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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.
The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court affirmation of the wartime power to intern "enemy" racial groups provides a sober reminder after the Boston bombings.
More workers than ever before were approved for compensation for work-related mental illnesses in fiscal 2011, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. While those statistics offer hope of treatment for those suffering and are a clear recognition that workplaces are one ...
The Supreme Court in March 2011 ruled that the 2009 Lower House election, which brought the Democratic Party of Japan to power, was held in an unconstitutional state because of great disparity in the value of a vote between depopulated rural areas and populated ...
The Nagoya High Court on May 25 rejected a retrial request by Masaru Okunishi, an 86-year-old man who has been on death row for the fatal poisoning of five women in 1961. It was his seventh petition for a retrial. The Supreme Court in ...
Three years have passed since the lay judge system was introduced to bring citizens’ perspective into criminal trials. According to the Supreme Court, 20,817 had people served as lay judges and 7,257 as backup lay judges by the end March. More than 95 percent ...
There remains less than a month before the current Diet session is scheduled to end on June 21. Deliberations have started in a Lower House special committee on the tax and social welfare reform. Among the bills before the committee are two related to ...
The Upper House on Friday passed censure motions against Defense Minister Naoki Tanaka and infrastructure and transport Minister Takeshi Maeda. The nonbinding motions were submitted by the Liberal Democratic Party, Komeito and two smaller parties. The LDP at first said it would boycott all ...
The proceedings of the trial of former Democratic Party of Japan leader Mr. Ichiro Ozawa, which began in October, ended March 19 as he entered his final plea of innocence and his defense counsel made its closing arguments. On March 9, court-appointed lawyers acting ...
Wage cuts for national public servants under a special law recently enacted will have repercussions in various areas. The law, jointly written by lawmakers of the Democratic Party of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, was enacted by the Upper House on Feb. ...
During a debate in the Lower House last week, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and Mr. Sadakazu Tanigaki, chief of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, appeared to have reached agreements on several issues. The ruling and opposition parties should use that momentum to break the ...
The emergence of super PACs shows once again that “campaign finance reform” has failed abysmally. After nearly four decades, it has achieved none of its goals. It has not purged politics of big donations, nor cured public cynicism about the influence of the rich, ...
I thought American exceptionalism was debunked and dying. I was wrong. Most recently, American exceptionalism jumped to the political fore at the start of this century. It did so with a swagger, ironically, because of the 9/11 attacks. In his speech that night, President ...