Japan

[ad_1] Sydney – Jubilant crowds will bid farewell to the hottest year on record Sunday, closing a turbulent 12 months marked by clever chatbots, climate crises and wrenching wars in Gaza and Ukraine.The world's population — now over 8 billion — will see out the old and usher in the new, with many hoping to shake the weight of high living costs and global tumult.In Sydney, the self-proclaimed "New Year's […]

[ad_1] North Korea said it aims to launch three more spy satellites next year and will reconsider reconciliation plans with South Korea as relations between the two deteriorate.North Korea should "no longer make the mistake” of considering South Korea as a counterpart for reunification because Seoul has declared Pyongyang a "main enemy,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Sunday, citing leader Kim Jong Un.It’s time to change and reset […]

[ad_1] 2023 marked a big turning point for Japan's previously floundering men's national volleyball, basketball and handball teams, which all ended decades of underachievement by executing long-term plans. Excluding its host-nation qualification for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Japan will send men's teams for all three sports to the same Olympics next summer in Paris for the first time since the 1976 Montreal Games. Japan reached the podium in a […]

[ad_1] Price hikes hit a total of 32,396 items produced by 195 major food and beverage firms in the nation in 2023, the largest amount in 30 years since the collapse of the bubble economy in the 1990s, according to research firm Teikoku Databank. The figure marks a 25.7% rise from 2022, when prices went up for 25,768 food items. The number of items whose prices will be raised next […]

[ad_1] The global semiconductor market is expected to grow 13.1% in 2024 to a record $588.36 billion, following a slump this year, thanks to growing demand for chips used for artificial intelligence, according to a forecast by an industry organization. The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics, an organization formed by major chip manufacturers, revised its growth forecast higher for the next year from the previous growth estimate made in June of […]

[ad_1] A 46-year-old man was found dead in a suitcase along the Tama River in Kawasaki, police said Saturday night, treating it as a murder case. An autopsy showed that the man, identified as Tadayuki Hara, whose address and employment status is unknown, died of suffocation. He appeared to have died a few days prior to the discovery. Kanagawa police said Hara was found in a large suitcase with his […]

[ad_1] A growing number of Japanese companies are moving to rehire former employees who have quit before retirement age — a move aimed at securing work-ready personnel amid serious labor shortages crippling the country.Previously, it had been widely believed that quitting a job means completely severing the relationship with the employer. But that way of thinking has been diminishing in recent years, offering a second chance to former workers.Sachiko Kido, […]

[ad_1] As midnight approaches on New Year's Eve, many across Japan line up for their turn to strike large, heavy bells at temples — altogether, they're struck 108 times to represent the number of one's desires and temptations — to ring out the year.In recent years, however, temples have scheduled bell-ringing events for different times of the day or stopped the tradition altogether amid noise complaints from nearby residents.Amid such […]

[ad_1] Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is considering forgoing a plan to visit Brazil and other Latin American nations in January amid a political fundraising scandal involving his party's biggest faction, a government source said Sunday. The move comes as Kishida, who doubles as the head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, needs to pull together his political foothold following allegations that the faction created hundreds of millions of yen in […]