Shinichiro Tsukada says his small plastering company in Tokyo wouldn't survive without the 22 Chinese and Vietnamese workers who make up half his payroll. "They're treasures, real treasures," he said. "Workers are disappearing as our population ages. Buildings cannot be built because there aren't enough ...

Chikara Imai, 73, is quick to dismiss the new parties in Sunday's national election, saying old ties with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is what the country's most elderly village needs for survival. Nanmoku, 107 km (67 miles) northwest of Tokyo, is at ...

Public support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, battered by a smoldering scandal and a perception that he is taking voters for granted, has fallen below 30 percent, the lowest since he returned to power in 2012, a survey released on Friday showed. The suspicion of ...

Few doubt Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's decision to invest public funds in a $90 billion high-tech maglev railway makes political sense. Whether it makes equally good economic sense is less clear. Proponents say lending government money to Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) to speed ...

Progress on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, not an apology, is what Hiroshima would want from a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama to the city wiped out in the U.S. atomic bombing 71 years ago, survivors and other residents said. No incumbent U.S. ...

Hitoshi Kino, a bespectacled clerical employee at a university near Tokyo, doesn't stand out. Only a slight Vietnamese accent betrays his past as he speaks in Japanese about being stranded on a rickety boat in waters off his war-torn homeland in 1980, starving with ...

Hiroshi Harada remembers how his leg sank into one of the bodies blocking a narrow Hiroshima street 70 years ago, as he fled the spreading fire ignited by the atomic bomb. "My leg slid deep into one of them. Then it was very hard to ...

Defense planners seek a record high ¥5.05 trillion budget for 2015 as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bolsters the military in the face growing tensions with China and North Korea.

Tokuro Inokuma, a former Imperial Japanese Army soldier, got his first taste of the horrors of war in 1945 when he scrambled to gather up the scattered limbs of his fellow servicemen, blown apart by a U.S. air raid in Japan. He was 16. One ...

The leader of the ruling party's smaller coalition partner said Friday that he does not agree with the defense policy changes that would allow Japanese forces to fight overseas to help allies, despite U.S. support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's review of the stance. Abe ...