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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.
A series of incidents in which people who had received no help from others citizens or local governments and apparently died alone raises concerns that human ties in Japanese society are growing increasingly thin and that the nation’s social safety net has serious holes. ...
In July 2009, China’s Foreign Ministry made a demand of the American embassy: Stop taking measurements of air pollution in Beijing available to ordinary Chinese since they conflicted with official data and could lead to “confusion” among the public and undesirable “social consequences.” The ...
As the Japanese economy greets the new year, overcoming the long period of deflation that has suffocated consumer spending and corporate investment should be the main goal of the government and the private sector. Firms can expect tailwinds from a rise in demand due ...
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, at a new year news conference Jan. 4, expressed his determination to push a two-stage raise of the consumption tax as well as to reform the social welfare system, and called for the opposition forces to join consultations with his ...
There are signs that following the death on Dec. 17 of North Korean “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, his youngest son Kim Jong Un is consolidating his power as the new leader. But it is unclear what direction his foreign policy will take. Japan ...
You may not believe so, but millions do. They’re convinced that ancient Maya priests calculated Dec. 21, 2012, as the end of the world as we know it. These claims and warnings, prognostications and reassurances are on bookstore shelves, on websites, in museum exhibits ...
Even though the new year has started, it is impossible for people in Japan to put 2011 behind them. The effects of the March 11 triple disasters — the magnitude-9 earthquake followed by the massive tsunami that devastated the Tohoku coastal area, plus the ...