On Monday, Japanese auto giants and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) joined forces to set up a common system to recharge electric cars, with the hopes to create a global standard.

The growth of the electric vehicle sector has brought questions over whether zero-emission cars or the networks of recharging stations should come first.

A group of cartoonists including Tetsuya Chiba, illustrator of popular manga series “Ashita no Joe” (Tomorrow’s Joe), voiced their opposition Monday in Tokyo to a proposed ordinance revision aimed at regulating sexual imagery in comics and animations.
Arriving at the Tokyo metropolitan government, the cartoonists voiced concerns over the proposal, to be put before a vote Friday, which calls for restricting comics and animations that contain sexualized depictions of “nonexistent minors” — a controversial concept described in the draft regulation, referring to characters that people would assume to be minors.
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Earlier this year, whale hunters and environmentalists clashed in the Southern Ocean.
A high-speed environmentalist vessel, the Ady Gil, and a Japanese security vessel collided, in a culmination of weeks of tension over whale hunting.
After the incident, the captain of the damaged trimaran, Pete Bethune, boarded the Japanese ship, Shonan Maru 2, to deliver a letter of protest.
He was then held on board the vessel for just under a month, taken back to Tokyo and arrested by Japanese authorities on Friday morning.
The New Zealander is expected to be charged with trespass.

Japan-based Korean singer Iconiq (25) is making a splash and is about to be in a wave of new commercials aired in Japan. She will be in commercials for no less than seven different corporations at the same time only three months after making her debut in Japan. This is said to be a record. Even funnier is that all seven commercials will air together on TV Asahi March 13th. Some of the corporations involved are ANA, Starbucks, and Maserati. With all this momentum, her Japan debut album …

The first delivery of at least 850 canisters of high-level radioactive vitrified waste arrived Tuesday morning by ship from the U.K. in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, where it will sit in storage for decades before being buried deep underground. Antinuclear activists argue that with no local government yet willing to host a final disposal site and concern over the international security and environmental risks of transporting so much nuclear waste between the U.K. and Japan, the shipments should end.

The words “Japan, wine exporter” have a somewhat unlikely ring but that is the aim of a new organisation, Koshu of Japan, which is keen to shine an international spotlight on a grape variety that is often dismissed within its native country.
I have just made my second visit in 12 years to Yamanashi prefecture, the Bordeaux of Japan in terms of winemaking. Except it reminds me more of Switzerland than Bordeaux. Every square metre in the heavily populated Kofu basin overlooked by Mount Fuji is cosseted. Individual vineyards are tiny, …

Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan on Sunday began a three-day official visit to Ghana at the head of a 30-strong delegation. He was welcomed at Kotoka international airport by Vice President John Dramani Mahama to traditional Ashanti drumming and dance, an AFP reporter saw. The visit is at the invitation of Ghana and is aimed at boosting ties between the two countries, officials said.
The prince is expected to hold talks with President John Atta-Mills on Monday at the presidential palace, known as the Castle.
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Australian police searched two anti-whaling ships at the request of Japanese authorities on Saturday, seizing log books and videos, after activists called a halt to their turbulent harassment campaign. Police boarded the Sea Shepherd group’s Steve Irwin and Bob Barker ships as they were greeted by well-wishers in Tasmania, but refused to reveal the reasons for the search warrant. “As a result of a formal referral from Japanese authorities, the Australian Federal Police can confirm it conducted a search warrant in boarding the Steve Irwin this morning,” a police spokesman …

Japan’s government will keep a US military base on Okinawa, meeting the demands of the Obama administration, even if that means alienating a coalition partner and local people, a vice defense minister said.

Okinawan residents, who want the Marine base moved off the island, will be offered compensation in return for accepting the government’s decision, Akihisa Nagashima, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday, without elaborating. His remarks are the most definitive by a member of the government indicating that Japan will keep the facility on Okinawa.

A Japanese professor has come up with a method of delivering vaccines and drugs that he says is completely painless. Kanji Takada of Kyoto Pharmaceutical University says the device he developed uses micro needles that don’t break the dermis or second layer of skin, The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday. The needles are made out of a water-soluble polymer that dissolves when pressed into the epidermis, the very outer layer of skin.
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