Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has surpassed 200,000 copies sold in Japan, with 64,000 of those sales occurring in 2018. The game sits at 75th place for the year in Japan, one spot behind Dragon Ball FighterZ on Nintendo Switch and one spot ahead of Attack on Titan 2 for PlayStation 4. This is especially impressive considering the game came out at the tail end of 2017, when the majority of its sales took place.

The number of suicides in Japan dropped 3.4 percent from a year earlier to 20,598 in 2018, down for the ninth year and the lowest in 37 years amid economic recovery, preliminary data by the National Police Agency showed Friday. The number of suicides per 100,000 people fell to 16.3, a record low since the survey began in 1978, but an increase of girls aged 19 or younger who killed themselves raised concern, according to the data.

One conservation group warns that the move shows "a troubling disregard for international rule".

If you’re living in Japan and modifying save data on Nintendo Switch, you’d probably want to stop whatever you’re doing right now. Japanese lawmakers have recently passed an amendment to the Unfair Competition Prevention Law. The amendment, in layman’s terms, has made the modification of video game save data illegal in Japan.

Japan has decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission in a bid to resume commercial whaling, government sources said Thursday. However, the country is unlikely to catch whales in the Antarctic Ocean even after its IWC pullout, as the government is mulling allowing Japan's commercial whaling only in seas near Japan as well as the country's exclusive economic zone, the sources added.

Dawn is an inspirational marriage of technology and humanity.

Wannabe homeowners in Japan are about to get the deal of a lifetime. The Japanese government is launching a program to reduce the number of abandoned homes across the country by offering them for sale for nearly nothing, or actually nothing, according to Insider. According to a 2013 report, there are about eight million houses that have been left abandoned all over Japan.

An intricate system of dams, levees and tunnels defends the Japan’s capital. Will it be able to cope with climate change?

A cafe staffed by robot waiters controlled remotely by paralysed people has opened in Tokyo, Japan. A total of 10 people with a variety of conditions that restrict their movement have helped control robots in the Dawn Ver cafe. The robot's controllers earned 1,000 yen (£7) per hour - the standard rate of pay for waiting staff in Japan.

Two typhoons followed by warm weather may have triggered Japan’s iconic trees to blossom months ahead of schedule

Under crisp blue skies, about 1,000 well-wishers turned out at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo Monday to catch a glimpse of Japan's Princess Ayako and her groom Kei Moriya on their wedding day.

Esanbe Hanakita Kojima, as the island is called, may have been eroded by wind and ice floes

Japan is full of bizarre tales about crypto zoological creatures and things that go bump in the night. Here are five of them.

Japan’s primary financial regulator has formally granted the cryptocurrency industry with a self-regulatory status by allowing an industry body to police domestic exchanges. The Financial Services Agency (FSA) on Wednesday approved the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA), a body comprised of all 16 licensed domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, to become a ‘certified fund settlement business association.’

The Japanese public is happier about the economy than at any time in nearly two decades, though few think the next generation will have it as good. People's biggest fear is automation, not foreigners, taking jobs from local workers. While 44% of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey said the current economic situation is good, 15% answered that today's children will be better off than their parents.

Yoshitaka Sakurada is responsible for ensuring the 2020 Olympic Games are not hacked.

In early September, the island nation of Japan was doing Japan things. One day, Typhoon Jebi roared ashore near Osaka and Kobe, breaking historical wind records. Early the next morning in Tokyo, as thick clouds from Jebi’s outer bands raced overhead, an offshore earthquake rattled softly but perceptibly through the city. The capital city’s skies remained a bleak gray a few hours later as we entered the headquarters of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in the city’s bustling Shinagawa area.

Japan's government is planning to develop a so-called "super city" where cutting-edge technologies will undergo fast-track testing to study their feasibility. Government officials have drawn up a basic plan that calls for the city to be developed on a former industrial site, with people invited to serve as residents.

A 64-year-old man had been arrested and fined after stealing a roll of toilet paper in Shimane Prefecture. The incident occurred in September at a hospital in Okinoshima, located in Oki District, Shimane Prefecture. Okinoshima lies on an island off the west coast of Japan, and has an estimated population of around 14,849. According to reports, the man was found guilty of stealing a roll of toilet paper from a male restroom at the hospital and fined 200,000 yen. The toilet paper was valued at 30 yen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.

The number of children in Japan fell for the 37th consecutive year to a new record low, the latest data showed Friday

Hit Japanese products, from the Walkman to Pokémon, have long captivated us, but Japan's most influential export might be its own lived experience.

Japan has notified the World Trade Organization that it reserves the right to take countermeasures against U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

Japanese research vessels harpooned, killed and necropsied 333 Antarctic minke whales during an annual hunt last summer — and 122 of those whales were pregnant.

BBC

Spotting shoplifters, but what else?

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.

Megumi Yokota was just 13 when she disappeared. On her way home from badminton practice at her junior high school, she vanished somewhere along the eight-minute walk to her house in this seaside town. It was just after sunset on Nov. 15, 1977, and the weather records from that day show a calm sea and clear sky.