Japan News

Olympic champion Kosuke Kitajima let it be known that he is just getting warmed up with a newfound style after completing a shining double at the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships last month. Returning to Japan on Thursday from his training base in the United States, Kitajima said, "I've discovered a new style. I'll continue swimming at my own pace." Kitajima came to life, making his mark once again in his first major international event since successfully defending his 100 and 200 breaststroke titles in Beijing two years ago and returning to training in November last year. (Mainichi)

A man who drove for about 90 kilometers the wrong way along two expressways after becoming upset that his cat had died has been arrested, law enforcers said. The man, 31-year-old Tsutomu Mizumoto, was arrested for violating the Road Traffic Law following the escapade early on Sept. 1. "I was sad that my pet cat died. I wanted to do something crazy," Mizumoto was quoted as saying when questioned over his actions. (Mainichi)

Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori submitted a letter of resignation Thursday to a faction within the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party, citing his displeasure with Shinzo Abe, a fellow faction member and also former premier, sources familiar with the matter said. Mori made an issue of Abe's support for former Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone in August's election to pick the leader of the LDP caucus in the House of Councillors, instead of contender Shuzen Tanigawa who belongs to the same faction led by former Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura. (Mainichi)

Sony has eked out a small victory against Apple in the market for portable music players. Sales of Sony's Walkman line beat those of Apple's iPod line in Japan for the month of August, according to survey results released Thursday by BCN, a Tokyo-based research firm. During August, Sony took a 47.8 percent share of the portable music player market, while Apple captured 44 percent. This marks the first time that Sony has inched ahead of Apple in a monthly tally since BCN began its surveys in 2001. (CNET)

Akihisa Shirota has piles of manga in his office. He likes to take math drills with the students. And he dismisses the "ivory tower" types as living too "in the box." Not your average junior high school principal in any country, but especially in Japan, a country renowned for its rigorous and rudimentary educational system. Look at Shirota's resume and you notice what's not there: the words "teacher" or "educator." It's instead dotted with high tech and publishing companies he's headed as the president or manager. (CNN)

Police said they will send papers to prosecutors over a senior police officer who allegedly stole a bicycle because he was worried about being late for work. The Kanagawa prefectural police will punish the police officer, whose duties include preventing bicycle thefts. The policeman, 25, of Takatsu Police Station, allegedly stole a bicycle parked outside a video rental shop in Saiwai Ward, Kawasaki, on the morning of Aug. 3 and rode it two kilometers to Kashimada Station on the JR Nambu Line. The bicycle belonged to a part-time worker at the store. (Yomiuri)

Six years ago, Keiko Sugimoto traded a life in the big city for a chance to gather seaweed on a remote island, and she couldn't be happier. The former member of the corporate world now spends her days on the ocean working with her father in the sea off Miyakejima island. The isolated community is still trying to get back on its feet after a volcanic eruption in 2000. One of the Izu Islands officially part of the Tokyo metropolis, the island on Thursday marked 10 years since residents evacuated due to the volcano. Although people began returning to the island in February 2005, the local fishing grounds are still recovering from ashfalls and mudslides, and tourism and agriculture are still affected by bursts of volcanic gas. (Yomiuri)

Dokkyo Medical University and the World Heritage-listed Nikko Toshogu shrine are teaming up to help the nation's tourism agencies and hospitals cash in on the growth of medical tourism. The university in Mibu, Tochigi Prefecture, and the shrine in Nikko in the prefecture will jointly establish the International Society of Tourism Medicine (ISTM) to look into ways of attracting people to visit Japan for medical checkups. Every year, about 60,000 foreigners visit Nikko, which counts the shrine and the Kinugawa onsen resort among its top tourist attractions. Hotels in the resort offer medical service packages, which include a hotel stay and a complete medical checkup. (Yomiuri)

August marked record lows at the Tokyo stock market--the strong yen made foreign investors reluctant to buy Japanese stocks, while individual domestic investors took a wait-and-see attitude in response to uncertainty over the economy. The average daily trading value at the Tokyo Stock Exchange's first section was down by 22 percent from the same month last year to 1.17 trillion yen, plunging to levels not seen since August 2004. (Yomiuri)

Taking Nintendo's Game Boy to places it was never meant to go, a lineup of international chiptune artists will be converging on Koenji High this weekend for Japan's first ever Blip Festival. The roster includes acts such as Nullsleep from New York, who takes a blowtorch to sweet "Super Mario" style ditties, gradually melting them down with a battery of zaps and bleeps until the listener is caught up in a dog fight (or goomba fight) of raw electronic sound. (Japan Times)

Newly appointed national team coach Alberto Zaccheroni wants his new charges to turn the page and create a new chapter in Japanese soccer history after their World Cup heroics in South Africa. The Italian, casually dressed in a black polo shirt, jeans and white trainers, ran the rule over the Blue Samurai for the first time from the sidelines Thursday as they limbered up for Saturday's highly anticipated rematch with Paraguay in Yokohama. (Japan Times)

Many Tokyoites believe there are two versions of the city: Version A is where the Japanese inhabit - defined by cramped spaces, excessively long working hours and totally functional toilets. Version B is the Tokyo known to non-Japanese, which by all accounts is ambivalent, exotic and infinitely more romantic. The majority of Japanese Tokyoites go through their lives steeped in the realities of Version A, slightly aware of but not really familiar with the goings-on in Version B, except via movies about Tokyo by foreign directors. (Japan Times)

Six people are under arrest for suspected money-laundering involving about ¥570 million wired from a U.S. bank to Japan, police said Thursday. The suspects are Nyeche Obeneme, 36, an auto parts dealer in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, who has Nigerian citizenship, two other Nigerian men, a Ghanaian man, and a man and woman from Japan. The two unnamed Nigerian men and the Ghanaian man reportedly work at junkyards tied to Obeneme's company. (Japan Times)

Only two Japanese firms made it onto Forbes magazine's list Thursday of Asia's 200 top small and medium-size companies. The number of Japanese firms dwindled from 24 last year, according to Forbes' latest annual "Best Under a Billion" list that picks 200 firms from 13,000 listed Asia-Pacific companies with sales below $1 billion. Japanese firms lag far behind those from other Asian economies, including China, India and South Korea, in the ranking. (Japan Times)

Takeshi Niinami, president of Lawson Inc., said Thursday the convenience store chain operator intends to raise the number of its stores in China to as many as 10,000 from some 300 at present over the next 10 years. The company, currently operating in Shanghai and Chongqing, hopes to expand into seven to 10 more cities, he said, citing Beijing, Tianjin and Guangzhou as possibilities. (Japan Times)

Japan and 13 Caribbean nations agreed in Tokyo on Thursday to cooperate with each other in curbing global warming and offering support to quake-hit Haiti among other issues at their first meeting in a decade, a Japanese official said. The ministerial meeting of Japan and member countries of the Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, also underlined Tokyo's renewed pledge to help those nations recover from the global economic crisis and deepen cooperation on global issues such as nuclear disarmament and the reform of the United Nations Security Council. (AP)

Police responded to a record 2,444 Internet crime cases nationwide in the first half of this year, a National Police Agency survey showed Thursday. The number, up 586 or 31.5 percent from a year earlier, represented a new high since the NPA started gathering statistics for Internet crimes, defined as crimes which use a computer network, on a half-year basis in 2004. Of the total, the number of fraud cases, such as swindling money from a successful bidder by posting false information in an online auction, climbed 22.8 percent to 867 cases. (AP)

Police responded to a record 2,444 Internet crime cases nationwide in the first half of this year, a National Police Agency survey showed Thursday. The number, up 586 or 31.5 percent from a year earlier, represented a new high since the NPA started gathering statistics for Internet crimes, defined as crimes which use a computer network, on a half-year basis in 2004. Of the total, the number of fraud cases, such as swindling money from a successful bidder by posting false information in an online auction, climbed 22.8 percent to 867 cases. (AP)

It's kind of hard to ignore a 36-point headline emblazoned with the words "Men's Nipples." Why has Sunday Mainichi (Sept. 12) chosen to raise this heretofore largely ignored topic? "Many women," it writes, "take an interest in men's nipples that protrude through their linen shirts or polo shirts. Rather than men's backs, we're in an era when men's nipples are discussed." "I was in a beer garden the other day. The nipples of the man at my table were poking through his polo shirt, and I couldn't get my mind off them!" pants Mika Naito, a 39-year-old author of erotic fiction. Naito says she is particularly turned on by the "fresh" nipples of young acting hunk Haruma Miura, age 20. (Tokyo Reporter)

How well is Twitter's monetization going? Other than to say it's going "better than expected" COO Dick Costolo and company are fairly tight-lipped. Luckily, Twitter Japan - run by Tokyo-based Digital Garage Inc.- is not so discrete. Digital Garage predicts ad sales will generate around $20 million in 2011. The Wall Street Journal reports that this year, 82 different companies have run ads on Twitter Japan, generating approximately $2.4 million sales. (sfgate.com)