Latest Headline News From Japan

This is arguably the most remarkable statistic in the bj-league's seven-year history: Center Jeff Newton's teams have advanced to the Final Four every season.
He's the only player in league history with four championship rings and five championship game appearances — three with the Osaka Evessa and two more with his current club, the Ryukyu Golden Kings. So it's no surprise that Newton's legend has grown as the fledgling circuit expanded from six teams to 19 for the 2011-12 campaign.

The adulation of Liverpool fans wasn't enough to save "King Kenny."
Kenny Dalglish's lackluster second stint in charge of the fallen English power was halted by the club's American owners Wednesday after less than 500 days in charge.

Ever since Hiroyuki Kurihara and his family took title to the Senkaku Islands in the 1970s, they have firmly kept to the will of the previous owner: The islets are not to be sold to anyone but the Japanese government or a public organization.
And so for decades the Kurihara family has continued to own four of the five uninhabited rocky islets in the East China Sea, turning down all offers from a number of private corporations.

For the first time in its history dating back some 1,300 years, a woman has become an apprentice of traditional "ukai" fishers along the Kiso River in central Japan.
Ukai fishermen use tamed cormorants. The city of Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, on Tuesday appointed Kotomi Inayama, 23, as an apprentice. She is the nation's sixth female "ukai" fisher.

Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ has suspended settlement of Iran-related transactions in response to a U.S. court order, sources said Thursday.
The federal district court in New York ordered the core unit of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. to disclose assets it holds on behalf of Iran's government and central bank, and freeze up to $2.6 billion worth, the sources said.

Nonprofit organizations play important roles in such areas as education, social welfare, public health and medical services and environmental protection in communities; after the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, they have also been active in disaster relief efforts.
A revised NPO law went into force on April 1. The crux of the revision is loosen conditions for awarding tax privileges to NPOs, thus creating incentives for ordinary citizens to make donations.

Everyone's eyes are on Asia's rise. China, once dismissed as poor and backward, is now the world's second-largest economy. India, with its huge population, scientific prowess and entrepreneurial vitality, is another powerful engine of Asian growth.
Add to this Japan and South Korea's formidable economies, plus Southeast Asia's dynamism, and a picture emerges of rising wealth, confidence and leadership.

Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) was an enigmatic man. The late Japan-born, New York-based artist and his partner, Madeline Gins, once jointly declared they had decided "not to die," and even added that it was "immoral" for people to have to die. Based on their philosophy, the two created a series of houses and other structures that they claimed would enable humans to achieve immortality. Then on May 19, 2010, Arakawa passed away in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 73.
In memory of the second anniversary of his passing, a special dance performance will be held on May 19 at the Site of Reversible Destiny, Yoro Park, a sprawling outdoor park in western Gifu Prefecture conceived by Arakawa. Featured in the performance will be Min Tanaka, known in Japan and abroad for his style of impromptu dance, which expresses the links between the origins of dance and farming.

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto caused another public stir recently when he asked all city workers if they have a tattoo and even suggested those who answered yes should quit the municipal government.
Earlier this month, the city asked 33,546 employees, excluding those at the board of education, if they have any tattoos after an incident in February in which a city worker showed off his tattoo and scared children at a welfare facility.

The women's tennis tour is opening the bidding process to find a host city for its season-ending WTA Championships starting in 2014.
In a statement issued Wednesday, WTA Chairman and CEO Stacy Allaster calls this "a chance for some city somewhere to step up on the world stage."

The economy grew an annualized real 4.1 percent in the three months through March from the previous quarter, beating market forecasts on strong consumption supported by the government's fiscal stimulus, the Cabinet Office said Thursday.
The result added to the view the world's third-largest economy is recovering from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, also helped by the acceleration of public works projects for reconstruction following the disasters, as well as a pickup in exports that signaled a recovery in the U.S. economy and diminished effects of the massive flooding in Thailand last fall.

The tour bus industry has set a voluntary 450-km limit on night driving by unaccompanied drivers to prevent accidents, industry officials said.
A group of bus operators and travel agencies informed transport minister Takeshi Maeda of its new voluntary rules, including the distance limit, on Wednesday.

The humiliating announcement of "stupid" losses of $2 billion, possibly more, by JPMorgan Chase could not have happened to a more appropriate guy, given how hard Jaime Dimon, the bank's chief executive, has argued against tougher banking regulations.
At various times in the last few months he described the Basel III rules that set stricter capital rules for banks as a recipe to "stifle growth," "extreme and excessive" and "blatantly anti-American."

Major League Baseball's 84th All-Star Game will be hosted in 2013 by the New York Mets at their three-year-old ballpark, $600 million Citi Field, commissioner Bud Selig announced on Wednesday.
The Mets previously hosted the mid-season event once before, in 1964 at Shea Stadium in the year that the Mets' prior home park was opened.

Yoshihiro Nakamura is an odd man out among contemporary Japanese filmmakers. All of his films as a director, including his 2009 international breakthrough "Fisshu Sutori (Fish Story)," are intended first and foremost as entertainment, not art. At the same time, they are often philosophical investigations into the nature of reality, seemingly inspired by geneticist JBS Haldane's observation that "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
This combination is not common in an industry whose commercial films are mostly either humanistic dramas, manga-esque fantasies or some combination of the two. At the same time, Nakamura is less a sui generis creator than an adaptor of others' work, especially the fiction of Kotaro Isaka, which has inspired four of his best films.

Dear reader, heed my warning: verily, the undead live. Not rotten-fleshed zombies or nocturnal ghouls, but old TV series from the 1960s and '70s, resurrected from the moldering vaults where they lay and given new life by devious Hollywood necromancers. In this deal with the Devil, they breathe new life into corpses where the spirit has long since departed, and set their foul creations upon an unsuspecting world.
Allow me to drive a stake through the heart of this latest monstrosity, "Dark Shadows," Tim Burton's big-screen adaptation of the "Gothic soap opera" which ran on American TV from 1966-1971. Burton stays firmly within his comfort zone — Johnny Depp in the lead, a bunch of likable misfits as characters, secondhand Hammer Horror set and costume design — and delivers a dull, Goth-lite flick that doesn't even come close to previous triumphs such as "Beetlejuice," "Sleepy Hollow" or "Corpse Bride".

Japan will attempt to put a commercial satellite into space Friday as it jumps into the Europe- and Russia-dominated world of contract rocket launches.
An H-IIA rocket is to put South Korea's KOMPSAT-3, an Earth observation satellite developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, into orbit, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency official said.

Hayato Sakamoto and the Yomiuri Giants might be finally hitting their stride. Which might be bad news for the Pacific League.
Sakamoto hit a game-tying homer in the sixth inning, Ryuchi Kajimae drove in the go-ahead run during the same frame, and Toshiya Sugiuchi won his first interleague start against the PL as the Giants edged the Orix Buffaloes 4-2 in front of a crowd of 45,997 on Thursday at Tokyo Dome.

The government will not issue binding electricity-saving orders for areas served by Kansai Electric Power Co., whose capacity to meet peak demand this summer is precarious now that the nation's nuclear plants are all shut down, because other utilities will probably be able to provide Kepco with extra power, sources said Thursday.
Still, to prevent blackouts, the government at a ministerial meeting Friday morning will ask households and businesses served by seven utilities, including Kepco, to voluntarily curb power use this summer by setting numerical reduction targets, the sources said.

The Meteorological Agency said Thursday that its accuracy rate for predicting tornados was less than 10 percent between 2008 and 2012.
The agency issued 1,446 tornado warnings between March 2008 and May 2012. During the four years, the best rate was a mere 9 percent in 2008, while it was only 1 percent in 2011, according to a report issued at a government meeting on tornado-induced disasters.