Bashar Assad has won his war for political survival but as Syria's conflict enters its ninth year, his country is fractured, cash-strapped, and prey to both friend and foe. The civil war reaches its eighth anniversary this month with more than 360,000 people killed, millions ...

The Supreme Court has finalized high court rulings ordering owners of cellphones with TV functions to pay a subscription fee to NHK, it was learned Wednesday. The broadcast law obliges anyone who has a TV signal receiver to sign a contract with the public broadcaster. Presiding ...

A Tokyo court ordered Kobe Steel Ltd. on Wednesday to pay a ¥100 million ($898,000) fine for fabricating product quality data at its domestic plants. The Tachikawa Summary Court found that three of the steelmaker's plants had sent about 300 falsified product certificates to clients ...

Journalists on Wednesday were given a guided tour of the Izumo — Japan's largest flat-topped helicopter carrier — for the first time since the Defense Ministry revealed a controversial plan late last year to convert it so that it could handle fixed-wing aircraft — ...

Completion of the Futenma replacement base in the Henoko coastal area could be pushed beyond the fiscal 2022 target due to the additional work needed.

With the market for business-use unmanned aircraft looking promising in coming years, a large-scale drone expo that kicked off Wednesday showed more companies are eager to get involved with the industry. Companies ranging from the small to the powerful are showing off their business solutions ...

Google Inc.'s Gmail and Google Drive temporarily experienced service disruptions Wednesday as part of a worldwide outage —including in Japan. The company said at around noon that Gmail users began reporting having trouble both attaching and accessing attachments, saving email drafts and sending emails. Google ...

Honda Motor Co. said Tuesday it is recalling some 1.1 million vehicles in the United States to re-replace defective air bags supplied by Takata Corp. Honda made the decision to replace the Takata air bags with products from a different company after a driver suffered ...

Big firms offered smaller pay increases at annual wage talks Wednesday as the economy sputters, tempering hopes that domestic consumption will offset external risks to growth. Major firms are set to raise wages for a sixth straight year as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe kept up ...

Over 40 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual students and over 80 percent of transgender students in Japan had uncomfortable experiences during job interviews, a survey by a nonprofit organization showed Wednesday. "Company officials in charge of personnel affairs should be aware that job-hunting students ...

The principal of a school in Ibaraki Prefecture who proposed establishing an extracurricular esports club has faced criticism from his teachers. In January, Takahiro Inose, principal of Oarai High School, proposed setting up a competitive gaming club. "After-school club activities are one of the catalysts for ...

Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. will stop production of its upscale Infiniti models in the U.K. as part of a plan to withdraw the brand from Western Europe and focus on North America and China. Production of the Q30 sedan and QX30 crossover models will cease ...

Suicide notes purportedly written by the two sixth-graders addressed to their school’s principal and a few friends were found after their deaths. They included accounts of verbal abuse, according to sources.

Just when it looks like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may restart his ballistic missile testing program, U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed trimming the missile defense budget, as one set of deterrents is delayed by two years. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) ...

The newsroom of the Chugoku Shimbun recently received a letter of complaint from a 76-year-old whose daily ritual is to take a stroll around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial every morning. His complaint: tourists flashing the peace sign in front of the memorial. "Tourists are posing ...

U.S. President Donald Trump has spent a lot of time trying to convince Kim Jong Un that great wealth awaits if he gives up his nuclear weapons and opens North Korea's economy. Yet that carries big risks for the young leader. While Kim's calls for ...

The government on Wednesday decided not to submit to the Diet a bill that would make it illegal to download literary materials without the permission of copyright holders.

South Korea on Wednesday ramped up its firepower as it battles pollution, passing a set of bills that designate the problem a 'social disaster' and which could unlock emergency funds to tackle the issue. Pollution in Asia's fourth-largest economy has been driven up by factors ...

The U.S. aviation regulator said on Tuesday it would not ground Boeing 737 Max 8 planes after a crash in Ethiopia killed 157 people, bucking a trend of countries around the world that have suspended the aircraft's operations. The Federal Aviation Administration's acting administrator, Dan ...

Pierre Taki, a member of techno-pop duo Denki Groove and the voice of snowman Olaf in the Japanese-language version of the hit Disney movie "Frozen," was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of using cocaine, investigators said. The 51-year-old, whose real name is Masanori Taki, has admitted ...

President Emmanuel Macron visited former French colony Djibouti on Tuesday with promises of a "respectful" partnership in the face of growing African indebtedness to China, which is fast expanding its foothold on the continent. Both Paris and Beijing — as well as Japan and the ...

T-Mobile US Inc.'s proposed $26.5 billion purchase of Sprint Corp. came under congressional scrutiny for the second time in as many months, with Democrats warning that the merger between two of the nation's top four carriers could lead to higher prices for consumers. "I'm deeply ...

Venezuela braced for fresh protests called by opposition leader Juan Guaido on Tuesday, day five of a crippling power blackout, as the U.S. moved to pull all remaining diplomatic staff from the crisis-wracked country. Venezuela's state prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, meanwhile told reporters he would ...

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said he has "profound concern" about Chinese networking giant Huawei Technologies Co. and the security and privacy threats that integrating its equipment across 5G mobile networks would incur. Schiff said Tuesday he believes the company would be unable to refuse ...

British MPs resoundingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal for a second time on Tuesday, plunging the country into further uncertainty just 17 days before it is due to split from the European Union. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against the divorce deal, ...

President Donald Trump's administration is planning to close the U.S. immigration agency's overseas locations, according to current and former officials and an internal memo, in a move affecting offices that currently handle family visa requests, international adoptions and other tasks. The move is the latest ...

Japan will not take part in the submission of a draft joint resolution at the U.N. condemning North Korea’s human rights abuses in bid to get it to hold talks.

Washington's top trade official on Tuesday said the United States and China were likely within "weeks" of ending their trade negotiations — but a successful outcome was not assured. "Our hope is that we're in the final weeks of an agreement but I'm not predicting ...

Trump's posture toward allies hosting U.S. forces could damage crucial relationships.

If you take arms sales as a proxy for influence, the U.S.'s global dominance looks to be resilient.

"Body," the much-anticipated debut album from music maker Amy Furuhara, aka Aaamyyy (stylized as AAAMYYY), opens with an instrumental of tumbling beats, skittering hi-hats, wonky nighttime synth and pitch-shifted samples of a Spanish monologue — the portal of sound aims to transport the listener ...

Food is sustenance, food is pleasure and, as Eric Khoo's nostalgia-drenched "Ramen Shop" reminds us, food is memory. The last is not often seen in Japanese foodie movies, which tend to focus on the hero's arduous journey to mastery of a culinary art. So when the ...

As he enters his 50th year in the music business, Haruomi Hosono hasn't lost his talent for making you wonder what the devil he's up to. After using modern studio technology to recreate the sounds of mid-20th century pop on "Vu Ja De" in ...

In Tokyo alone, Murakami’s commercial work can be seen in the official mascots for the Roppongi Hills complex and Tokyo MX TV station.

Nearly 50 people, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were charged on Tuesday in what federal authorities say was a $25 million scam to help wealthy Americans get their children into elite universities like Yale and Stanford. The most sweeping college admissions fraud scheme ...

Substitute Manabu Saito struck a late winner as Kawasaki Frontale beat visiting Sydney FC 1-0 in the Asian Champions League on Wednesday. Despite taking 20 shots to their opponents' two, Frontale had difficulty breaking down the Australian side, which brought a defensive game plan into ...

Mike Bolsinger ended his first year in Japan with a 13-2 record and 3.06 ERA in 117⅔ innings for the Chiba Lotte Marines. As he prepares for the 2019 season, the right-hander isn't looking for an encore. He's aiming to be even better the second ...

Sekiwake Takakeisho bounced back from his first loss of the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament with a win against komusubi Hokutofuji on Wednesday. The 22-year-old ozeki hopeful charged Hokutofuji (1-3) to the edge of the straw in the first bout of the day between highly-ranked wrestlers ...

Swimming star Rikako Ikee said Wednesday she will not give up on competing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics despite being diagnosed with leukemia a month ago. A day after local organizers marked 500 days until the start of the games, Ikee shared her resolution on ...

Tuesday's Asian Champions League game at Edion Stadium in Hiroshima marked exactly 4,112 days since Keisuke Honda had last stood on a Japanese pitch representing his club rather than his country. The former Samurai Blue star was not quite impressed with what he saw. Just over ...

Every time a yokozuna performs the traditional ring-entering ceremony, he is flanked by two attendants. They are the tachimochi (sword bearer) and tsuyuharai (dew sweeper). The tachimochi is normally the higher ranked of the two, but both must be makuuchi-division wrestlers, and if possible, from the ...

Ryoyu Kobayashi placed third in the men's large hill individual event at the FIS ski jumping World Cup in Lillehammer on Tuesday, the 17th time he has finished on the podium this season. In the event won by Stefan Kraft of Austria, who beat home ...

World No. 1 and defending champion Naomi Osaka crashed out of the fourth round of the women's tournament at the BNP Paribas Open on Tuesday, upset by a lower-seeded challenger just hours after fellow countryman Kei Nishikori suffered the same fate in the third ...