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TOKYO  - Cherry blossoms make unexpected appearance The delicate blossoms of the cherry tree might be synonymous with the onset of spring in Japan -- except this year they're also blooming in autumn, a weather forecasting company said Wednesday. Experts told local media that the rare late blooms could be the result of this year's unusual weather, including a particularly active typhoon season.  Weathernews, a meteorological firm, said more than 300 people across Japan had reported cherry blossoms were blooming in their neighborhood, in a survey conducted last week.Local media spotted clusters of the famous pink and white blooms at several popular cherry blossom spots. Hiroyuki Wada, a tree doctor at the Flower Association of Japan, speculated that unusual weather patterns could be responsible for the blooms' surprise appearance.  He told public broadcaster NHK that violent storms had stripped trees of their leaves, which usually release a chemical that inhib...

Sapporo expected to drop out of 2026 Winter Olympic bid race In this Jan 23, 1972, file photo, members of Japan's self-defense ground forces raise Olympic Flags in Sapporo at Makomanai speed skating stadium in a rehearsal of ceremony at the official opening of the Winter Olympics. 1. The Japanese city of Sapporo is expected to stop pursuing the 2026 Winter Olympics, leaving four possible candidates as the IOC struggles to find hosts - particularly for the Winter Games. A city official said Deputy Mayor Takatohsi Machida and Japanese Olympic Committee president Tsunekazu Takeda will meet International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach on Monday.  "We haven't officially announced other items to be discussed with the IOC, however, I understand various matters might come up," city spokesman Akihiro Okumura said Friday. 2. The expected withdrawal - widely reported in Japan - isn't a surprise. It comes a week after an earthquake killed about 40 people...

1. Japan is racing to secure power supplies ahead of winter after a devastating quake left 41 people dead and damaged generating stations on the northern island of Hokkaido, where temperatures regularly drop well below zero in colder months. 2. Although the government has eased an initial 20 percent power-savings target for residential and business customers on the island of 5.3 million, Japan's trade and industry minister Hiroshige Seko has said power supplies on Hokkaido will remain tight and unspecified savings are still needed. 3. Regional utility Hokkaido Electric Power is rushing to repair broken generators and bring on idle power plants, but those efforts will come up against the brutal reality of winter in Hokkaido, where temperatures can reach as low as minus 41 Celsius (minus 42 Fahrenheit). 4.Power demand on Hokkaido in winter is typically more than a third higher than in the warmer months before the quake. "The harsh reality is that we have to ask for power ...

1. The powerful earthquake that hit Japan's popular tourist destination of Hokkaido, the country's northernmost main island, has highlighted a lack of preparedness to provide information to foreign visitors in a time of a disaster. With the number of foreign visitors expected to grow ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, the government is introducing multilingual emergency information apps and other tools, but a lot more work is needed to train people who can provide direct assistance to non-Japanese in a crisis, experts say. Hokkaido gets close to 2.8 million foreign visitors a year. 2. "The hotel staff only responded in Japanese," complained a South Korean man, who was among many such foreign visitors seeking information following the M6.7 quake that caused a massive blackout and transportation disruptions in Hokkaido on Sept 6. A Chinese man said most information posted on signs in stations and in other public areas was in Japanese and English. ...

1. A week after a powerful quake rocked Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido, people mourned the deaths of 41 people as around 1,600 others remained in shelters as of Thursday.  Self-Defense Forces members offered silent prayers at an evacuation center in the worst-hit town of Atsuma at 3:07 a.m., the same time the magnitude 6.7 quake occurred on Sept. 6, triggering landslides that engulfed homes and killed 36 of the town's residents. A total of 681 others have been injured across Hokkaido. 2. ”It's truly regrettable," 63-year-old Yasuo Sato said while looking at a mound of soil that hit the home next door belonging to his 65-year-old cousin, Masayoshi Sato, who was killed.  Yasuo Sato was taking belongings out of his own home, which was at risk of being hit by another landslide amid continued aftershocks. 3. ”It has already been a week. The victims included a colleague of mine, and it is just sad and regrettable," 57-year-old town official Masato...

What my father, RFK, means today Think of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. Each, in his own way, is firmly set in a certain era of American history. Yet as vibrant as they were at the same peak of their power and influence, none of these men could easily slip into the contemporary political world. Their leadership was unique to their time and place.  That does not ring true for my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed 50 years ago. His appearance is ever modern: the shaggy hair, the skinny ties, the suit jacket off, the shirt sleeves rolled. Beyond appearances, what is striking about RFK are the themes he returned to again and again — themes that still energize the debate and resonate in our own time.  Think of the headlines over the past few years and it is  easy to hear Robert Kennedy's voice and imagine him  speaking out in our country — on the madness of gun  violence, the shame of police brutality, the need for  com...

Why Japan has more old-fashioned music stores than anywhere else in the world 1. For many people, the days of wandering into a store, browsing the shelves, and walking out with music stored on plastic are a distant memory. In Japan, however, the CD is still king. Globally, 39% of all music sales are physical CDs and vinyl, but in Japan, the figure is double that. It helps make Japan the world’s second biggest music market, selling more than ¥254 billion ($2.44 billion) worth of music a year—most of it in the form of CDs. 2. Feeding that demand are 6,000 music stores, according to an estimate from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). To put that in context, the US is the world’s largest music market in terms of revenue, but has about 1,900 old-fashioned music stores, according to Almighty Music Marketing. Germany, the third biggest market, has only around 700 stores. 3. Japan’s odd consumer behaviour is a prime example of the Galapagos syndrome, a business ...

Step up war on plastic pollution 1. Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans poses an increasingly grave environmental hazard. Japan, which relies on the ocean for its survival, is urged to take a more proactive role in international efforts to combat the problem through recycling and cutting back on the manufacturing and use of disposable plastic products. 2. Japan, along with the United States, abstained from signing the “Ocean Plastic Charter” that was endorsed by other Group of Seven members and the European Union at the G7 summit held earlier this month in Canada. 3. The charter set a target of ensuring, in cooperation with industrial sectors, 100 percent reuse, recycling and collection of all plastic products by 2030, thus significantly reducing the volume of plastic waste.  4. The government explained that Japan was not ready for tight regulations on plastic products because it has to carefully assess the impact on people’s lives and its industries. True, ...

71-year-old woman arrested for keeping dead mother’s body in apartment for 18 months SAPPORO  - Police in Sapporo on Monday arrested a 71-year-old woman on suspicion of abandoning the body of her mother in their apartment in Kita Ward for the past 18 months. Police said Etsuko Miyoshi continued to collect the pension of her mother, Mitsu Ozawa, who died at the age of 98 in January 2017, Sankei Shimbun reported. Miyoshi was quoted by police as saying that when her mother died, she couldn’t afford to pay for a funeral. The apartment building is scheduled to be demolished later this month. Miyoshi's mother owned the apartment. After the building management company was unable to contact her for some time, a representative of the company and police visited the apartment on June 30 and discovered the remains of Miyoshi’s mother. Police said Miyoshi told them she continued to collect her mother’s pension because she needed the money to live on.

Face the reality of racism in Japan JUN 3, 2018 GIFU –  Recent events continue to suggest that discussions of racism in Japan typically prove problematic. This is largely because those discussions typically present it as a “uniquely” Western phenomenon, a matter of black and white or white and nonwhite, from which a mythic “uniquely monoracial” Japan has been spared. Rather, when the issue is broached, as it was recently following controversies provoked by blackface performances, it is dismissed as arising from Japanese racial naivete. And while a conscious antipathy may not motivate some of these acts, a more insidious implicit bias remains. A recent study of implicit bias by Matsumoto University psychologist Kazuo Mori notes that Japanese have an implicit bias against blacks, concluding that “Japanese participants showed an implicit preference for ‘white people’ over ‘black people.’ ” Mori suggests that this bias may be the product of the “media in which whites ...