Japan’s current account surplus plunged 69.5 percent from a year earlier in April, the finance ministry said Wednesday, as the March earthquake and tsunami badly hampered factory production.
While the drop was much smaller than falls of more than 80 percent forecast by economists, it was the smallest surplus for the month of April in 26 years.
The surplus in the current account — the broadest measure of trade with the rest of the world — fell to 405.6 billion yen ($5.0 billion) in April from 1.33 trillion yen a year earlier, …

Facing a summer power crunch, some Tokyo city government employees began working an hour earlier Monday to conserve energy amid shortages caused by damage to a tsunami-hit nuclear plant.City workers on the earliest shift will start at 7:30 a.m. and be allowed to leave at 4:15 p.m.By better exploiting the early daylight hours this summer, city officials hope to use less air conditioning and less office lighting at night."It should be a good thing, and it doesnt require any cost," Tokyos outspoken Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said Friday. "I think all …

The government banned on Thursday the shipment of green tea leaves grown in four prefectures in eastern Japan after samples were found contaminated with radioactive cesium above the permitted level.
The shipment ban covers tea leaves, including dried leaves in a processing stage, harvested in parts of Tochigi, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures and all of Ibaraki Prefecture, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said.
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Japan Airlines Co., the nation’s biggest international carrier, said ticket sales in Europe and the U.S. were lagging behind forecasts and would take a “very long” time to recover from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.“The recovery of demand from Europe and North America has not met our expectations,” President Masaru Onishi said in an interview in Singapore yesterday, ahead of the International Air Transport Association annual general meeting. “We feel it’s going to be a very long, drawn out and slow recovery.”JAL and overseas carriers including United Continental Holdings …

A model presents a casual office wear during a ‘Super Cool Biz’ fashion show Wednesday, June 1, 2011. Japan’s ‘Super Cool Biz’ campaign kicked off with the government-sponsored event featuring outfits appropriate for the office yet cool enough to endure the sweltering heat. This summer may be especially brutal. Looming for Japan is a potential power crunch, the result of the March 11 tsunami crippling the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

President Barack Obama is pointing to problems in Japan and Europe as challenges for the U.S. economy, placing some blame on events abroad for a domestic recovery that is showing signs of slowing down.Government data released on Friday showed employers in May hired the fewest number of workers in eight months and U.S. unemployment rose to 9.1 percent, up from 9.0 percent in April.That bump is a political challenge for the president, whose re-election in 2012 may depend on his ability to convince voters that his economic policies have been …

It doesn’t take much to bring an automotive assembly line to a halt, according to John Mendel, CEO of Honda’s U.S. subsidiary, even “something as small as a speedometer needle.”
It’s a lesson the automaker has had driven home after the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, killing tens of thousands and all but shutting down the country’s auto industry for the better part of a month. Since then, shortages of various parts and components, some as small a speedometer needle, have forced a sharp cutback in production …

THE famous oysters of Miyagi on Japan’s northern Pacific Coast once saved the French industry from disaster, but the March tsunami has left growers on the brink of ruin.
The difficulties facing oyster growers of Matushima Bay – who lost all but 10 per cent of their breeding stock to the killer wave – is typical of the predicament for businesses across Japan.
The Naruse branch of the growers’ co-operative, which lost three of its oyster breeders in the tsunami, is battling fuel and cash shortages, and an astonishing collection of debris …

Japan asked the World Trade Organization on Wednesday to form a legal panel to decide whether Canadian provincial backing for solar and wind energy projects gives an unfair advantage to domestic equipment makers.
Japan has given up direct attempts to resolve a spat over an Ontario scheme that guarantees prices for renewable energy as long as it is generated with Canadian-made equipment, Japan’s ambassador to the WTO said in a letter to the chairman of the WTO’s disputes division.
"Consultations failed to resolve the dispute. As a result, Japan respectfully requests that …

Japan’s unemployment rate rose to 4.7 percent in April, up 0.1 percentage points from a month earlier, with figures from the disaster-hit northeast excluded, the government said Tuesday.
The number of jobless people stood at 3.09 million, down 300,000 from a year earlier, in the 11th straight month of year-on-year decline, the official data showed.
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