Actor-turned-politician Taro Yamamoto is angling for a new real-life role in which he leads his novice party and allies to victory, ousts long-ruling conservatives and takes over as prime minister within the next few years. Whether or not he can achieve that ambitious target, Yamamoto ...

Prosecutors have confirmed that Nissan's arrested chairman, Carlos Ghosn, is being held in the spartan Tokyo Detention House in Katsushika Ward — its many rules and restrictions making for a stark contrast with his comfortable, globe-trotting lifestyle. Ghosn is most probably being held in a ...

On a recent weekday morning, a group of men in their 70s and 80s gathered for baseball practice just down the road from a junior high school where students were arriving to start the day. At full strength, the Shimohama Club baseball team's 33 players ...

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 ...