When Toshitsugu Fujii became head of a Japanese task force on disaster response at Mount Fuji, he was confronted with a startling oversight. Japan had no plan in place to deal with a disaster in which an earthquake sparks a volcanic eruption at the country’s most famous landmark.
Fujii said a tremor “greatly increases” the chance of an eruption in a country that has experienced nearly 12,000 earthquakes since the magnitude 9.0 tremor that led to disaster on March 11, 2011.
Read the rest of the story: Japan finds another gap in …

Major Japanese firms have shuttered factories in China and urged expatriate workers on Monday to stay indoors after angry protests flared over a territorial dispute that threatened to hurt trade ties between Asias two biggest economies.
Chinas worst outbreak of anti-Japan sentiment in decades led to weekend protests and violent attacks on well-known Japanese businesses such as car-makers Toyota and Honda, forcing frightened expatriates into hiding and prompting Chinese state media to warn that trade relations could now be in jeopardy.
“Im not going out today and Ive asked my Chinese boyfriend …

Chinese President Hu Jintao said on Sunday Japan should not make a “wrong decision” over a territorial dispute when he met Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda after weeks of tension between the neighbors, media reported.
The two leaders met for 15 minutes on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation APEC summit in Vladivostok.
No talks had been scheduled, given the row over their claims to uninhabited islands known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan, but the Japanese prime minister said on Friday he would not shun a …

Japanese artist Haruhiko Kawaguchi took nearly 80 duos (most of them real-life couples) and trapped them in vacuum-sealed bags. The process called for the participants to pose and hold their breath for 10 to 20 seconds, the time it took to snap a few photographs.
Each couple needed about 5 liters of lube (at 10 times normal concentration) to ensure that their skin wouldn’t burn in the process. Reportedly, only one guy pissed his pants during the whole ordeal.
Read the rest of the story: 12 Japanese Couples Wrapped In Plastic Bags.

The Japan Coast Guard on Monday released a condensed 30-minute video of its failed attempt to prevent activists from Hong Kong from making an unauthorized landing on the Senkaku Islands on Aug. 15.
“We decided to release the video to show that the coast guard took appropriate measures against the protesters,” said Takahiro Okushima, director of the Japan Coast Guard’s Territorial Waters Guard, Security Division.
The video was edited down from about seven hours of footage that began at 11:52 a.m., when the patrol boats started transmitting footage to coast guard headquarters, …

Atsuko Maeda, who was supposed to hold a parade to see her fans before performing with AKB48 for the last time, has cancelled it due to security concerns.
With Maeda graduating on August 27th, AKB48 will be holding a special final performance at the AKB48 theater to commemorate her leaving the group. With hundreds of thousands of people applying to a lottery to get one of 250 tickets to the event, it was decided that a parade would be held in her honor for fans to see her one last time …

Anti-Japanese protests spread across China over the weekend, with the landing of Japanese activists on a disputed island on Sunday and the unfurling of Japanese flags increasing tensions between the two countries.
Protesters took to the streets in nearly a dozen Chinese cities on Saturday and Sunday in response to Japan’s detention on Wednesday and deportation on Friday of activists from Hong Kong, Macau and China. Demonstrations took place in cities up and down China’s eastern provinces, from Harbin and Shenyang in the northeast to Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the southeast, …

Masaharu Tsubokura, M.D., of the University of Tokyo, and colleagues conducted a study to gauge the level of radiation exposure to residents of the city of Minamisoma, located 14 miles north of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. “Release of radioactive material into the air, water, and soil raised concern about internal radiation exposure and the long-term risk of cancer in nearby residents,” they write.
Many residents were evacuated after the meltdown, but by August 2011, approximately half had returned. A voluntary screening program for levels of cesium, known to be representative …

Japan fell far short of its gold-medal target at the Olympics but still rejoiced Monday in a record medal haul, hailing it as a boost to the country’s recovery from last year’s quake-tsunami disaster.
“A record-high 38 medals for Japan,” blared a front-page headline in the business daily Nikkei’s evening edition, hours after the London Games closed. The previous high was 37 from Athens 2004.
But only seven medals in London were gold, with Japanese judokas bagging only one of those. The Japanese Olympic Committee had been gunning for 15 golds, hoping …

Japans Ryota Murata denied Brazil a first Olympic boxing gold medal on Saturday when he fought smart to win his countrys first in the ring for 48 years by beating middleweight Esquiva Falcao Florentino.
Falcao, whose brother Yamaguchi won bronze in the light-heavyweights, appeared to serve notice to the rest of the middleweight division when he demolished Britains Anthony Ogogo in the semi-final.
However university worker Murata, a silver medalist at last years world amateur championships, gave the aggressive Falcao a lesson in how to score points, defending expertly and catching the …