Japan's space agency (JAXA) has made history by successfully landing two robotic explorers on the surface of an asteroid. The two small "rovers", which were despatched from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Friday, will move around the 1km-wide space rock known as Ryugu. The asteroid's low gravity means they can hop across it, capturing temperatures and images of the surface.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency says the Minerva-II1 explorers will explore the flying space rock by hopping around it, taking advantage of its low gravity.

Following Wednesday’s Media Create charts, today the firm released its weekly analysis, going more in-depth into the impressive local performance of Marvel’s Spider-Man. We learn that the game was almost sold out, selling 96.17% of the total initial shipment. Media Create estimates that a considerable number of purchasers resorted to buying the digital download version of the game on the PlayStation Store, because there were shortages at retailers.

Accepting Putin's offer would go against long-standing Japanese position on the territorial dispute.

Few conservation issues generate as emotional a response as whaling. Are we now about to see countries killing whales for profit again? Commercial whaling has been effectively banned for more than 30 years, after some whales were driven almost to extinction. But the International Whaling Committee (IWC) is currently meeting in Brazil and next week will give its verdict on a proposal from Japan to end the ban.

Japan has acknowledged for the first time that a worker at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami more than seven years ago, died from radiation exposure. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck in March 2011, triggering a tsunami that killed some 18,000 people and the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl 25 years earlier.

Announcing the completion of time-consuming “cleaning” work, a research team in Hokkaido has unveiled what it claims is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Japan. Through the work to remove rocks and sediments in which the fossils were embedded, a total of 157 pieces were identified as bones of a large herbivorous dinosaur from the Hadrosaurid family, according to the team comprising curators of the Hobetsu Museum in Mukawa, Hokkaido, and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, an associate professor at the Hokkaido University Museum.

Workers in Japan who want to leave their jobs — but don't want to face the stress of quitting in person — are turning to a company called Exit.

Arthur C Clarke’s concept of a space elevator could start to be realised by experiments beginning next month by a Japanese university and construction comp.

The typhoon prompted officials to urge the evacuation of more than a million people. By Tuesday night at least six deaths had been reported.

Japanese people aged 70 and older account for more than 20 percent of the total population for the first time at 26.18 million, in further evidence of the country's rapidly aging society, according to government data. The data, released by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry ahead of Monday's Respect-for-the-Aged Day holiday, showed that as of Saturday people aged 70 or above account for 20.7 percent of the population, up from 19.9 percent the previous year.

North Korea has agreed to allow International Civil Aviation Organization staff to conduct an on-site inspection to ensure the safety of international flights from the country’s missile launches, according to officials with the Montreal-based U.N. agency. An official with North Korea’s General Administration of Civil Aviation gave the assurance when high-ranking ICAO representatives visited the country in May, ICAO officials said.

The US trade war and a thaw in ties between China and Japan are raising prospects for the world’s biggest regional free-trade deal, analysts said on Sunday after trade negotiators voiced high hopes of reaching a broad agreement in November.

Sony Interactive Entertainment’s aftercare service for the PlayStation 2 in Japan is ending. While the console has been out of production since 2012, Sony Japan continued to service to the game machine, keeping it alive. Sony is now pulling the plug. As IT Media reports, Sony Japan asked PS2 owners to fill out online forms by August 31 to have their consoles fixed one last time. PS2 that arrive at the PlayStation Clinic service center in Iwate Prefecture after September 7 will not be serviced.

Finding your everyday reason for living, or ikigai, could lead to a longer and better life.

Shigeaki Mori was 8 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived and committed himself to uncovering the names of all those who died — including 12 American POWs.

Tepco suspended the sale of souvenirs at its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant Wednesday — just eight days after launching the products — following public outcry that it was looking to profit from the 2011 disaster. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. had been selling plastic file folders imprinted with pictures of the Nos. 1 to 4 units at the crisis-hit plant at two of the facility’s convenience stores since Aug. 1, after receiving requests for memorabilia from visitors and workers.

In Japan, ghost stories are not to be scoffed at, but provide deep insights into the fuzzy boundary between life and death. By Christopher Harding.

Municipalities across Japan are reaching out to the social recluses known as hikikomori to help them find their place in society without focusing solely on getting them back into the workforce. Japan has some 540,000 people aged 15 to 39 who, aside from taking care of small chores, cut themselves off from the outside world for six months or longer at a time, according to a 2016 government estimate.

In some incredibly sad news for the world of Pokémon, it’s been announced that Unsho Ishizuka, the voice actor for the iconic Professor Oak in the original Japanese anime, has passed away.

Black markets and American wheat imports popularized ramen.

Japan held a “secret” meeting with North Korea in Vietnam in July without informing the United States, according to media reports. Talks were reportedly held between Shigeru Kitamura, head of Japan’s Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, and Kim Song-hye, a senior North Korean official in charge of reunification. Japan’s decision not to inform the US government of the meeting, which was reported in the Washington Post, was said to have caused “irritation” among senior officials.

U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested to The Wall Street Journal that he will take on Japan next in his fight to cut trade deficits with U.S. trading partners, according to a column carried on the paper's online edition Thursday. Citing a phone call he received from Trump, James Freeman, a columnist for the paper, wrote that the president "described his good relations with the Japanese leadership, but then added: 'Of course that will end as soon as I tell them how much they have to pay.'

A rocket developed by a maverick Japanese entrepreneur and convicted fraudster exploded shortly after liftoff Saturday, in a major blow to his bid to send Japan's first privately backed rocket into space. Interstellar Technologies, founded by popular internet service provider Livedoor's creator Takafumi Horie, launched the unmanned rocket, MOMO-2, at around 5:30 a.m. from a test site in Taiki, southern Hokkaido.

In Japan

Tokyo-based translation firm 8-4’s mission is to reduce cultural gaps between countries, and infuse games with local personality

One of Japan’s leading whisky bloggers discusses the shortage of good Japanese single malts, the state of the country’s whisky industry, and how to order a highball.

The European Union and Japan signed a landmark deal on Tuesday that will eliminate nearly all tariffs on products they trade. The ambitious pact signed in Tokyo runs counter to President Donald Trump’s moves to hike tariffs on imports from many U.S. trading partners. It covers a third of the global economy and markets of more than 600 million people.

Two Japanese national research institutes said Saturday they have succeeded in using artificial intelligence to identify early-stage stomach cancer with a high accuracy rate. The breakthrough may help extend the lives of more cancer patients in Japan, where stomach cancer is one of the leading causes of death. According to Riken and the National Cancer Center, it took AI only 0.004 seconds to judge whether an endoscopic image showed early-stage cancer or normal stomach tissue. AI correctly detected cancer in 80 percent of cancer images, while the accuracy rate was 95 percent for normal tissue.

At least 65 people have died and more than 22,000 are treated in hospital amid record temperatures.

Japan’s government is to urge companies to give employees Monday mornings off in its latest attempt to improve the country’s poor record on work-life balance. The economy, trade and industry ministry believes that “Shining Mondays”, part of a wider campaign to address the punishingly long hours many Japanese are expected to work, will give employees a much-needed lie-in at the start of the working week...

The Education Minister of Japan has condemned gender discrimination following reports that Tokyo Medical University allegedly rigged entrance exam scores to lower the ratio of female students.

Mazda Motor Corp, Suzuki Motor Corp and Yamaha Motor Co conducted improper fuel economy and emissions tests on their vehicles, Japan’s transport ministry said on Thursday.

Leading Japanese mining company GMO Internet has stopped mining Bitcoin Cash (BCH) once again, reports indicate. According to company documents recently made public, the top bitcoin mining firm stopped mining bitcoin cash in July and previously in April. The documents published by Trace Mayer of the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast show that GMO mined 0 BCH last month, down from 62 coins in June and a high of 287 in February.