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/ 21 October 2005
Sony won a crucial boost on Friday in a war over new DVD formats as Warner Bros became the latest Hollywood studio to announce its support for the struggling electronics icon’s Blu-ray technology. Warner Bros is a member of a rival format group led by Toshiba, which said the Time Warner unit continued to collaborate closely with the group towards a commercial launch of its HD DVD technology.
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/ 19 October 2005
An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 6,2 rocked eastern Japan late on Wednesday, the meteorological agency said. The temblor shook buildings in Tokyo and nearby areas, including Ibaraki, Chiba and Fukushima prefectures, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
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/ 18 October 2005
United States Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday that the world would have to learn to live with high oil prices and their negative impact on economic growth ”for some time to come”. He said the recent shutdown of US oil production and refinery facilities battered by hurricanes was ”an accident waiting to happen”.
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/ 12 October 2005
A Japanese government committee is mulling a copyright-law revision to charge royalties on digital music players, but the opinion is so divided on the so-called ”iPod tax” that it isn’t likely to be charged, officials said on Wednesday. The panel is made up of academics, consumer-rights activists and other experts.
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/ 11 October 2005
Fraudsters are growing increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to beat identification systems, but Japanese electronics maker Hitachi thinks it has the answer — technology to read your finger veins. Hitachi said on Tuesday it is launching a global sales push for the system.
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/ 10 October 2005
Japan’s ruling coalition is expected to achieve a key ambition of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi this week by passing legislation to privatise the country’s sprawling postal service and create the world’s largest private bank. Parliament’s lower house may take up the Bills and approve them as early as Tuesday, setting up a vote in the upper house by week’s end.
In a new twist to the battle over next-generation DVDs, United States movie giant Paramount Home Entertainment said it will support Sony’s Blu-ray format while also making DVDs for Toshiba’s rival technology. Paramount will begin releasing content in North America, Japan and Europe suitable for the Blu-ray hardware after its launch.
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/ 30 September 2005
Japanese carmaker Nissan on Friday unveiled a car of the future which only goes forward — with a cabin able to revolve 360°, eliminating the need to reverse. The three-seater electric concept car, nicknamed Pivo, will be put on display at the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show to be held in Chiba, outside Tokyo, from October 22 to November 6, Nissan Motor Company said in a statement.
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/ 26 September 2005
Sony shares tumbled almost five percent on Monday as investors fretted that with a big loss looming this year, a plan to overhaul the struggling Japanese electronic icon may not be radical enough. Sony fell by as much as 4,8% in early trade as dealers gave their first response to the restructuring plan, which was announced after the close of trade on Thursday ahead of a long holiday weekend.
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/ 22 September 2005
Sony boss Howard Stringer, under pressure to reverse a slump at the electronics icon, announced 10 000 job cuts on Thursday but renewed his vision of the group as an electronics-to-entertainment colossus. Sony also issued its second profit warning this year, forecasting a net loss of 10-billion yen (-million).
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/ 21 September 2005
Japan’s Parliament went to work on Wednesday on breaking up the massive post office after the landslide election victory of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose popularity keeps on rising. Hours before the 42-day special session opened, Koizumi’s Cabinet resigned, a formality in the wake of the September 11 general election, in which reforming the Japanese economy was the key issue.
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/ 16 September 2005
Toshiba said on Friday it has developed two small fuel cell prototypes that can dramatically increase the playing time for mobile music players. A fuel cell unit the size of a pack of chewing gum can power a flash-memory-based player for about 35 hours on a single charge, using highly concentrated methanol as its fuel, the Japanese technology giant said.
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/ 16 September 2005
Japan on Friday carried out its first execution in a year, hanging a man who was convicted of killing two women in robberies, an official and reports said. Japan, the only major industrialised nation other than the United States to practice capital punishment, gives inmates little advance notice before they are hanged and does not release their names to the public.
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/ 15 September 2005
Japan’s largest opposition party is looking both at veteran leaders and fresh young faces to help it recover after it lost to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in a record drubbing. The Democratic Party of Japan is set to elect a new leader on Saturday after Katsuya Okada, a dour former civil servant, quit over the election rout in which the party lost one third of its seats.
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/ 14 September 2005
Sony is aiming for a comeback in the global television industry with a new range of flat-screen televisions that it hopes will boost its share of a market now dominated by domestic and overseas rivals. The Japanese electronics giant will begin selling eight new televisions — both liquid crystal display (LCD) screen and rear-projection — under a new brand, "Bravia," on October 1 in Japan.
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/ 12 September 2005
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, fresh from a historic election victory, plans to go to New York this week for a United Nations summit due to take up Tokyo’s cherished UN reform bid, the government said on Monday. It has been a long-time diplomatic goal of Tokyo to get a permanent seat on the Security Council.
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/ 12 September 2005
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went back to work on Monday with a powerful mandate to transform the nation’s economic and political landscape after racking up a historic election victory. Fresh from the triumph which even many of his supporters had doubted was possible, a confident-looking Koizumi, clad in an open-neck striped shirt, waved to reporters as he entered his official residence.
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/ 8 September 2005
Wanting to be as punctual as possible, Japan will next year move its clocks ahead — by one second. Japan will head one second into the future on January 1 2006 when it adjusts the high-precision atomic clock that keeps Japan Standard Time using advanced physics.
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/ 8 September 2005
Powerful Typhoon Nabi left Japan on Thursday after criss-crossing north to south in a path of destruction that left 32 dead or missing in Japan and South Korea and flooded thousands of homes. The worst-hit area remained Miyazaki province on the southern island of Kyushu, where rice fields were deluged by a powerful downpour.
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/ 5 September 2005
One person was killed and at least six injured as a powerful typhoon heading on Monday toward Japan’s mainland lashed Tokyo with torrential rains, flooded homes and cut off power to thousands. A 61-year-old man was found dead late on Sunday on a flooded road in Saitama outside Tokyo after he rushed to help his son whose car was stuck.
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/ 5 September 2005
The Japanese election campaign may have spawned an ingenious new marketing tactic: take a relatively unknown product, have it berated in public by an unpopular politician, and watch sales soar. Sales of the French cheese Mimolette have taken off since the former prime minister, Yoshiro Mori urned his nose up at it in a bizarre television interview.
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/ 2 September 2005
Five people have been questioned for allegedly shooting footage for a pornographic film inside a cable car at the World Exposition, a showcase of technology under way in Japan, police said on Friday. The five suspects, who include an actress, could get up to 30 days in jail or a fine of up to 10 000 yen () for indecent exposure, police said.
Powerful Typhoon Mawar hit central Japan early on Friday, bringing heavy rain and fierce winds that left at least one person dead, two people missing and four injured, officials said. Transportation was also disrupted by the storm, leaving tens of thousands stranded.
A powerful typhoon was closing in on Japan on Thursday, grounding planes and bringing warnings of torrential rain, landslides and high waves in large areas of the country. Typhoon Mawar, packing winds of up to 144kph near its centre, was approaching Japan’s main island of Honshu at a speed of 15kph.
A powerful magnitude-7,2 earthquake struck north-eastern Japan on Tuesday, injuring at least 56 people, triggering small tsunamis and shaking skyscrapers as far away as Tokyo, 300km to the south. A caved-in roof at an indoor pool in the coastal city of Sendai injured 14 people, national broadcaster NHK reported.
Japan was plunged into political turmoil this week when the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was pushed into calling a snap election that risks destroying his party. The crisis was prompted by radical plans to privatise the post office, which Koizumi has put at the heart of a structural reform programme.
Originally marketed for medical students, a life-sized skeleton paper doll has proved a hit in Japan among people who have time on their hands and want to piece together the human body. Like a human, "Bony" has about 200 bones and it takes a grown-up three days to finish reconstructing the doll.
McDonald’s said on Tuesday that a 100-yen burger-and-drink combo is bringing Japanese back to the United States fast-food chain — but has eaten more than half-a-billion yen into its profits. In April, the Japanese unit of the US burger giant launched a set menu of a hamburger and a drink for 100 yen, or just less than (R6,46).
Japan’s Upper House of Parliament voted down legislation to split up and sell the country’s postal service on Monday, prompting Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to follow through on a threat to call snap elections that could shake the ruling party’s grip on power.
Downloads at Apple’s iTunes Music Store have reached a million tunes in Japan in just four days, the company said on Monday. Apple Computer, which has scored a hit in Japan with its iPod portable music player, started its music download service in Japan last Thursday with one million songs.
A Japanese mugger with a fetish, who longed for his boyhood friend’s eyeglasses, was arrested with 154 pairs of glasses or contact lenses he allegedly seized by force, police and reports said on Friday. Construction worker Toru Nagasawa was caught after allegedly punching a man and forcing him to take off his contact lenses.
Japanese scientists are preparing to dig deep inside the Earth for the first time in human history to unlock the mysteries of life in an attempt to figure out how civilisation came to be and how to save it. The researchers will collect the first samples of the Earth’s mantle for clues on the primitive organisms that were the forerunners of life.