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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...