Free Republic

How much debt can an industrialized country carry before the nation’s economy and its currency bow, then break? The question looms large in the United States, as a surging budget deficit pushes government debt to nearly 98 percent of the gross domestic product. But it looms even larger in Japan. Here, years of stimulus spending on expensive dams and roads have inflated the country’s gross public debt to twice the size of its $5 trillion economy — by far the highest debt-to-G.D.P. ratio in recent memory. Just paying the interest on its debt consumed a fifth of Japan’s budget for...

A Japanese menswear company is selling an "anti-swine flu" business suit that it says can reduce the risk of catching the H1N1 virus. Haruyama Trading has developed a wool suit coated with titanium dioxide, which it says breaks down the virus molecules on contact under ultraviolet light, according to Reuters . "If a person with the flu virus coughs, it might get on someone else's suit and from there, another person might get infected," Shinto Hirata, vice director of merchandising at Haruyama told Reuters. "Small children might catch the virus after touching their father's suit. We came up with this...

A Fuji TV morning news show reenacts a crime that took place in Niigata Prefecture: Japanese News

Milan (AsiaNews) – Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each. Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter...

ROME — Two Japanese nationals were detained by Italian financial police last week after trying to enter Switzerland with $134 billion worth of undeclared U.S. bonds, mostly Treasury bonds, an Italian daily said Wednesday. The Japanese consulate general in Milan confirmed that the detention had taken place and said it was trying to confirm with Italian authorities whether the two were indeed Japanese nationals and their identities. According to the report in il Giornale, two unidentified Japanese in their 50s concealed the bonds, including 249 U.S. Treasury bonds each worth $500 million, in a suitcase with a false bottom that...

PARIS (AFP) – In a controversial achievement, Japanese scientists announced on Wednesday they had created the world's first transgenic primates, breeding monkeys with a gene that made the animals' skin glow a fluorescent green. The exploit opens up exciting prospects for medical researchers, they said. It could eventually lead to lab monkeys that replicate some of humanity's most devastating diseases, providing a new model for exploring how these disorders are caused and how they may be cured. "Great advances in pre-clinical research can be expected using these models," the team said. But other voices warned of a potential ethics storm,...

May 19, 2009 “Concept” and “bra” aren’t two words you’d typically expect to go together. After all, a bra is the epitome of simplicity. As Seinfeld's George Costanza said, “Two cups in the front, two loops in the back. How do they do it?” Well, Japanese lingerie maker Triumph International has complicated the humble undergarment with its concept “Konkatsu bra” – a bra that is designed to help Japanese women search for husbands by proudly declaring they're “on the hunt”. Triumph International's Konkatsu Bra takes its name from an abbreviated form of kekkon-katsudo, a Japanese term for “marriage hunting”, which...

Japan's marriage rate is falling and the average age at which women get married is over 28 years, relatively late for a country in which single females were once considered over the hill at 25. Triumph's latest novelty bra features an electronic nuptial timepiece, putting women seeking spouses literally on the clock. "Japanese women are becoming more aggressive than men, working actively to make marriage happen, whereas in the past it was men who led women toward marriage," she said. "The roles have switched completely." Government statistics show nearly 57 percent of women under the age of 34 are unmarried,...

After running up the biggest loss in its history, Toyota executives said Friday that they will focus on selling more small cars to cope with a devastating shift in consumer demand. The Japanese carmaker also disclosed a $7.7 billion loss for the January-March quarter, a bigger loss than General Motors suffered in the same period.

TOKYO – Japanese broadcaster NHK says North Korea has launched a rocket, citing the Japanese government. The report came Sunday morning amid heightened tensions in the region. North Korea had informed international authorities that it planned to launch a rocket sometime between Saturday and Wednesday in order to put a satellite into orbit.

Japanese Held After Bid To Cross Border To North Korea SEOUL (AFP)--South Korean soldiers have detained a Japanese man who attempted to cross the heavily guarded border into North Korea, in what local media described as a one-man peace protest. The Japanese embassy in Seoul confirmed that a Japanese had tried to cross the frontier at the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which divides the peninsula. Information official Satoshi Nishijima said he had no details and didn't know the man's motive. Yonhap news agency said the 40-year-old approached a barbed-wire fence in the Cheorwon area on Wednesday night but was detained...

"Action packed! These little robots have some fast moves, battling it out for fame and glory. Funny stuff." I can't figure out if this is the coolest robot duel ever -or just a group of drunken unemployed Japanese techies having a good time? Enjoy!

Seattle, WA (LifeNews.com) -- Massive online retailer Amazon.com has dropped its listing for a controversial Japanese video game called Rapelay that involves raping women and forcing them to have abortions. The so-called "rape simulator" game was sold on the web site and included a graphic description of the gameplay. Although a listing for the product is available through online searches, the link to it on Amazon's web page no longer functions. Gaming web sites that have reviewed the simulation describe the "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as the player attacks her in graphic detail.

Seattle, WA -- The large online retailer Amazon.com has dropped its listing for a controversial Japanese video game called Rapelay that involves raping women and forcing them to have abortions. The so-called "rape simulator" game was sold on the web site and included a graphic description of the gameplay.

Shortly after Mitsuo Fuchida led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he discovered just how fortunate he was to be living. Along with the 21 holes that visibly pocked the 39-year-old’s aircraft, a mechanic on the aircraft carrier Akagi found a frayed elevator cable that dangled from Fuchida’s reconnaissance bomber by a single thread. If it had been severed, the inevitable crash could have killed the flight commander — whose radio message "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was the final go-ahead for the attack that drew the United States into World War II.

KATHMANDU (AFP) – A team of Japanese adventurers say they have discovered footprints they believe were made by the legendary yeti said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet. "The footprints were about 20 centimetres (eight inches) long and looked like a human's," Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan, told AFP in Kathmandu on Monday. Takahashi was speaking after he returned with his seven-member team from their third attempt to track down the half-man-half-ape, tales of which have gripped the imaginations of Western adventurers and mountaineers for decades. Despite spending 42 days on Dhaulagiri IV...

Japanese model the latest styles of adult diapers during a show in Tokyo Thursday Sept. 25, 2008. The show was organized to display the latest styles of adult diapers and raise awareness of some of the issues facing the county's rapidly aging population.

London (agencies) A Desperate dad last night begged medics for help because he is turning naturally into a woman. Pub singer Terry Wright said: “I am a man, not a woman. And I do not want to be a woman. “I just want to get my life back to normal.” Father-of-five Terry, 60, started losing his hair and beard ten years ago. Since then he has developed smooth skin, hot flushes. And kids living nearby taunt him by calling him “She-Man”. Blood tests have revealed Terry has abnormally high levels of the female hormone oestrogen. But doctors who have examined...

This is hilarious. I cant believe they get by with this stuff over there. LINK

TOKYO — Japan celebrated a national holiday on Monday in honor of its children. But Children's Day might just as easily have been a national day of mourning. For this is the land of a slow-motion demographic catastrophe that is without precedent in the developed world. The number of children has declined for 27 consecutive years, a government report said over the weekend. Japan now has fewer children who are 14 or younger than at any time since 1908. The proportion of children in the population fell to an all-time low of 13.5 percent. That number has been falling for...

Japanese balloon bombs: A forgotten history Posted: May 2, 2008 10:47 PM CDT Balloon bombs, sent aloft by Japanese during WWII, reached West Coast, and one proved deadly With hundreds never recovered, still a rare chance of risky encounter By Christian Boris, KTVZ.COM In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese military launched bomb-carrying balloons to strike the American homeland. Many balloons landed in Oregon, including one that killed six people in Klamath County. On May 5, 1945, a group of Sunday school students encountered a balloon bomb snagged in a tree near Bly in Klamath County. Thirteen-year-old Joan Patzke attempted to...

Conan the dog joins the priests at Jigenin temple at prayer time Attendance at a Buddhist temple in Japan has increased since the temple's pet, a two-year-old dog, has joined in the daily prayers. Conan, a Chihuahua, sits on his hind legs, raises his paws and puts them together at the tip of his nose. "He may be showing his thanks for treats and walks," says a priest at Jigenin temple on Okinawa island. Priest Joei Yoshikuni would like Conan to meditate, but "it's not like we can make him cross his legs", he says. "Basically, I am just...

17th century Japanese village uncovered in Cambodia Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 07:01 EST PHNOM PENH — A site of a Japanese village dating back to the 17th century has been found in the outskirts of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, a Japanese archaeologist said Wednesday. Hiroshi Sugiyama, chief research fellow at Japan's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, said that based on research since 2004 and analyses of excavations and documents, the site in Ponhea Lueu Commune, about 25 kilometers north of Phnom Penh, is a Japanese village dating back to the 17th century. Based on on-site research, excavations and...

A letter that a young girl in Japan sent into the sky in a balloon some 15 years ago has been found on a fish hauled from 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) below the Pacific. A fisherman found the still legible piece of paper sitting on a sticky flatfish in his catch on Thursday, along with a torn-off string and the fragment of a red balloon. He opened the folded paper, discovering it was a handwritten letter from a six-year-old girl at an elementary school in Kawasaki, 150 kilometres (93 miles) away from where the fish was caught off Choshi port....

SIERRA VISTA — Four years before Pearl Harbor was attacked, a local man sailed on a U.S. Navy ship that was bombed and sunk by Imperial Japanese warplanes. The incident happened on Dec. 13, 1937, as the USS Panay was evacuating U.S. embassy personnel from Nanking, China’s capital of that era. It was a city under siege whose downfall became the infamous Rape of Nanking. The Panay was a gunboat that belonged to the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, whose 1930s peacetime mission included protection of American lives and property from pirates along the lawless Yangtze River, under a treaty with the...

Japanese-built Prius carries energy bill18 minutes ago WASHINGTON - When Congress sent an energy bill to President Bush for his signature, it arrived in a Japanese-built Toyota Prius hybrid — a move that rubbed two Michigan Republicans the wrong way. "It is a huge slap in the face, calculated I believe, just to demonstrate their complete disregard for the domestic auto industry," said Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich. To Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., it was a "slap in the face of every American auto worker." They said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., could have provided the same symbolism by sending the...

12/7/2007 - SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) -- More than 200 U.S. forces at this air base in Southwest Asia attended a memorial retreat in honor of the 2,340 killed and 1,143 wounded in the Dec. 7, 1941 attacks on U.S. military installations on Oahu, Territory of Hawaii. "We have come here today to pay honor and homage to our nations' heroes, the fallen and survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor," said Brig. Gen Charles Lyon, 379th Air Expeditionary Wing commander. "Let us never forget there is a price to pay for freedom. It doesn't come free" "Dec. 7th, a day...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7, 2007 – It’s been 66 years, and tears still well up in the eyes of Robert Bishop when he thinks of that day. Robert Bishop stands outside the U.S. Capitol, where he and 13 other Pearl Harbor survivors and about 100 others including family, friends, servicemembers and members of Congress met for a remembrance ceremony sponsored by the White House Commission on Remembrance and the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund in partnership with the AMVETS and the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. Photo by Fred W. Baker III  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. He was a 20-year-old...

Japan has confirmed that it will carry out its largest whaling programme in the South Pacific. The mission, expected to draw strong protests from environmentalists, will depart on Sunday and breaks a 44-year moratorium on hunting humpback whales. Japan's fisheries ministry said the fleet had instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks.

ISE, Japan, Oct. 26 — It was supposed to be a celebratory year for Akafuku, a confectioner that had been selling bean-jam sweets here since 1707. On its 300th anniversary, its top-selling sweets were still indispensable gifts to bring back home or to the office after a trip to Ise Shrine here, Japan's holiest religious site. Instead, Akafuku has become the latest Japanese food company to be exposed for lying about the contents of its products, tampering with expiration-date labels and recycling ingredients. For only the second time in its history, Akafuku, which was forced to halt production during World...

A postcard that a Japanese soldier mailed from a Southeast Asian battlefront during World War II has reached a recipient in Japan 64 years later, a university whose student helped deliver it said Saturday. Shizuo Nagano, an 80-year-old retiree in Japan's southwestern state of Kochi, received the card Friday — by way of Nagasaki, Arizona and Hawaii — said a statement from Mukogawa Women's University. Nagano's former colleague at a retail store, Nobuchika Yamashita mailed the card in 1943 from Burma, now called Myanmar, a year before Yamashita died at war at age 23, the university statement said. It said...

MEDIA ADVISORY, June 21 /Christian Newswire/ -- As Japanese culture becomes more prominent in American entertainment, mysterious and awe-inspiring tales of the samurai have become more familiar to the Western world. A new book, The Way of the Christian Samurai: Reflections for Servant-Warriors of Christ (ISBN 0-9772234-6-9) explores how the advice and stories of real samurai can help modern-day Christians. As Christians, we are called to be both servants and warriors for Jesus Christ. The samurai, whose very title means "one who serves," were skillful warriors of feudal Japan who devoted themselves fully to the service of their masters, willing...

Japan Lawmakers Take Out U.S. Ad on Comfort Women A group of Japanese lawmakers in a full-page ad in the Washington Post on Thursday denied the Japanese government and military had a hand in conscripting women from Asian countries as sex slaves for the Imperial Army during World War II. Titled “The Facts”, the ad published Wednesday claims “no historical document has ever been found” proving the direct involvement of the Japanese government and military, contrary to a recent U.S. congressional resolution sponsored by the Democrat Representative Mike Honda. The ad was co-sponsored by some Japanese academics, political commentators and...

TOKYO: About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.

TOKYO (Reuters) - An 111-year-old Japanese just named the world's oldest man said he owed his longevity to steering clear of alcohol. "I don't drink alcohol -- that is the biggest reason for my good health," Tomoji Tanabe told reporters on Monday. He also told media he does not smoke and likes a glass of milk a day. Asked how much longer he wanted to live, the besuited Tanabe, a former local government worker, said simply: "I don't want to die." Tanabe, who lives with his 66-year-old son and the son's wife in Miyakonojo, about 900 km (560 miles) southwest...

A Japanese man who admitted to smuggling endangered butterflies into the United States and attempted to sell them was sentenced Monday to 21 months in federal prison. Hisayoshi Kojima, 57, of Kyoto, Japan also was ordered to pay more than $37,000 in fine and restitution, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns. Kojima was arrested last August at Los Angeles International Airport as part of an undercover investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Prosecutors said he brought rare butterflies collected from all over the world into the United States and sold them to investigators posing as interested buyers. They...

Did Hirohito play an active part in planning and conducting the war? Japanese emperor Hirohito expressed doubts about going to war with China in the 1930s and 40s, extracts from a diary of one of his advisers reveal. They show Hirohito was afraid the Soviet Union would intervene. The diary by Kuraji Ogura, who worked as a chamberlain to Hirohito in World War II, was found recently and parts have been published in Japan's media. The full text may help solve the debate about how much responsibility the emperor had for Japan's wartime action. South Pacific visit The document...

Japanese metal stolen to 'feed China's Olympic boom' Justin McCurry in Tokyo Monday March 5, 2007 Guardian Unlimited (UK) A worker pushes parts of a motorcycle at a scrapyard in Guangzhou, southern China. Japanese authorities claim metal stolen across the country ends up with Chinese metal merchants. Photograph: Color China Photo/AP The next time Japanese children turn up at their local park to find that their slide has disappeared overnight, they could try blaming rocketing world metal prices. Stainless steel slides are among a growing list of metal objects to have vanished in Japan in a spate of thefts that...

TOKYO - Anyone who doubts that the Japanese army forced Asian women into sexual slavery in World War II should "face the truth," South Korea's foreign minister said Friday as outrage grew over comments by Japan's prime minister that there was no evidence of the enslavement. Women's rights activists in the Philippines and a group of lawmakers in South Korea also denounced the remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday that there was no proof that so-called "comfort women" were forced into prostitution during the war. But one of the harshest comments came from 81-year-old Hilaria Bustamante of...

For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist...

TOKYO - Col. Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March. And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view. The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under...

CAIRO (AFP) - A Japanese archeological team has discovered three painted wooden coffins in Egypt, including two from the little-known Middle Kingdom period dating back more than 4,000 years. The sarcophagi were found in tomb shafts in the vast Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on Saturday. "It is significant because of the discovery of two sarcophagi from the Middle Kingdom," said Japanese team leader Sakuji Yoshimori. The Saqqara burial grounds which date back to 2,700 BC and are dominated by the massive bulk of King Zoser's step pyramid --...

Why Japanese girls want Christmas romance By Colin Joyce in Tokyo Last Updated: 1:57am GMT 20/12/2006 Get yourself a wonderful boyfriend by Christmas; Best Christmas date spots; Christmas for lovers – the magazine headlines tell the story: all a Japanese girl wants for Christmas is the perfect date. In a country where less than one per cent of the population is Christian, Christmas has been reinvented as the most romantic time of the year. For many Japanese women being taken to an expensive restaurant on Christmas Eve is a crucial indicator of success, while having to go shopping with female...

HONOLULU - Sixty-five years ago, Takeshi Maeda and John Rauschkolb tried to kill each other at Pearl Harbor. This week, now both 85, they met face-to-face for the first time — and shook hands. The Japanese veteran gripped Rauschkolb's arm with his left hand and briefly hesitated, as if he was searching for the right words. Then he said, "I'm sorry." On Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese Imperial Navy navigator Maeda guided his Kate bomber to Pearl Harbor and fired a torpedo that helped sink the USS West Virginia. Rauschkolb, a Navy signalman, stood on the West Virginia's port side as...

SYDNEY (AFP) - A mystery over a Japanese midget submarine that went missing after attacking a ship in Sydney Harbour during World War II has been solved, an Australian television station has claimed. The submarine was one of three that slipped into the harbour on the night of May 31 1942 after being launched from a fleet of five larger Japanese submarines offshore. Two of the midget vessels were spotted and attacked, leading the two-man crews to commit suicide, Australian national archives record. The remains of those subs were recovered and a rebuilt composite is on display at the Australian...

Take anything you want.... You Drive Me Crazy

A town baseball field in Farmington, Connecticut may seem about as far away from the major leagues as you can get. But it's been witness to baseball history recently, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason. The key to throwing a gyroball, says sportswriter Will Carroll, is a football-like spiral spin that's easy to learn but hard to master. Minor league pitcher Steve Palazzolo is learning to throw what some claim is the first new pitch in a generation. It's called the "gyroball." True believers claim it's almost un-hittable. "We know that a curveball curves and a slider slides and a...

THE SAMURAI AND THE AINU Findings by American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, University of Michigan, will surely be controversial in race conscious Japan. The eye of the predicted storm will be the Ainu, a "racially different" group of some 18,000 people now living on the northern island of Hokkaido. Pure-blooded Ainu are easy to spot: they have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese. Most Japanese tend to look down on the Ainu. Brace has studied the skeletons of about 1,100 Japanese, Ainu, and other Asian ethnic groups and has concluded that the revered samurai of...

The Japanese Jesus trail By Duncan Bartlett BBC News, Japan A Japanese legend claims that Jesus escaped Jerusalem and made his way to Aomori in Japan where he became a rice farmer. Christians say the story is nonsense. However, a monument there known as the Grave of Christ attracts curious visitors from all over the world. The Grave of Christ has become an international tourist attraction To reach the Grave of Christ or Kristo no Hakka as it is known locally, you need to head deep into the northern countryside of Japan, a place of paddy fields and apple orchards....

An American Marine who became known as "the Pied Piper of Saipan" after single-handedly persuading more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender during the war for the Pacific in 1944 has died at the age of 80. Guy Gabaldon was brought up as a tough Chicano kid in the barrios of eastern Los Angeles and signed up for the Marines on his 17th birthday. He arrived on Saipan, a Japanese-held island in the Marianas, as an 18-year-old Marine Private First Class, only 5ft 4in tall, but managed to use street Japanese picked up from a foster family back home -...