balloons flown by China,” the defence ministry said in a statement late on Tuesday.

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Fukushima: Japan insists release of 1.3m tonnes of ‘treated’ water is safe

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Neighbouring countries and local fishers express concern as 12th anniversary of nuclear disaster looms

Almost 12 years have passed since the strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history resulted in a tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people along its north-east coast.

As the country prepares to mark the 11 March anniversary, one of the disaster’s most troubling legacies is about to come into full view with the release of more than 1m tonnes of “treated” water from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

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Old-school backpacks too heavy, Japan’s pupils complain

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Sturdy leather bag known as randoseru can weigh 4-10kg when full, leaving students in pain and wanting something lighter

It’s a familiar sight every weekday morning and afternoon all over Japan: children as young as six creaking under the strain of a leather backpack crammed with textbooks.

The randoseru – a Japanese derivation of ransel, the obsolete Dutch word for backpack – is a fixture of primary school education, a repository for everything a child needs to get through a day at school.

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Japanese prime minister fires aide over anti-LGBTQ+ remarks

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Fumio Kishida says official’s comments ‘outrageous and completely incompatible with policies’

The Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has sacked an aide who said he would not want to live next to LGBTQ+ couples and that people would flee Japan if same-sex marriage was permitted.

In remarks reported by local media, Masayoshi Arai, an economy and trade official who joined Kishida’s staff as a secretary in October, said he did not even want to look at same-sex couples.

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Wave of ‘sushi terrorism’ grips Japan’s restaurant world

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Signature cuisine is at the centre of a police investigation after customers at revolving sushi restaurants posted video clips of themselves meddling with dishes

There are breaches of etiquette – drenching your rice in soy sauce, for one – and then there are heinous acts of “sushi terrorism”.

Japan’s signature cuisine is at the centre of a police investigation after customers at revolving sushi restaurants posted video clips of themselves interfering with food and playing pranks on other customers.

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Chip war: Japan and Netherlands expected to join US in ban on tech exports to China

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Washington officials appear to confirm deal to restrict export of semiconductor manufacturing technology to China

A Washington official has made the most direct comments by a US authority to date acknowledging the existence of a deal with Japan and the Netherlands for those countries to impose new restrictions on exports of chipmaking tools to China.

“We can’t talk about the deal right now,” said Don Graves, deputy commerce department secretary, on the sidelines of an event in Washington. “But you can certainly talk to our friends in Japan and the Netherlands.”

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Bizarre ‘whirlpool’ appears in night sky above Hawaii

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Phenomenon believed to have origins in launch of military GPS satellite from SpaceX in Florida

A camera on top of Hawaii’s tallest mountain has captured what looks like a spiral swirling through the night sky.

Researchers believe the strange phenomenon is linked to a military GPS satellite that launched from a SpaceX rocket in Florida.

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Japan and North Korea sound warning as deadly cold snap sweeps across Asia

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Extreme weather kills at least one person in Japan and more than 100 in Afghanistan while parts of China hit record low temperatures

Weather authorities in Japan and the Korean peninsula have issued warnings over freezing temperatures and gales that have killed at least one person, and stranded thousands.

Severe cold weather has already caused fatalities, havoc and record low temperatures across the region in the last fortnight, with at least 124 people dead in Afghanistan and record lows of -53C in northeastern China.

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