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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Shrouded in mystery, the gigantic Daisen Kofun mound in Japan is thought to hold the remains of a 5th century emperor.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan president, Atsushi Morita, finally addressed the censorship regulations that Sony has employed for PS4 games, speaking at the Japan Studio “Fun” Meeting that took place in Tokyo, Japan on December 1st, 2018. The event was themed around a celebration of SIE Japan Studio’s projects, but was also open to some fan questions. The news was picked up by Ebitsu.net, which briefly covered some of the topics Morita addressed while at the meet-and-greet.

There is nothing to prepare us for the shock to the senses in the National Gallery of Victoria's latest exhibition combining the works of M. C. Escher with Japanese design firm nendo.

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

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.

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 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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Less than a month after releasing the iPhone XR, Apple Inc. is moving to offer subsidies to mobile-network operators in Japan to shore up sales of its least-expensive new smartphone, people familiar with the matter said.

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

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'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.