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DRIZZLE/RAIN
Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan’s biggest banking group, raised the rates it offers on time deposits with a maturity of one year or over on March 20. The increase varies according to the size of the deposit and the length of maturity. The ...
The current account deficit of the United States topped $800 billion in 2005. Ben Bernanke, who recently became chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, told a lecture in the spring of last year that the U.S. deficit level is “passively” determined by income, asset ...
The national savings rate dropped to as low as 2.8 percent in 2004, according to a report released by the Cabinet Office last month. This is incredibly low, given the figure had been above 10 percent until as recently as 1999. When Japan’s huge ...
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in his first news conference of the year, argued that Yasukuni is not a diplomatic issue, rebutting claims that Japan is being isolated in Asia because of his repeated visits to the war-related Shinto shrine. Naturally, freedom of speech in ...
The government bills drafted to privatize the state-run postal services were finally enacted into laws in mid-October, but there will be two major challenges ahead as privatization is carried out. One is the how to reorganize, abolish or privatize government-affiliated financial institutions that have ...
Postwar Japan gave up guns for butter in its bid to prioritize economic reconstruction. This position has lingered for 60 years, and Japan today continues to rely heavily on its alliance with the United States for its own national defense. On Oct. 29, Japan ...
Finance ministers and central bankers from the G20 advanced and emerging economies expressed strong concern Oct. 16 that high oil prices could decelerate growth and destabilize the global economy as they wrapped up their annual meeting on the outskirts of Beijing. Reflecting the views ...
The two biggest events in the postwar history of currency exchange markets are the Nixon shock of August 1971 and the Plaza Accord of September 1985. In the first case, then U.S. President Richard Nixon terminated the convertibility of the dollar to gold. An ...
On July 21, the People’s Bank of China announced it had ended the yuan’s effective peg to the U.S. dollar and that it would link it to a basket of currencies based on China’s main trading partners. The central bank also said that the ...
Now that he’s back from the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi faces an uphill battle to get his postal privatization bills approved by the House of Councilors. In the House of Representatives vote held just before Koizumi’s departure ...
The Netherlands followed France in rejecting the EU Constitution in a referendum earlier this month. While France has long been the driving political force behind European integration, the Netherlands has also been a key player in the integration process. The “no” votes by these ...
On April 1, the government’s limited deposit guarantee, known as the “payoff” system, took full effect as scheduled. So far, the measure hasn’t resulted in any visible disturbances, such as a major shift of funds out of bank accounts. Why? One of the reasons ...