Taro Kono's appointment as the new foreign minister is raising eyebrows. Though he hasn't shown any indication that he will buck Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's agenda, Kono is considered a leftish maverick within the Liberal Democratic Party, especially with regard to its nuclear energy ...

Japan's health insurance system is considered "universal," since it covers everyone in the country, but it is hardly "free" in the sense of having the government pay for everything with tax revenue. Anyone who lives in Japan must pay into the system according to their ...

As everyone knows, Japan has an unmanageable surplus of vacant housing. According to the latest government surveys there are more than 8 million unoccupied houses and apartment units in Japan and that number will increase to the point where one in four or five ...

Tomomi Inada's resignation as defense minister ended a tenure that often made reporters wonder if her transgressions had more to do with ignorance than with incompetence. It would be wrong to associate her failures with her sex, though there were some in the media ...

Few recent scandals have been as entertaining as Lower House lawmaker Mayuko Toyota's verbal and physical attack on her secretary as revealed in a recording leaked to the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho. With the recording coming to light in the week before the Tokyo ...

On July 7, during a public assembly in Takahama, Fukui Prefecture, Shunichi Tanaka, head of Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, was asked how his organization would respond to a North Korean missile attack. Tanaka replied that it would make more sense for North Korea to ...

The Liberal Democratic Party lost a large number of seats to Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike's upstart Tomin First Party in the Tokyo assembly election. Media surveys reveal that the public is dismayed by recent scandals involving the LDP, in particular the one surrounding educational ...

Though last Sunday's Tokyo assembly elections garnered the most media attention, another contest came in a close second, even if only two people were involved. Fourteen-year-old Sota Fujii's record-setting winning streak of 29 games of shogi was finally broken on July 2 when he ...

Japan and the European Union just announced a deal on free trade and will seek to reach a final agreement by the end of this year. The EU has already promised to phase out its 10 percent levy on Japanese automobiles, while Japan says ...

Until the postwar growth period, the majority of Japanese rented rather than owned the places where they lived, but renters in Japan have never had much in the way of rights. Still, it is difficult to evict someone from a home they rent, even ...