A high-profile mudslinging battle is raging at the very top of Japan’s oldest and arguably most popular professional baseball club, pitching a powerful media shogun against a former reporter.
Hidetoshi Kiyotake, who was fired as general manager of the Yomiuri Giants last week after criticising the club’s reputedly untouchable chairman, said on Friday he would take legal action against his sacking, possibly next month.
"My dismissal is illegal and unjust and was carried out as a means to cover up a breach of compliance and as a retaliatory measure against me," the …

A Japanese government panel will propose mandatory appointments of outside directors on boards of large firms in the hope of averting the kind of accounting scandal that has engulfed Olympus.
But expectations of meaningful change are not high, and experts say the process in which companies pick outside directors may also need regulatory adjustment.
The British ex-CEO of Olympus, Michael Woodford, emerged from a meeting of directors on Friday convinced its board would eventually quit.
Read the rest of the story: Japan May Force Big Firms To Appoint Outside Directors.

By 2030, Japan is projected to go from today’s 5.9 persons in the working-age labor pool supporting each retiree, to 1.9 workers per retiree (see Figure 1). In essence, this translates to a three-fold increase of pressure on the workforce just to support the population base at that time. This issue for Japan, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision study, is higher than most but is followed by Europe, and the US. Even China faces an increasing pressure as we approach 2050.
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Billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s trip to a Japanese plant today may “shine a light” on investment opportunities in a nation hampered by the March earthquake and the global market rout.
Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is visiting Japan for the first time to tour Tungaloy Corp.’s plant in Fukushima prefecture after canceling his trip in March when the country was hit by a record earthquake. Iscar Metalworking Cos., an Israeli company that was Berkshire’s largest acquisition of a non-U.S. firm, in 2008 bought a 71.5 percent stake in Tungaloy, which …

Michael Woodford, the former chief executive of Olympus admits to being apprehensive as he packs his bags to return to Japan for the first time since blowing the cover off one of the countrys most high-profile corporate scandals.
"It is a little scary to go back but I have started on this journey and plan to finish it," he wrote in an email copied to Reuters on Tuesday.
Fired last month for demanding to know why the board had approved around $1.3 billion worth of obscure fees and deals, the British Olympus …

The Japanese say they suffer from an economic disease called "structural pessimism." Overseas too, there is a tendency to see Japan as a harbinger of all that is doomed in the economies of the eurozone and America — even though figures released last week show that its economy grew by an annualized 6 percent in the third quarter, rebounding quickly from the March tsunami and nuclear disaster.
Look dispassionately at Japans economic performance over the past 10 years, though, and "the second lost decade," if not the first, is a misnomer. …

Warren Buffett is making the trip to Japan that he planned, and postponed, last March.
He had been scheduled to attend a “completion ceremony” on March 22 for a new Tungaloy plant in Fukushima Prefecture.
Tungaloy is owned by Berkshire subsidiary Iscar, a toolmaker headquartered in Israel.
On March 11, the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the area, prompting Buffett to put off his trip.
Read the rest of the story: Warren Buffett Going to Japan for Plant Tour.

EVENING was falling in the old Japanese capital of Kyoto, and I was tucking myself into a container slightly larger than a refrigerator. I pulled down the shade and, after a bit of contorting, lay down, the wall a few inches from my feet. It was a dainty little space, about 3 ¼ feet wide and 6 ½ feet long, charmingly traditional with rice-paper latticework and two woven-reed mats. I felt like an origami crane as I folded my 6-foot-2-inch frame into this “tatami capsule.”
The eight units at Capsule Ryokan …

The strong yen is forcing Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor to consider changes in production plans and alliance strategies, the top executives of both Japanese automakers said Thursday.
The yen, which hit a record high against the dollar in late October, has undercut profits for Toyota and Nissan, which both build vehicles in Japan for overseas markets.
To offset the strong yen, Toyota may “deepen alliances” with suppliers and dealers, Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, said during the opening of a Toyota plant in Mississippi that will build Corolla cars now being …

Japan called on Germany on Friday to step up and help plug the widening hole in Europe’s finances, saying Berlin should play a leading role in creating a debt "firewall".
Finance Minister Jun Azumi said the continent’s largest economy needed to do more if Europe was to get out of the downward spiral of debt that is threatening to tip the global economy into recession.
"It is important for Germany to (play) a central role in creating a firm funding scheme that we can refer to as a firewall," Azumi told a …