Taking karaoke to a new level, a machine soon to be out in Japan will let people impersonate animation characters, turning them into superheroes — or mischievous smart alecs — for the night. Namco Bandai Games unveiled the prototype machine at the Tokyo International Anime Fair 2008.
Top jewellers De Beers and Swarovski on Thursday opened flagship stores in Tokyo in a bid to lure customers in the highly lucrative but increasingly saturated Japanese luxury market. De Beers, the British-South African diamond giant, and Switzerland’s Swarovski cut the ribbons on the stores blocks away from each other in Tokyo’s Ginza district.
Corporate Japan will join the country’s battle against bulging waistlines next month with the introduction of compulsory "flab checks" for the over-40s and penalties for firms that fail to bring their employees’ weight under control. Health authorities hope the measures will arrest the rise in obesity among middle-aged men and slow soaring medical costs.
Masaaki Shirakawa, the Bank of Japan’s acting governor, has warned that the country’s economy faces an uncertain future. It comes at the end of a week in which the Nikkei share index sank to its lowest level for almost three years. Shirakawa took up the post after Parliament failed to agree on a long-term appointment.
At a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan, even the dog prays. Mimicking his master, priest Joei Yoshikuni, a one-and-a-half-year-old black-and-white chihuahua named Conan joins in the daily prayers at Naha’s Shuri Kannondo temple, sitting up on his hind legs and putting his front paws together before the altar.
Mieko Kawakami, a former bar hostess and bookstore clerk, was just another obscure singer until she started a blog. Her poetic, street-wise writing stood out so starkly among internet diaries in Japan — which, like those around the world, tend to be more informative or gossipy than narrative — that she is now Japan’s biggest literary star.
A serial seducer who enchants aristocratic women with poems on scented paper and gifts of luxurious kimono, Genji turns 1 000 this year, his appeal to readers undiminished. Schoolchildren still study parts of the work and three major English translations have brought international acclaim for the author known as Murasaki Shikibu.
Share prices are tumbling and the yen is rising, but Japanese businessman on Monday got one thing to cheer — underwear to tame their bulging waistlines. Wacoal announced on Monday it was making a full entry into the men’s market with undergarments especially for men with a bit of flab.
A grouping of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters on Sunday backed United Nations-led efforts to forge a global pact to fight climate change but disagreed on a sectoral approach to curb emissions from industry. G20 nations held three days of talks near Tokyo to discuss ways to tackle rapidly rising emissions.
Sony said this week it will soon sell a record deck that plugs into a computer to let vinyl collectors convert their analogue recordings into digital form. The turntable hooks up with a USB cable to a computer, where special software turns the sound into MP3 or ATRAC format.
Japan is being lined up as a Bledisloe Cup host in 2009 and could become the base for a new team in an expanded Super 14 competition. The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) said initial talks with Japanese officials about bringing the Wallabies and New Zealand All Blacks to Asia’s top rugby nation had gone smoothly.
Boozing into the night might inhibit coherent speech, but a Japanese company bets it will make workers communicate better. And it’s even willing to pay for it. Japan General Estate said on Tuesday it is planning to dole out thousands of dollars a month for its employees to go on the town in a bid to help communication.
Militant environmentalists hurled stinging acid for more than an hour onto a Japanese whaling ship off Antarctica on Monday, hurting three crew members, officials said. Both Japan and Australia, the leading opponent of whaling, condemned the latest attack by the Sea Shepherd group.
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/ 29 February 2008
At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors. Welcome to Tokyo’s first schoolboy cafés, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.
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/ 28 February 2008
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed on Thursday to make Hamas militants pay a heavy price for rocket attacks despite United States concerns about civilians in the Gaza Strip. As five more Palestinians were killed, Olmert held talks in Tokyo with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
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/ 22 February 2008
Japanese professor Yoji Kimura believes laughter is a weapon that in healthy doses can end the world’s wars. The only problem is finding a way to measure it. And so the expert on communications has invented a machine to chart out laughter — and a new unit of "aH" to calculate it.
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/ 22 February 2008
A Japanese man was arrested for trespassing this week after turning up at a high school dressed in a girl’s uniform and a long wig, local police said. Thirty-nine-year-old Tetsunori Nanpei told police he had bought the uniform over the internet and put it on to take a stroll near the school in Saitama.
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/ 19 February 2008
Japan’s top court ruled on Tuesday that pictures by late United States photographer Robert Mapplethorpe are not obscene, putting an end to years of legal fighting. In the 2003 ruling, the Tokyo High Court ruled that the book, which included images of male genitals, went ”against good sexual morality”.
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/ 19 February 2008
Japan’s Toshiba conceded defeat on Tuesday to rival Sony in a long-running DVD format war, ending consumer confusion but leaving about one million people with expensive machines doomed to become obsolete. Toshiba said it will stop selling its HD DVD machines by the end of March.
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/ 18 February 2008
Investors cheered an impending end to a format war for next-generation DVDs on Monday, pushing up shares of both Toshiba, on the verge of abandoning its HD DVD discs, and Sony, the leader of the rival Blu-ray camp. Toshiba shares jumped 5,1% as analysts praised its decision to cut its losses.
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/ 14 February 2008
Japanese police on Thursday heaped praise on a Labrador Retriever who found an elderly man who fallen over in freezing conditions at night, the second time the dog was credited with saving a life. The three-year-old black Lab, named ‘Dor, suddenly started barking when she was taking a walk with her owner in the western city of Iwade one evening last month.
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/ 14 February 2008
The United Nations climate chief on Thursday called for rich and developing nations to reach a compromise as they held talks in Japan in their bid to forge a new deal on fighting global warming by the end of next year. Officials from the United Nations and 21 countries opened two days of closed-door talks in Tokyo to help find common ground.
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/ 13 February 2008
Hiroshi Hoketsu, a 66-year-old equestrian rider, is set to become Japan’s oldest Olympian after being officially named on Wednesday in the team for Beijing. Hoketsu, who will be 67 next month, has been named to compete in the team dressage event after a 44-year break from the Games.
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/ 9 February 2008
A Russian strategic bomber briefly entered Japanese airspace over the Pacific south of Tokyo early on Saturday morning, prompting 24 Japanese military aircraft to scramble, officials said. Russia denied the incursion, but the Japanese Foreign Ministry said it lodged a strong protest with the Russian embassy in Tokyo.
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/ 9 February 2008
Top world finance ministers warned on Saturday that the global economy faces growing threats from a United States housing slump and credit crunch. The finance chiefs from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialised nations said their economies were set to lose steam in the near future but remained fundamentally solid.
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/ 5 February 2008
Japan’s health minister raised the possibility on Tuesday that someone had deliberately contaminated Chinese-made dumplings imported into Japan with pesticide in an incident that made 10 Japanese sick and sparked a food scare. Japanese police have set up a joint task force to investigate the case on suspicion of attempted murder.
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/ 31 January 2008
Dozens more people in Japan on Thursday said they fell sick after eating Chinese-made food, a day after Japanese food companies recalled pesticide-contaminated dumplings from China that made 10 people sick. The food scare has triggered a nationwide probe into possible additional cases of food poisoning.
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/ 29 January 2008
With her hair tied back into a neat ponytail, Hikari Kanno (13), a bookish schoolgirl, would hardly seem to fit the profile of an avid reader of novels about sex, drugs and violence. She finds them not at the bookstore but on her cellphone, the gateway for "cellphone novels" that are becoming very popular in Japan.
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/ 29 January 2008
Lovelorn staff at a Japanese marketing company can take paid time off after a bad break-up with a partner, with more "heartache leave" on offer as they get older. Tokyo-based Hime & Company, which also gives staff paid time off to hit the shops during sales season, says heartache leave allows staff to cry themselves out and return to work refreshed.
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/ 28 January 2008
British rock band Led Zeppelin enjoyed jamming together again last year in a charity concert but won’t have another session before September at the earliest, lead guitarist Jimmy Page said in Tokyo on Monday. Page, in the city to promote a greatest hits release, painted a happy picture of the reunion.
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/ 16 January 2008
The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd scored a victory on Wednesday in its high-seas campaign to obstruct a Japanese whale hunt in the Antarctic, forcing the fleet to a standstill while officials tried to unload two protesters who had boarded a harpoon vessel from their rubber boat.
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/ 14 January 2008
Young Japanese people are evolving a new lifestyle for the 21st century based on the cellphones that few are now able to live without. While about one-third of Japanese primary school students aged seven to 12 years-old use cellphones, by the time they get to high school that figure has shot up to 96%.