When Masayoshi Matsumoto joined the Japanese army in 1943 and was sent to occupied China as a medic, he thought he was taking part in a righteous war to free Asia from the yoke of Western imperialism. Seven decades later, the 91-year-old retired Christian pastor says it’s his mission to speak out about the injustice [...]

Ahead of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s visit next week, Japan has announced that it remains committed to civil nuclear cooperation with India despite its concerns over nuclear safety. The negotiations between the two countries have remained stalled since the disaster in Fukushima in 2011 leading to speculation that Japan’s rethink over its nuclear policy will [...]

Japan will provide patrol boats to the Philippines to help the country bolster its capabilities in the face of China’s growing presence in regional waters. In a meeting in Tokyo on May 22, Foreign minister Fumio Kishida and his counterpart Albert del Rosario agreed to work together to improve the capabilities of the Philippine Coast [...]

Nissan Motor Co Ltd will recall about 841,000 vehicles worldwide including the Micra compact car, also known as the March, as a result of a steering wheel glitch, Japan’s No.2 automaker said on Thursday. Nissan is recalling certain models of the Micra compact car produced in Britain and Japan between 2002 and 2006, as well [...]

The Bank of Japan said on Thursday that the bond market operation it conducted the same day was in line with Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s stance to conduct flexible market operations in the wake of bond market volatility. Kuroda vowed to take steps needed to reduce volatility in the Japanese government bond market following Wednesday’s monetary [...]

Japan’s nuclear watchdog on Wednesday endorsed a conclusion by a panel of seismologists that a fault under a reactor at an atomic plant in western Japan is active, potentially blocking a restart of the reactor. The Nuclear Regulation Authority said it agreed with the panel that the fault underneath the Tsuruga No. 2 reactor could [...]

Japan is considering direct talks with North Korea, the government said Wednesday, adding momentum to the cause after a top level aide to the prime minister made a surprise trip to Pyongyang. Bilateral talks are on the table as Tokyo seeks to salve the running sore of abductions of its nationals by North Korean spies [...]

Japan’s nuclear watchdog said Wednesday that one reactor was sitting directly above an active tectonic fault, effectively ruling out a restart forever. The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said it had approved a report from experts which found a crack in the Earth’s crust lying underneath the reactor at a plant in Tsuruga, western Japan, was [...]

A record 923,000 foreigners travelled to Japan in April, up 18.1 percent from a year earlier, taking advantage of a weaker yen and an increase in chartered flights, a government agency said Wednesday. The previous monthly high was 879,000 in July 2010, the Japan National Tourism Organisation said. Tourism has rebounded since 2011, when visitor [...]

Farmers have resumed planting rice for market only 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, a local official said Wednesday. It was the first time since the March 2011 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster that farmers have gone inside the former 20-kilometre “no-go” zone around the doomed plant to sow rice intended for [...]

Walter Benda had no inkling of what was to happen after he and his Japanese wife and their two small daughters moved from to Tokyo from Minnesota in 1992. Three years later, Benda returned home from his job at a trading company one evening to find his wife and children gone. For the next three-and-a [...]

Japan’s parliament on Wednesday approved an international treaty on child abductions after decades of pressure from the United States and other Western nations. Japan is the only member of the Group of Eight major industrialised nations that has not ratified the 1980 Hague Convention, which requires nations to return snatched children to the countries where [...]

Japan has started looking into resuming inter-governmental talks with North Korea after a surprise visit to Pyongyang by an aide to Japan’s prime minister, the Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers said on Wednesday. Such talks, intended to discuss North Korea’s abduction of Japanese citizens decades ago and other issues, were last held in November 2012, [...]

The Bank of Japan stood pat on monetary policy Wednesday amid market jitters over volatility in bond markets, which has threatened to undermine the country’s battle to end deflation and stimulate growth in the giant economy. In a unanimous vote, the bank’s board stuck to its strategy of expanding the monetary base at an annual [...]

A senior Japanese official said Tokyo will make its own overtures to North Korea on what it claims are abductions of Japanese citizens, dismissing US and South Korean concern that the North may try to drive a wedge between the three allies. A surprise trip to Pyongyang last week by Isao Iijima, a senior aide [...]

The prime ministers of Singapore and Japan have expressed the desire to enhance bilateral ties. Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong met his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, in Tokyo, Japan on Wednesday. In his opening remarks, Abe said both countries share the same values of freedom and democracy. He added Singapore and Japan can work [...]

Japanese exports rose 3.8 percent in April from a year earlier, marking a second straight month of gains, Ministry of Finance data showed on Wednesday, in a sign that a weaker yen and a pickup in global demand are helping the export-reliant economy. The MOF data also showed that Japan logged a trade deficit in [...]

The Bank of Japan is expected to stand pat on monetary policy on Wednesday despite jitters over the recent volatility in bond markets, hoping it can prevent a renewed spike in yields by fine-tuning market operations. The central bank may front-load bond purchases or offer funds via market operations more frequently if bond market turbulence [...]

Shinzo Abe, now six months into his second try at being prime minister of Japan, is a puzzling man. In his first, spectacularly unsuccessful go in 2006-07, he was a crude nationalist and an economic ignoramus who rarely had control of his own dysfunctional cabinet. By the time he quit, after only a year in [...]

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said Europe risks an extended period of low growth and deflation like Japan’s unless the European Central Bank acts with an aggressive quantitative easing programme. “You should worry about it, and then take policy action to avoid it,” Bullard said in Frankfurt today in response to [...]

A senior Japanese official said on Tuesday that Tokyo will stick with its policy of making its own overtures to North Korea on what it believes are abductions of its citizens, dismissing US and South Korean concerns that the North may try to drive a wedge between the three nations. A surprise trip to Pyongyang [...]

South Korean soldiers were guilty of abusing women in wartime, Osaka’s mayor said in comments reported Tuesday, days after provoking a storm by labelling sex slaves a military necessity. In a remark likely to fuel outrage and further stoke tensions in an already uneasy relationship, Toru Hashimoto said the South Korean military used women for [...]

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to provide low-interest loans to companies that borrow residential rooftop space for solar power generation, the Nikkei newspaper reported today. The ministry plans to make loans available through government financial institutions such as Development Bank of Japan Inc., the newspaper cited Trade minister Toshimitsu Motegi as saying. [...]

Japanese Finance minister Taro Aso said on Tuesday that he wants the Bank of Japan to have a thorough dialogue with markets in the wake of volatility in the government bond market. “Governor Kuroda is communicating with the market in a thorough way and I expect the bank to continue to do this,” Aso said [...]

A large majority of Japanese people disagree with a high-profile politician who said women forced to provide sex during World War II were a military necessity, polls issued on Monday said. Up to 200,000 “comfort women” from Korea, China, the Philippines and elsewhere were forcibly drafted into brothels catering to the Japanese military during WWII, [...]

Japan is pledging $2 billion for energy and mineral projects in Africa, capping a conference with government resource officials from across the continent as it seeks to catch up with years of Chinese investment. Japan needs to secure long-term reliable sources of natural materials. It is also eager to provide its technologies to build roads, [...]

Japan continues to be the world’s biggest financial story. The consensus seems to be that the country’s extraordinary economic measures are good for both itself and the world. I’ve detailed previously how Japan’s efforts are likely to have terrible domestic economic consequences, whether they succeed or not. Today, I’m going to explore the latter idea: [...]

Yahoo Japan Corp. has said it suspects up to 22 million user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Yahoo! Japan portal. “We don’t know if the file (of 22 million user IDs) was leaked or not, but we can’t deny the possibility given the volume [...]

Japan’s prime minister vowed Sunday to seek talks with Pyongyang in a bid to settle the nagging issue of North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese, without risking its alliance with Washington and Seoul. Shinzo Abe made the comment after a surprise visit to North Korea by one of his advisers last week has irritated the United [...]

Japan has a child-kidnapping problem. It’s not strangers snatching the kids on the playground or at the bus-stop; the problem is that when a Japanese national divorces a foreigner overseas, he or she can abduct their children, bring them back to Japan and the law ensures that the parent left behind has no rights to [...]

Japan risks missing, yet again, an opportunity to use foreign investment to help fuel sustained economic growth that has eluded it for the last two decades. Prime minister Shinzo Abe pledged to make Japan “the world’s easiest country for companies to do business in” as part of his economic revival plan, which so far has [...]

The yen climbed versus all 16 major peers after Japan’s Economy minister Akira Amari said further losses in the currency would threaten to negatively affect people and the government’s job is to minimise that. The yen retreated from near its weakest in more than four years versus the dollar after Amari said yesterday there’s speculation [...]

Nissan Motor Co. (7201) will start selling the first minicar it jointly developed with Mitsubishi Motors Corp. (7211) in Japan next month amid increasing demand from the nation’s consumers for smaller and cheaper vehicles. The automaker, based in Yokohama, Japan, began production of the minicar at Mitsubishi’s Mizushima plant in Okayama prefecture today. The model [...]

Japan has made progress in its attempts to curtail soaring fuel costs since the 2011 Fukushima disaster and Washington on Friday gave it the green light to import cheap liquefied natural gas. Since Japan is poor in natural resources, it has been longing to import US-produced LNG emerging from the shale gas boom. This is [...]

Japan’s premier said Friday he would slash red tape in a bid to boost corporate investment as he seeks to capitalise on the feel-good mood of a soaraway stock market and a plunging yen. Prime minister Shinzo Abe set out broadbrush outlines of the third of his “three arrows” of a plan dubbed “Abenomics”, which [...]

An aide to the Japanese premier returned home from a controversial trip to North Korea on Saturday, reportedly saying he had demanded Pyongyang’s act swiftly on its kidnapping of Japanese nationals. Isao Iijima, a senior adviser to prime minister Shinzo Abe, said he told senior North Korean officials that Tokyo wanted Japanese civilians kidnapped by [...]

Prime minister Shinzo Abe defended in an interview Friday the right of Japan’s leaders to visit a controversial shrine to war dead but hit back at critics who accuse him of revisionism. Amid the latest flare-up with China and South Korea over history, Abe quoted a US scholar as comparing the Yasukuni shrine to Arlington [...]

Caterpillar Inc’s (CAT.N) deal to cut the purchase price of a Chinese mining-equipment maker it bought last year ends an embarrassing episode that overshadowed the company’s effort to expand in China and distracted its executives for months. Now, analysts say, comes the hard part: Proving to investors that ERA Mining Machinery, the Chinese maker of [...]

A small crack has appeared in the international show of unity against North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, following the “secret” visit to Pyongyang this week by a special adviser to Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Isao Iijima arrived in the North Korean capital on Tuesday for a four-day visit that many believe was aimed [...]

Three Chinese government ships entered the waters of disputed islands on Friday, Japan’s coastguard said, more than a year after then-Tokyo governor set off the row by announcing plans to buy them. The Chinese maritime surveillance vessels were spotted off the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyus, in the East China Sea at around [...]

Investment banks are among the first and biggest beneficiaries of Japan’s new economic stimulus policies, known as Abenomics. Since prime minister Shinzo Abe came into office in December with a plan to end more than a decade of deflation, demand for banks that help companies sell equity and debt is white-hot. Companies have more than [...]

Japanese goods are getting more affordable. For consumers worldwide – and for Japan’s economy – it’s welcome news. Credit Japan’s drive to pump cash into its economy to stimulate growth. The extra money flooding its financial system is helping shrink the value of the yen. A US dollar now buys about 100 yen. Last fall, [...]

A US envoy for North Korea sidestepped questions on Thursday on the nature of a surprise visit to Pyongyang by an aide to Japan’s prime minister, but said all sides tackling North Korea’s nuclear ambitions should coordinate closely. Isao Iijima’s trip to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and his talks with senior officials there have [...]

WHEN Shinzo Abe resigned after just a year as prime minister, in September 2007, he was derided by voters, broken by chronic illness, and dogged by the ineptitude that has been the bane of so many recent Japanese leaders. Today, not yet five months into his second term, Abe seems to be a new man. [...]

Investors are more confident in a Japanese leader than any time since at least September 2010, with optimism about prime minister Shinzo Abe’s policies exceeding that for counterparts in the US, Europe and China. The number of respondents who are more optimistic than pessimistic on the impact of Abe’s plans on Japan’s investment climate rose [...]

In the first sign that the bold policies of prime minister Shinzo Abe are gaining traction in the real economy, Japan’s gross domestic product grew at a robust annualised pace of 3.5 percent in the first quarter, kindling hopes that recovery would finally take hold for the long-suffering economic power. Japanese growth came to 0.9 [...]

The United States condemned as “outrageous and offensive” comments by the mayor of the Japanese city of Osaka who said this week that Japan’s military brothels during World War Two were “necessary” to provide respite for soldiers. The remarks by Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto drew strong criticism from China and South Korea, two nations sensitive [...]

South Korea Thursday criticised an “unhelpful” visit to North Korea by a senior aide to Japan’s prime minister, saying it weakened the united front needed to deal with Pyongyang. Isao Iijima arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday on a visit that clearly surprised both Seoul and Washington, which have been working closely with Tokyo on coordinating [...]

Japan’s economy expanded at a rapid clip at the start of the year, the first hard evidence that prime minister Shinzo Abe’s sweeping stimulus is beginning to rouse consumers and businesses into action even as risks loomed in the horizon. Corporate investment, seen as an essential ingredient of a sustained recovery, fell for the fifth [...]

It’s been a bad month for Japanese conservative politicians who can’t seem to resist the temptation to rewrite history and make provocative gestures while shifting and minimising war responsibility. Yoshihide Suga, prime minister Shinzo Abe’s overworked spokesman, has been in damage control mode, issuing numerous denials while restating and reinterpreting controversial statements. Abe is feeling [...]