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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 Abe administration's apparent refusal to heed the lessons of the Fukushima nuclear disaster suggests it is just kowtowing to the power industry.
It would be unrealistic for the Abe administration to return to the energy polices that prevailed before the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster of 3/11.
The U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, was held in Rio de Janeiro on June 20-22 as a follow up to the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), also held in the Brazilian city. Since 1992, the Convention on Biological ...
The Diet on June 20 enacted a law to establish a nuclear regulatory commission. If the new body is established, it will end the current system, in which the authorities promoting nuclear power generation and the authorities regulating it are virtually integrated in the ...
As the March 2011 reactor meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 power plant demonstrated, loss of power sources for an extended period of time at a nuclear power plant — known as a “station blackout” (SBO) — can lead to catastrophic ...
Japanese set three new records last month, all of them sky high. One was a marvel of technology, the other two marvels of human endurance. The achievements offer a renewed sense of hopefulness that Japan is still very much a can-do society. Stunning the ...
The Noda Cabinet on May 29 endorsed the 2012 white book on the environment. It calls for promotion of electricity power generation through renewable energy sources in the Tohoku region. Given the effects of the March 11 disasters and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear crisis, ...
It has surfaced that the Cabinet Offices’s Atomic Energy Commission, in the course of its review of Japan’s nuclear fuel cycle policy, has held a series of closed-door study meetings attended by insiders in the nation’s nuclear power establishment. These meetings were separate from ...
The government has drawn up a design for Japan’s feed-in tariff system to promote the generation of electricity through renewable energy sources. In a nutshell, it has decided the prices at which the nation’s major power companies buy such electricity and the duration of ...
The Noda Cabinet has adopted a new environment basic plan, the fourth since the first plan was adopted in 1994. It incorporates the experience of the Fukushima nuclear crisis and says that the idea of safety should serve as the basis of the endeavor ...
The 912,000 kW No. 3 reactor at Hokkaido Electric Power Co.’s Tomari nuclear power plant came to a complete shutdown on early Sunday morning for regular inspection. No nuclear reactors are now operating in Japan — the first such situation in 42 years. Japan ...
The Nuclear Regulatory Agency was originally scheduled to be set up on April 1. Although the Noda Cabinet endorsed a bill to establish the agency on Jan. 31 and send it to the Diet that day, the Diet has yet to start deliberating on ...