Crime & Legal

A district court on Wednesday ordered the government to pay ¥400,000 in damages to an inmate who was unjustifiably held for months in solitary confinement in a cell equipped with a surveillance camera. The Kumamoto District Court ruled it was unlawful to continue holding the ...

Two graduate students have been arrested for sitting around a traditional Japanese heated table they set up at the center of a busy intersection in western Japan, police said Wednesday. Masako Ueda, a 31-year-old student at Kyoto University's graduate school, and fellow 26-year-old student Masatoshi ...

Forty-six victims of human trafficking were rescued from forced prostitution or forced labor in Japan in 2017, down slightly from the 50 assisted during the previous year, a government report showed Friday. Of those rescued, Japanese nationals made up the largest share — at 28, ...

A Liberal Democratic Party policy research division on health affairs approved Thursday a draft bill to ban transactions of umbilical cord blood, except for those involving government-approved institutions. The draft also won approval from a similar division at Komeito, the LDP's partner in the ruling ...

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has arrested a man on suspicion of selling counterfeit 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic commemorative coins. Yasuhiro Kotani, 43, was arrested for allegedly violating the trademark law by possessing the imitations in order to sell them. He admitted to the allegations, ...

A 28-year-old worker at a Tokyo-based system development company died from overwork in August 2017, about a month after he began to work under the contentious discretionary work system, an attorney representing his family has said. He worked for 36 consecutive hours shortly after switching ...