16
P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
The government has sent a bill to unify different pension systems for public servants and private school teachers, on one hand, and corporate workers, on the other. The Diet should thoroughly discuss the bill since it will lay a long-term foundation for the nation’s ...
JPMorgan Chase recently posted $2 billion in trading losses. Mr. Jaimie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chief executive and a man considered one of the savviest bankers in the world, has dismissed the losses as “a tempest in a teapot.” Given the scale of his bank’s ...
The incident in which AIJ Investment Advisors Co. lost most of ¥145.8 billion in pension assets through bad investments highlights problems related to the type of corporate pension fund known as kosei nenkin kikin. According to the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission, 84 corporate ...
BRICS is back. The five-nation group that comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa held its fourth summit last week, convening in New Delhi to present their collective views on global problems. While their opinions are increasingly relevant given their growing weight and ...
The Noda Cabinet in early March submitted to the Diet a bill to help establish a unified exchange that will integrate stock, commodity and other exchanges. But even if the Diet passes the bill to revise the financial instruments exchanges law, the envisaged system ...
The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission on March 23 raided the head office of AIJ Investment Advisors Co. over the loss of nearly all the ¥145.8 billion entrusted to it by corporate pension funds. The SESC must do its best to uncover in detail ...
The Democratic Party of Japan has been calling for incorporating irregular workers into kosei nenkin (a pension scheme originally for permanent corporate workers) as a means of helping to stabilize their life. But the plan the government and the DPJ adopted March 13 shows ...
The news that AIJ Investment Advisors Co. lost most of ¥210 billion entrusted to it by corporate pension funds is causing great worry to many salaried workers. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has found that 84 corporate pension funds entrusted their assets to ...
The Democratic Party of Japan has finally made public its preliminary financial calculations for pension reform it is advocating. Although the DPJ’s proposal is not perfect, both the government and political parties should accelerate their discussions on how to strengthen Japan’s pension system as ...
In its manifesto for the 2009 Lower House election, the Democratic Party of Japan proposed introducing a minimum monthly pension of ¥70,000 or more. In their recent outline for tax and social welfare reforms, the government and the party only stated that they will ...
The government plans to reduce public pensions over three years starting in fiscal 2012, saying that it has overpaid by 2.5 percent. The overpayment has resulted from the Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito government’s decision. Public pensions are supposed to decrease in accordance with falls in ...