In a stark warning to North Korea after its successful test of a long-range missile, the top U.S. military commander in South Korea insinuated Wednesday that Seoul and Washington were willing to go to war if provoked. The unusually blunt statement by Gen. Vincent Brooks, ...

Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori is arranging to visit Russia for talks with President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, a diplomatic source said Wednesday. The planned three-day visit to Russia, starting Saturday, is aimed at supporting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is eager to settle a ...

North Korea's new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) represents "a new escalation of the threat to the United States," Japan and South Korea, the U.S. said, as dictator Kim Jong Un pledged not to give up his isolated country's burgeoning nuclear weapons capabilities while continuing ...

Japan’s population fell last year at the fastest pace since the current survey started in 1968. As of Jan. 1, there were 125,583,658 Japanese nationals, down a record 308,084 from a year earlier.

Japan's oldest "love doll" manufacturer wants to strip the sex toys of their seedy image and encourage people to see them as works of art instead. "Even now there is still a stigma," said a spokesperson for Tokyo-based sex doll maker Orient Industry, which recently celebrated ...

The ruling and opposition parties agree to briefly reopen both houses of the Diet for one-off committee deliberations, with plans to quiz a former top education ministry bureaucrat who alleged favoritism by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Sunday's Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election dealt a hard blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with his Liberal Democratic Party suffering a historic defeat and securing only 23 seats — the lowest-ever figure for the LDP. But another big loser in the election may face problems ...

Shop-owner Adnan dragged himself from the rubble for the second day in a row, as again the house where he was sheltering was bombed in a U.S.-led campaign to uproot the last Islamic State militants from Mosul. "Daesh (Islamic State) forced us out of our ...

Japan's labor shortage has pushed the number of people changing jobs and employers during their career to its highest level since the global financial crisis, as companies scramble for workers with experience amid a rapidly-aging economy. So-called job-hopping goes against the grain of Japan's work ...

A proposal that residents be required to give their My Number before entering a casino could severely restrict access, the leader of a ruling party panel working on plans for the Singapore-style resorts said in an interview. Identification cards with chips that contain data including ...

Tetsuro Funai, the founder of audiovisual electronics maker Funai Electric Co., known for his business strategy of mass producing items at low cost, died of pneumonia at an Osaka hospital on Tuesday, the company said. He was 90. Born in Kobe, Funai, the son of ...

Police arrested a man on arson charges after the bodies of a woman and two toddlers believed to be his wife and children were found at the scene of a fire at a home in Miyagi Prefecture early Tuesday. The fire started at around 2:30 ...

Japan may not achieve its carbon emissions target if an ambitious plan to build more coal-fired power plants moves ahead, the environment minister said, underlining Tokyo's struggle to meet globally agreed goals to halt climate change. Even as it champions the Paris climate agreement, Japan ...

Move over blow-up dolls, the sex robots are here. Artificial intelligence is making its way into the global sex market, bringing with it a revolution in robotic "sex tech" designed to offer sexual gratification with a near-human touch. In a report on the growing market in ...

Schools offering lessons in piloting drones are increasing in Japan as more seasoned operators are needed for industrial purposes such as logistics as well as disaster response. While simply flying a drone is not a complicated process, operating them for surveying or disaster sites employ ...

A state-backed entity is close to completing a plan for decommissioning the crisis-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant, detailing for the first time how it hopes to extract fuel debris from three reactors.

She died in her 20s some 1,700 years ago, and is believed to have ruled over a desert valley in ancient Peru where her elaborately tattooed body was buried with weapons and gold objects. But a glimpse of the former priestess, the Lady of Cao, ...

A consortium seeking to buy Toshiba Corp.'s prized memory chip unit may delay closing the deal in order to wait for a court decision on whether the sale should be blocked, sources said Tuesday. Western Digital Corp., Toshiba's chip production partner, opposes the sale and ...

Venomous and highly invasive fire ants have been found at Osaka port, with the first confirmation of a queen ant in the country, the Environment Ministry said. The discovery is serious as queen ants can lay over 1,000 eggs a day. While no eggs have ...

Ukrainian police on Tuesday seized the servers of an accounting software firm suspected of spreading a malware virus that crippled computer systems at major companies around the world last week, a senior police official said. The head of Ukraine's Cyber Police, Serhiy Demedyuk, told Reuters ...

Last week's summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in demonstrated a shared commitment to ridding Pyongyang of its nuclear weapons and ending its missile program.

Japan's way forward is to be the prophet of a new global order, not the hegemony of Washington or Beijing.

Upcoming changes to Japanese university admissions have students, parents and teachers raising their hands to ask questions.

"It is my job to ensure that patients do not need to see me" is written in large letters on the web page of Thomas Blasejewicz, an acupuncturist from Germany who practices in Hayama.

One of the best things to come out of the rise of streaming websites overseas has been an increase in productions that have featured great roles for women. This year alone we've seen some phenomenal acting from Elisabeth Moss on "The Handmaid's Tale" and ...

Though it has been 11 years since his last album, Keigo Oyamada never really went away. The studio wizard known as Cornelius has spent the past decade diversifying his portfolio: creating soundtracks for anime and educational TV; playing in electro super-group Metafive and collaborating ...

Some actors have a knack for picking good material. And some, like Shun Oguri, drift from stinker to stinker: "Museum," "Terra Formars," "Galaxy Turnpike," "Lupin the Third." Still considered a box-office force despite this dismal track record, Oguri stars in "Gintama," the live-action adaptation of ...

The Yomiuri Giants blanked the first-place Hiroshima Carp for the second straight night, this time with ace Tomoyuki Sugano throwing six scoreless innings in a 5-0 win Wednesday. Pitching on four days' rest for the first time since September 2015, Sugano (8-4) picked up his ...

Yu Kobayashi scored twice as Kawasaki Frontale thrashed Urawa Reds 4-1 in the J. League on Wednesday night, landing a sizeable psychological blow ahead of their meeting in the Asian Champions League quarterfinals. Hiroyuki Abe set up Kobayashi for the first-half opener and then got ...

WBC bantamweight champion Shinsuke Yamanaka insists attempting to match a 37-year-old Japanese record will not affect his performance when he fights Mexican challenger Luis Nery next month. Yamanaka, 34, will be aiming to tie former WBA light flyweight champion Yoko Gushiken's record of 13 consecutive ...

It was probably in the best interests of everyone at Sanfrecce Hiroshima that Hajime Moriyasu stood down as manager on Tuesday, but that should not obscure the debt of gratitude that the three-time J. League champions owe him. Moriyasu, who led Sanfrecce to three titles ...

Japan striker Genki Haraguchi says his rumored transfer to newly promoted English Premier League side Brighton and Hove Albion from Bundesliga club Hertha Berlin is still up in the air. Speaking to reporters at Tokyo's Haneda airport before leaving for Germany to join up with ...

A sore shoulder will delay the return of right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma, who went on the disabled list on May 10 with shoulder inflammation, the Seattle Mariners said Tuesday. Iwakuma had two rehab sessions in his recover process, but according to the Mariners website the 36-year-old ...