Japan

[ad_1] Real wages in Japan fell in August, bringing into doubt the earnings recovery some politicians hope will drive a sustained economic recovery.The labor ministry said real wages declined 0.6% year-on-year in August as high inflation ate away at solid nominal gains. This followed a positive reading in June, which broke a 26-month streak of real-wage declines, and another positive reading in July.The increases in those two months “were largely […]

[ad_1] New Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s “Asian NATO” proposal appears dead on arrival.The idea, long-mulled by the former defense chief, has faced an outpouring of criticism that it is both unrealistic and unpalatable for partners. It also comes just as Ishiba is set to attend his first multilateral forum as prime minister, when he heads to Laos this week for Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meetings.Ishiba himself has admitted […]

[ad_1] South Africa winger Kurt Lee Arendse became the latest Springbok to join a Japan Rugby League One club when Sagamihara Dynaboars announced his signing on Tuesday. The 28-year-old former Sevens flyer, who won the 2023 World Cup and last month's Rugby Championship with South Africa, joins the Dynaboars on sabbatical from the Pretoria-based Bulls. "I think the hard grounds in Japan and the general approach to the game, with […]

[ad_1] The Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) overpaid some ¥81 million to outsourcing companies tasked with charging submarine batteries, because the batteries were not fully charged as they should have been, people familiar with an investigation by the Board of Audit said Monday. Twenty MSDF submarines use lead-acid storage batteries for power while they are submerged. The batteries are charged during regular inspections every three years, a task outsourced to submarine […]

[ad_1] After nearly 60 years, former professional boxer Iwao Hakamata has been exonerated.Ahead of a Thursday deadline to file an appeal against last month’s not-guilty verdict of the Shizuoka District Court, which heard a rare retrial of the 1966 murder case against the ex-boxer, prosecutors have decided not to do so, his lawyers' office told The Japan Times on Tuesday.“We are happy that it is finally over,” said Hideko Hakamata, […]

[ad_1] A pair of AI scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.John J. Hopfield, a professor at Princeton University, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, used tools from physics to develop methods that became the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning, the Nobel Foundation said.“When we talk about artificial intelligence, […]

[ad_1] Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan called for another change of government in the country during his retirement news conference on Tuesday. Kan, 77, a member of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, will not run in the upcoming general election for the House of Representatives. "I hope a change of government will be realized again," he said. "It is desirable for a democracy to have a change […]

[ad_1] Paris – Japanese game designer Katsura Hashino, who made his name with the high school role-play Persona series, is in a reflective mood days before Friday's launch of his latest game, Metaphor: ReFantazio."I can't even count how many games I've worked on," Hashino, who has worked for Sega-owned publisher Atlus since the mid-1990s, says.For his newest title, he has shifted the monster-slaying action of Persona from Tokyo to a […]

[ad_1] A third-grade elementary school boy in Sapporo was sexually assaulted several times by a junior high school boy in 2021, a Sapporo education board third-party panel said in an investigative report on Tuesday.Due to the magnitude of the incident, the report categorized the case as a “serious incident,” legally requiring the school to report the case in detail to the mayor.According to the report, the offending student previously went […]