The US refused to join a new global cybersecurity agreement this week—maybe because it was created by French president Emmanuel Macron, with whom President Trump isn’t on great terms with. On the same day, internet traffic that was supposed to route through Google’s cloud servers instead went haywire, traveling through unplanned servers based in the likes of Russia and China. Hack? No, as Lily Hay Newman explains, though the cause was still worrisome.

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.

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.

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.’

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

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.

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

In Chichibu, Japan, there's an odd museum; perhaps the only one of its kind. It's called the Chinsekikan (which means hall of curious rocks) and it houses over 1700 rocks that resemble human faces.

It’s a good day for science and science fiction when Harold Ramis’ Multiplicity can finally be proven to be complete bullshit. And I’m …

A device which zaps your tongue with electricity sounds more like some cruel and unusual torture method than it does something folks might do for enjoyment. But you’d be wrong — at least when it comes to the electric tongue zapper created by researchers at Meiji University in Japan. They’ve been working on technology they call “unlimited electric gum,” able to electrically simulate flavor sensations when a person chews a stick of specially created “gum.”

Each spring, Japan is crowned with a fluttery wreath of pink cherry blossoms, which draw crowds of admirers and inspire many celebrations. But this year, as Laurel Wamsley reports for NPR, the country’s cherry blossoms have made an unexpected second appearance—in the middle of fall. More than 350 people reported seeing the ephemeral flowers this autumn, though it isn’t clear if or to what extent the reports overlap. According to Japanese broadcaster NHK, the blossoms have been sighted in an area stretching from Kyushu, in western Japan, to Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands.

Nestle opens a made-to-order chocolate shop called KitKat Chocolatory in Osaka, Japan.

Sleeping where I worked blurred my work-life boundaries

A rare white tiger has mauled a zookeeper to death in its enclosure at a zoo in Japan, officials say. Akira Furusho, 40, was found bleeding from the neck in the tiger's cage at the zoo in the southern city of Kagoshima. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead. The male tiger, named Riku, was sedated with a tranquiliser before rescue workers and police arrived.

Today is the first official day of the Toyosu Market, the new fish market that is replacing the beloved Tsukiji Fish Market. The opening wasn’t exactly smooth.

Well blow me down! These fantastical, bizarre, hilarious scrolls date from the Edo period in Japan, which spanned the years 1603–1868 for those too lazy to Wikipedia it (I know because I Wikipedia’d it). Authorship for them is unknown, which leads me to believe that they were a very refined form of bathroom graffiti, like those beautiful Japanese ceramic figurines that used to appear in Playboy under the heading “Ribald Art” or something that would reveal the figure’s naughty lady parts if you turned it upside down.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

How instant noodles, now 60 years old, went from a shed in Japan to global success.

A Japanese space agency, iSpace, announced on Wednesday 26th September that it will launch a lunar lander and rover to the moon in 2020 and 2021. The uncrewed iSpace spacecraft will go to space on board a SpaceX Faclon 9 Rocket, the organization said. On the off chance that it all g oes well, in 2020, the company will endevour to orbit the moon with one of its landers. In 2021, it will attempt to securely place a lander on the lunar surface and send lunar rovers to investigate further

President Donald Trump lobbied Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to allow one of his biggest campaign donors, Sheldon Adelson, to build a casino in Japan, according to a new report by ProPublica. In February 2017, Abe met with Trump for the first time at the White House. The two discussed the possibility of a bilateral trade agreement and the United States’ mutual defense treaty with Japan. Trump described having a “very, very good bond” with the Japanese leader.

Japanese authorities have arrested members of the notorious Yakuza crime ring, after they were found extorting earnings from workers at the site of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Six Yakuza members were arrested Wednesday for illegally mobilizing homeless people to work on construction, then extorting part of their $90-a-day wages, the Asahi Shimbun reported.

Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.

The Japanese, meticulous in their approach to baseball, recycling and reuse, have figured out how to make good use of splintered bats.

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. As the smiling couple entered the shrine, the crowd shouted their congratulations with the Japanese word "Banzai" -- meaning an auspicious wish for long life. Close family members and friends welcomed the bride and groom as they made their way to the ceremony hall.

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.

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.