月別: 2017年5月

1)   British police suspect a 22-year-old man carried out the bomb attack in Manchester that killed 22 people and injured 59.

2)   Japanese police have arrested 6 men in connection with last year’s robbery of gold bars worth millions of dollars near a train station in the city of Fukuoka, western Japan.

3)   Some Japanese insurance companies are expanding their policies to cover cyberattacks because of increased risks worldwide.

Officials at Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Insurance have updated their policies for small and medium-size businesses relating to cyberattacks.

4)   A pair of melons produced in the northern city of Yubari, Hokkaido, sold for 1.5 million yen in the first auction of this harvest season on Friday.

The price was half the record 3 million yen fetched for a pair of Yubari melons, a type of premium cantaloupe, in the previous year’s auction, but largely in line with prices set in regular years at the Sapporo Central Wholesale Market.

5)   Businesses and local authorities in Japan are turning to environmentally friendly bioplastics for shopping and garbage bags, as well as product containers, in a bid to step up their conservation efforts.

Environmentally conscious consumers have responded positively to the use of such materials, viewing it as a practical way of helping conservation.

6)   The last Japanese peacekeepers with a United Nations mission have left South Sudan. The team was Japan’s first with an expanded mandate to use force if necessary to protect civilians and U.N. staff.

Japan decided in March to end its peacekeeping mission in the East African nation where civil war is well into its fourth year.

7)   Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and US President Donald Trump have confirmed that both countries will work closely to tackle the issue of North Korea.

Abe and Trump held talks in Italy on Friday on the sidelines of the Group of Seven countries summit.

At the top of the meeting, Trump said the issue of North Korea is on the global agenda, and that it definitely needs to be resolved.

8)   Japan is to increase the number of officials assigned to tourism promotion as it gears toward a target of 40 million visitors from overseas in 2020.

Last year, a record 24 million foreigners visited Japan. The government wants to boost this to 40 million when Tokyo hosts the Olympics and Paralympics.

The ministry in charge of tourism says it will boost the number of personnel at the Japan Tourism Agency, an external agency, by about 50 to 150 by this summer.

9)   Japan’s Education Minister has reiterated that he can’t confirm the existence of documents allegedly tying Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a university operator’s plan to open a school. The operator is run by a close friend of Abe’s.

10)   Japan’s Consumer Price Index for April was up for the 4th straight month.

The officials at the Internal Affairs Ministry say the CPI was 0.3 percent higher from the same month last year.
The reading includes oil products, but not fresh food

11)   The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and major non-OPEC oil producing nations have agreed to extend their cuts in crude oil output until March of next year.

12)   Rural areas in Japan are being hit by severe declines in population. A government-affiliated housing loan provider has decided to offer mortgages with lower interest rates to those moving to the countryside.

The Japan Housing Finance Agency says it will cut the rates on their 35-year fixed mortgage by quarter of a percentage point with certain conditions.

トランプ大統領と皇室と共謀罪の話

1)   The cabinet on Friday approved a bill to allow Emperor Akihito to hand over the Chrysanthemum throne to Crown Prince Naruhito in what would be Japan’s first abdication in roughly 200 years.

2)   Toxic benzene at up to 100 times the government safety limit was detected again in groundwater samples collected in April at the planned relocation site for Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, the Tokyo metropolitan government said Thursday.

3)   The ruling coalition has won crucial approval for a controversial bill that would criminalize the act of plotting terrorist attacks or other serious crimes. A majority of members on a Lower House committee have given their backing to the legislation.

The vote was a scene of chaos as opposition lawmakers shouted out in protest.
They’ve called the deliberations insufficient, and said the bill doesn’t have the public’s support.
But members of the ruling coalition voted in favor

4)   A hospital in Japan has started a clinical study to find out whether laughter can have therapeutic effects on cancer patients by boosting their immune systems with help from professional entertainers.

The Osaka International Cancer Institute and 3 entertainment companies will conduct the experiment. Professional comic storytellers, known in Japan as “rakugo-ka,” and pairs of stand-up comedians called “manzai-shi,” will participate in the research.

5)   A global treaty designed to restrict the manufacture and trade of products that contain harmful levels of mercury will take effect in August.

As of Friday, 51 signatories, including Japan, the United States and the Netherlands, had ratified the Minamata Convention. It was adopted at a UN conference in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, in 2013.

The convention was named after a city in the prefecture where people suffered health problems caused by industrial mercury poisoning.

6)   US information security firm is looking into the possibility that North Korean hackers were involved in last week’s massive global cyberattacks.

The US government says at least 300,000 computers in 150 countries were affected.

In each case, ransomware encrypted the computers’ data and locked users out of their systems.

7)   One day before the first anniversary of her inauguration, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen urged China to try to improve cross-strait relations without sticking to the “One China” principle.

Tsai made a speech before an overseas group on Friday. She admitted that she has achieved little to revitalize the economy and narrow the wealth gap among Taiwanese people.

On relations with China, she said old problems should be left in the past, adding that leaders face a new task of keeping peace and prosperity on both sides of the strait.

8)   New university graduates in Japan are enjoying the best job market on record.

The labor and education ministries say 97.6 percent of graduates had landed jobs by April 1st. The ministries jointly polled 4,770 students who left university in March.

The employment rate is up 0.3 percentage points from last year, the highest since the survey began in 1997.

9)   4 carmakers have agreed to pay 553 million dollars to settle a class action suit in the United States over a massive recall of Takata airbags.

Toyota, Subaru, Mazda and BMW say they reached a settlement with car owners who said they incurred economic losses because of the recall.

 

この中にはないけれどFBI長官の話。アメリカだなぁ。と。

1)   The Japanese government for the first time has released a nationwide list of over 300 companies that have violated labor laws, hoping this name-and-shame tactic would help eliminate abuses and prevent karoshi, or death by overwork.

Major companies such as advertising agency Dentsu Inc and electronics maker Panasonic Corp are named for illegal overtime, and a local unit of Japan Post, a subsidiary of Japan Post Holdings Co, is mentioned for failing to report a work-related injury.

2)    A man has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for causing the death of a woman in Kasugai, Aichi Prefecture, last August while playing Pokemon Go as he was driving.

The Nagoya District Court ruled that 27-year-old Yusuke Okuyama from Toki in neighboring Gifu Prefecture was giving his attention to his smartphone when his car hit the 29-year-old Vietnamese woman.

3)   Police in Tokyo have arrested an unemployed 31-year-old man on suspicion of theft after he was caught stealing a wallet from a woman’s tote bag on a train.

According to police, the suspect, Nobutaka Ando, stole the wallet, containing 18,000 yen. Police said Ando may be responsible for at least 21 pickpocketing cases on the Saiko Line this year.

4)   Rice planting for commercial sales began on Wednesday in a village in Fukushima Prefecture for the first time since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.

5)   Police say 85 million yen in cash, or about 750,000 dollars, was stolen from a safe in a police station in the city of Hiroshima, western Japan. Police say confiscated evidence is normally kept in a safe in the investigators’ division, but in this case, the cash was stored in a bigger safe in the accounting division, as the amount was large.

6)   The youngest-ever professional player of the Japanese board game shogi, 14-year-old Sota Fujii, has stretched his run of official consecutive victories to a fresh record of 17.

Fujii made headlines last month when he broke an earlier record of 10 straight wins in the game, which is often called Japan’s version of chess. Since then he has continued to dominate.

On Friday, Fujii beat Kazuhiro Nishikawa, a shogi master who holds the rank of 6th dan, to notch his 17th win.

7)   Tokyo police have raided the headquarters of a yakuza crime syndicate in the western prefecture of Hyogo in connection with an extortion case.

About 30 investigators conducted a search of the headquarters of the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi on Friday.
The group, which was formed in 2015, is an offshoot of Japan’s largest crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi.

8)   New Zealand has ratified the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, becoming the second country to do so after Japan.

9)   The head of a Chinese-led development bank says it wants to cooperate with the region’s long-established lender, the Asian Development Bank.

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank President Jin Liqun attended a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Cambodia on Thursday.

Jin said his bank was not created to be a rival of the ADB. He added that he believes the 2 lenders can share responsibilities and work together. The ADB promotes health and education, while the AIIB focuses on support for infrastructure.

10)   Japan’s central government debt stood at a record 1,071.56 trillion yen ($9.4 trillion) at the end of fiscal 2016 in March, the Finance Ministry said Wednesday. The amount owed per person came to approximately 8.45 million yen, based on Japan’s estimated population of 126.79 million as of April 1.

11)   Thousands of people took part in a parade in Tokyo’s Shibuya district Sunday to raise awareness of issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, marching on along busy shopping streets led by a float decorated in rainbow colors about 6,000 participated.

12)   The United States cannot continue to run huge trade deficits with major trading partners, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said following the release of data showing the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with Japan hit a nine-year high in March. “The United States can no longer sustain this inflated trade deficit with Japan.

13)   JR East will open a prayer room within Tokyo Station’s premises due to an increase in travelers from Muslim countries, notably Southeast Asia.

14)   More Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force troops left Juba, South Sudan, on Thursday, to return to Japan.

Their departure is part of the process to end their five-year participation in the ongoing U.N. peacekeeping mission.

1)   A car driven by an elderly woman has rammed into a hospital in southwestern Japan, leaving 13 people injured.

Police suspect the driver, who is 76 years old, made an error and lost control of the car.

2)   Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said he wants to put a revised Constitution into force in 2020.

3)   North Korea has warned Japan that it would suffer the greatest damage if war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.

4)   Anti-refugee sentiment is rising in Europe and the United States but in Japan those seeking haven from tyranny and war have long faced daunting legal and social gauntlets.

One of the world’s wealthiest countries, Japan accepted just 28 refugees in 2016

5)   Japanese researchers have succeeded in extracting natural gas from frozen methane hydrate deep in the seabed off the Pacific coast of central Japan.

6)   A Japanese research group has found a new type of computer virus that destroys programs in devices that are connected to the Internet.

7)   US electric car maker Tesla more than doubled its sales in the January-March quarter from the same period last year, thanks to record volume.

8)   Japan’s economy has expanded in the first 3 months of this year thanks to brisk exports and consumer spending.

The growth estimates for annualized real-term GDP range from 1.4 percent to 3.1 percent from the previous quarter.

9)   The number of children in Japan fell for the 36th straight year to another record low, the latest data showed Thursday, indicating efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government have been inadequate to tackle the long-standing issue of a declining birthrate.

10)   Tokyo risks being one of the unhealthiest Olympic Gamaes hosts in years, as an anti-smoking law exposes deep rifts over tobacco tax revenue, personal freedom and the dangers of passive smoking.