Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should again abandon his oft-delayed plan to hike the consumption tax this year because it risks pushing Japan's economy into recession and hampering efforts to generate stable inflation, according to former economy minister Heizo Takenaka. "Of course a sales tax hike ...

The country that brought robots to car factories looks set to stay resolutely old-school in agriculture as it seeks to attract more foreign workers to replenish an aging workforce. This month's vote by the Diet to open the door more widely to overseas laborers confirms ...

The country's male-dominated businesses are starting to ditch long-held views about what kinds of products women want as female consumers flex their growing spending muscle. While the result — more goods that emphasize the practical rather than the pretty — is the way it's long ...

Ohara Inc. sees batteries playing a bigger role in its future. The Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture-based optical glassmaker, whose products are used in precision optical devices such as digital cameras and telescopes, is eying a share of the fast-growing battery market with a material that it ...

Building a machine to construct high-end Prada sweaters was just the start. Now Mitsuhiro Shima, who took over his dad's knitting-machine firm three months ago, is setting his sights on — of all places — the car industry. The 56-year-old president of Shima Seiki Manufacturing ...

As Elon Musk pushes out from his California base to make electric vehicles ubiquitous, a Japanese firm deep in the depths of the battery supply chain is riding his wake. Tanaka Chemical Corp., which has a long history in developing battery materials, says it's boosting ...

Researchers at an Osaka-based firm are closing in on a safer generation of batteries that could weather extreme temperatures in outer space. At least that's what Hitachi Zosen Corp. is betting on. The company, better known for building plants that convert waste to energy, is ...

Making one of the world's biggest cities beautiful is a task beleaguered Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. is unlikely to relish. Tepco, which is facing $144 billion in cleanup costs in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, has been assigned the ...

The latest robot attempting to find the 600 tons of nuclear fuel and debris that melted down six years ago in the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant met its end in less than a day. The scorpion-shape machine, built by Toshiba Corp., entered ...