International Olympic Committee Vice President John Coates stressed Tuesday that the IOC will remain "politically neutral" toward North Korea's participation at the 2020 Tokyo Games and will not try to force the government to accept non-sporting visitors. "We are keen to see sport be available ...

Police officers have been hunting in vain for an inmate who escaped from an open prison in Imabari, keeping investigators and local residents on edge.

As the ministry’s probe continues, opposition parties take issue with the government’s decision to accept Junichi Fukuda’s resignation without immediately reprimanding him.

The party’s leader called remarks made by ex-education minister Hakubun Shimomura “utterly incomprehensible,” after the lawmaker criticized a journalist that made allegations against a top bureaucrat.

For a Tokyo man, being told by friends and neighbors that he looked nothing like his parents was a source of pain growing up, and his own suspicions that he might not be his parents' biological son proved to be true many years later. The ...

In the run-up to a planned Kim-Trump meeting, Tokyo wins broader backing for its efforts to address past abductions of Japanese by Pyongyang.

Eiji Teruya, a third-generation Japanese-Brazilian and son of a migrant worker, has passed the bar exam and is getting ready to go to work as a lawyer in Japan, possibly the first Brazilian to do so. Teruya's accomplishment has spread in the Brazilian community by ...

Group of Seven foreign ministers pledged Monday to maintain "maximum pressure" on North Korea to compel it to give up its nuclear and missile programs, determining that Pyongyang's decision to suspend nuclear tests and long-range missile launches is not sufficient to meet the demands ...

A two-armed robot in a Chiba factory carefully stacks rice balls in a box, which a worker carries off for shipment to convenience stores. At another food-packaging plant, a robot shakes pepper and powdered cheese over pasta that a person has just arranged in ...

U.S. and South Korean negotiators should seek to secure a nuclear-weapons-free zone on the Korean Peninsula.

Consumers have begun to behave more rationally, and that is reducing economic growth.

Drones are dangerous and should be banned.

As far as Hollywood debuts go, it doesn't get much bigger than stepping into a Steven Spielberg blockbuster. For Win Morisaki, it's a giant leap toward his goal of becoming an international actor. Morisaki, 27, is a singer and actor who grew up in Myanmar ...

"The Genius of Ike no Taiga: Carefree Traveler, Legendary Painter," at Kyoto National Museum, is magisterial. Edo Period (1603-1868) Kyoto teemed with big name painters, but Taiga (1723-1776) was superlative. Taiga began the practice of calligraphy when a child, and was pseudo-certified in 1729 as ...

Right-hander Yuta Nakamura worked into the ninth inning for the Hiroshima Carp in Tuesday's 7-2 victory over the Yokohama BayStars. The BayStars, who upset the CL champion Carp last autumn in the playoffs, had two key players making their season debuts, lefty Shota Imanaga and ...

Hall of Famer Sachio Kinugasa, whose 2,215 consecutive games played remain a Japan pro baseball record, died of colon cancer Monday at 71, an informed source said. Nicknamed "Iron Man," Kinugasa played for the Hiroshima Carp from 1965 to 1987 and was the Central League's ...

For the New Orleans Pelicans, it's the elephant in the locker room. Theirs has a name: DeMarcus Cousins. Not that Cousins should take offense even if he is one of the largest people in the NBA at about 213 cm and close to 135 kg. It's more ...

Yuichi Sugita failed to match last year's best-eight performance as he was knocked out of the Barcelona Open after suffering a 7-6 (7-5), 7-6 (7-5) first-round defeat to Guillermo Garcia-Lopez on Monday. Had Sugita, ranked 42nd, beaten the 69th-ranked Spaniard, he would have set up ...

After his surprise Boston Marathon victory last week, Yuki Kawauchi earned third place in this season's World Marathon Majors men's series while Kenya's Eliud Kipchoge was crowned champion Monday in London. Kawauchi was one of five runners tied on 25 points for a first-place finish ...