An employee of Tokyo Electric Power Company says even a flood barrier would not have prevented tsunami from inundating the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the huge earthquake in 2011. The employee was testifying at the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday in the trial of 3 former TEPCO executives, including former chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata. The 3 are accused of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, in connection with the nuclear accident.

If President Trump decides to re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Japan, the biggest economic player in the deal, would welcome him with open arms, a top Japanese diplomat told Axios on Wednesday, before Trump directed his top advisers to take a fresh look at the deal.

A 112-year-old Japanese man born months before Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity was recognized on Tuesday as the world's oldest man.

A Japanese worker has been reprimanded by her boss for “selfishly breaking the rules” after she became pregnant before it was her “turn”, according to media reports. The woman was working at a private childcare centre in Aichi prefecture, north Japan, when she found out she was pregnant.

The deposit, found within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, contains more than 16 million tons of the elements needed to build high-tech products.

Japanese whaling vessels returned to port on Saturday after catching more than 300 of the mammals in the Antarctic Ocean without facing any protests by anti-whaling groups, officials said.

Lightning lights up the ash cloud above Shinmoedake peak as the volcano erupts between Miyazaki and Kagoshima prefectures, southwestern Japan, in a photo taken by a remote camera and released by Kyodo News, April 5, 2018.

America's national pastime is the most popular sport in Japan, but it's also more than that.

Japan is more focused on a securing major trade deal with the European Union than pursuing an agreement with a post-Brexit Britain, a senior minister has said. Shinichi Iida, minister for public diplomacy and media, said his country's "first and foremost priority" was rubber-stamping its historic trade agreement with Brussels – the largest the EU has ever signed – before work could begin on establishing lucrative free trade deals with the UK.

The USS Lexington was discovered in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia (by 800 km). The ship took part in the Battle of the Coral Sea and will actually be left on the ocean floor since the US Navy considers it a war grave.

Japan is believed to be preparing to execute as many as 13 members of a doomsday cult in what could become the country’s biggest round of hangings in the past decade. Tuesday marked the 23rd anniversary of Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed 13 people and caused illness among thousands of others.

A research team led by Teruyuki Hirano of Tokyo Institute of Technology's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences has validated 15 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf systems. One of the brightest red dwarfs, K2-155 that is around 200 light years away from Earth, has three transiting super-Earths. Of those three super-Earths, the outermost planet, K2-155d, with a radius 1.6 times that of Earth, could be within the host star's habitable zone.

Visitors on boats enjoy Someiyoshino cherry blossoms at Chitorigafuchi Imperial Palace moat in Tokyo.

Japan has again been forced to confront its work culture after labour inspectors ruled that the death of a 31-year-old journalist at the country’s public broadcaster, NHK, had been caused by overwork. Miwa Sado, who worked at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Tokyo, logged 159 hours of overtime and took only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure in July 2013.

Japan's third-largest electricity provider is emerging as one of the first major companies in the world to trial a promising bitcoin payments technology. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Chubu Electric Power Co. has entered into a proof-of-concept with local bitcoin and Internet of Things (IoT) startup Nayuta, one that finds it exploring how bitcoin payments can be made via the Lightning Network, an in-development protocol that promises to cut costs for bitcoin users.

Japan has the world’s oldest population, with more than a quarter of its citizens aged 65 or older. The ageing population has already put a strain on Japan’s financial system and retail industry. But in recent years, another unexpected trend has been unfolding: In record numbers, elderly people in Japan are committing petty crimes so they can spend the rest of their days in prison.

Japanese engineering researchers say they have created a tiny electronic light the size of a firefly which rides waves of ultrasound, and could eventually figure in applications ranging from moving displays to projection mapping.

Shoplifting has become something of a lifeline for Japan's elderly population. As Bloomberg reports, nearly one in five women in prison is 65 or older. These elderly women commit minor crimes in order to escape poverty and solitude. Often, women are repeat offenders so that they can return to prison once they are released. To serve...

The owner of a camera lost at sea for over two years — which turned up on a beach in Taiwan this week — has been identified as a university student in Tokyo after an online search.

Lonely seniors are shoplifting in search of the community and stability of jail. In 2016, Japan’s parliament passed a law aiming to ensure that recidivist seniors get support from the country’s welfare and social-service systems. Since then, prosecutor’s offices and prisons have worked closely with government agencies to get senior offenders the assistance they need. But the problems that lead these women to seek the relative comfort of jail lie beyond the system’s reach.

A 112-year-old Japanese man born months before Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity was recognized on Tuesday as the world's oldest man.

So many Japanese people die alone, there's a whole industry devoted to cleaning up after them.

In Japan, a phenomenon known as “shrinkflation” — an important economic countermeasure against inflation for businesses — has been catching the attention of consumers. The term, coined by American economist Pippa Malmgren, describes what happens when manufacturers have to contend with higher costs but don’t want to increase the prices of their products. What they do instead is decrease the size or amount of the product while maintaining a steady price.

Known for their massive losses of cryptocurrency, Japan has now nearly scuttled the world of virtual finance by injecting 20 trillion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin into the financial system. Only one month after the mysterious crash of the Japanese exchange, Coincheck, which saw losses estimated around half a billion

Monster Hunter: World is getting a huge official guidebook that boasts 1,008 pages, full of all the info any Hunter could ask for, and it is releasing next month in Japan.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics organising committee has confirmed that 87% of the plywood panels used to build its new national stadium come from southeast Asian rainforests. But the timber cannot be traced back to its original source under the committees’s certification protocols, which have been censured by campaigners for a lack of due diligence.

Japan is taking steps to help aging business owners find buyers for their companies rather than shut them down for lack of suitable successors. By doing so, it seeks to protect jobs and economic value as the population ages and shrinks. The country has 2.45 million small and midsize businesses run by those at or over the average retirement age of 70, roughly half of which are without successors. An even larger number are run by those aged 65 to 69. Around 28,000 businesses closed their doors in 2017, according to Tokyo Shoko Research -- a 30% increase in 10 years.

One stubborn doctor pioneered a cure.

Last year, we cast the spotlight on a young girl setting Japan's junior motorsport series on edge: Juju Noda. She's the daughter of Hideki Noda, a driver with two decades of international racing experience, and a motorsport academy in his name. Juju has been quoted expressing a drive to be the first woman to win a Grand Prix in Formula 1, and if her racing so far is anything to go by, she may even have the X-factor needed to fulfill her ambitions.

A volcano in southern Japan that appeared in a James Bond film had its biggest eruption in years Tuesday, shooting smoke and ash thousands of meters (feet) into the sky and grounding dozens of flights at a nearby airport, officials said. The Meteorological Agency said the Shinmoedake volcano on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu erupted violently several times, and some lava was rising inside a crater.

The cryptocurrency mine launched by Japanese IT firm GMO Internet has generated more than $3 million in revenue over the past three months. According to a mining report released on March 5, the publicly-traded company disclosed that it had generated 23 BTC, 93 BTC and 124 BTC in December, January and February, respectively. All told, those coins are worth approximately $2.67 million as of press time according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index.

With its poppy history of battling with fellow sugar-giant PepsiCo, Coca-Cola has given us a lot of things. In its illustrious past spanning a century and a quarter, the beverage mammoth has finally gone and done it — it's finally coming out with a drink with alcohol in it!

Japanese design meets produce.

When a massive earthquake struck in 2011, Japanese oyster fisherman Atsushi Fujita was working as usual by the sea. Soon after, a huge black wave slammed into his city and killed nearly 2,000 people.

In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original.’ By Byung-Chul Han.