Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
With the messages of “Change” and “Yes, we can,” Democratic Sen. Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4. Apparently aided by the financial crisis that unfolded under the Republican administration of George W. Bush, Obama scored a resounding victory that gave ...
The upheaval in the U.S. financial system since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 two weeks ago has triggered turmoil worldwide. The United States government has handed Congress a comprehensive plan to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from U.S.-based ...
The subprime-mortgage problem has entered a third phase. The first phase, needless to say, involved the decline in housing prices in the United States that crippled many homeowners’ ability to repay their loans. Subprime lending schemes were based on the assumption that housing prices ...
The Toyako G8 Summit held from July 7 to 9 with the participation of leaders from 23 other countries exposed the wide rift between the developed and developing worlds and failed to reach concrete agreements on key issues ranging from climate change to surging ...
On May 20, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry and the Financial Services Agency jointly submitted a request letter asking the heads of national and private universities across Japan to improve the quality of financial education. The FSA, as stated in a ...
The dispute over replacing the Bank of Japan governor, whose seat was left vacant when Toshihiko Fukui’s five-year term ended March 19, was finally settled April 9 when Deputy Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa was officially promoted to chief of the central bank. The new BOJ ...
Bilateral relations can be complicated by conflicting interests, which makes occasional problems inevitable. What’s important, however, is whether the two countries can communicate frankly about the problems, find their causes and resolve them. This is one reason wh countries set up hot lines between ...
The Feb. 9 meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank chiefs — the first one held in Tokyo in eight years — adopted a statement recognizing that the global economy is facing more challenging and uncertain circumstances. The statement underlined ...
The international profile of sovereign wealth funds is expanding, and the Group of Seven’s finance ministers and central bankers are expected to discuss the depth of the funds’ risk control, management and accountability when they gather Feb. 9 in Tokyo. At the same time, ...
On the surface, the ruling coalition’s tax reform package for fiscal 2008 contains a number of promising proposals, including the transfer of local corporate tax revenue from better-off prefectures to fiscally distressed rural areas, a new system to let people combine stock investment returns ...
