Japanese government

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg met Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a visit to Japan, discussing the risks of generative AI, a government spokesman said Wednesday.

Zuckerberg is on a mini-tour of Asia that includes stops in Japan, India and South Korea, where he travelled on Tuesday night.

In a concerning trend for Japan's demographic landscape, the year 2023 saw a significant decline in the number of newborns, marking a record low in the country's history. According to government data reported by Kyodo News, Japan's population shrank by its largest ever margin, with births plummeting by 5.1 percent compared to the previous year, totaling just 758,631 infants.

Japanese Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said at a press conference that Japan only accepted U.S. aid after the earthquake while rejecting aid from other countries due to difficulties in reaching an agreement on how the aid would be delivered, reports Kyodo.

Japan's top currency official said yesterday that Tokyo was "on standby" to intervene after the yen fell to a new year-low against the dollar and plunged against the euro, Bloomberg reported.

The yen dropped below 151 against the dollar overnight after the Bank of Japan further loosened its control of bond yields but stuck with sub-zero short-term interest rates.

Around 100 fishermen and locals living near Fukushima will file a lawsuit this week seeking to stop the release of wastewater from the stricken Japanese nuclear plant, they said yesterday.

Twelve years after one of the world's worst nuclear accidents, on Aug. 24 Japan began releasing treated cooling water from the facility into the Pacific Ocean.

The tsunami-wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant 's operator says it began releasing its first batch of treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday — a controversial step, but a milestone for Japan's battle with the growing radioactive water stockpile.

Japan and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have signed an agreement worth 130.6 million Turkish Liras for recycling earthquake debris in Türkiye's southern provinces of Hatay and Kahramanmaraş, which suffered the most damage in the Feb. 6 twin quakes.

A Japanese government panel is set to recommend the closure of a controversial vocational training scheme for young people from developing countries, an immigration official said yesterday.

The country's "technical intern" program was launched three decades ago and has long been criticised by campaigners as a hotbed of abuse and discrimination.

North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles Tuesday, Seoul said, Pyongyang's second launch in three days and the first since South Korea and the United States began their largest joint military drills in five years.

Mitsui and Mitsubishi are shareholders in the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas (LPG) project.
Shares of Mitsui fell by 5.7 percent and of Mitsubishi by 5.4 percent respectively, by the midday break in today's trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, reports Reuters.