Each year in early September, Japan opens season on dolphins, and today marks the start of the season in Taiji, a now notorious place for slaughtering cetaceans thanks to the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove. And of course, activist Ric O’Barry is on the move. He delivered a petition to the US Embassy in Tokyo signed by 1.7 million people from 155 countries demanding an end to the hunt. The embassy wasn’t his first destination — the Japanese fisheries agency was. But death threats from a group known for violence kinda …

Foreigners who visit restaurants and bars in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district are increasingly becoming the targets of credit card fraud in which they are charged for payments they did not make.
According to Azabu Police Station, which oversees the district, it has received more than 100 consultation requests from foreigners over such scams since last year, mostly involving people from Europe and the United States.
The number of Chinese tourists visiting the area has been sharply on the rise recently and they could also become targets of such fraud, the police said.
An …

Wild monkeys caused injuries to 43 people from Aug. 22 to Aug. 25 in the neighboring Shizuoka Prefecture cities of Mishima and Susono. Reports of monkey sightings in areas of Mishima including residential communities near the Hakone mountain range began coming to authorities in June. From Aug. 22 to Aug. 24, 26 people were reported to have been attacked by monkeys. On Aug. 24, the city set up a task force to try to capture the monkeys.

NHK reported this week that a Kyoto prefecture public relations office that deals with complaints and citizen requests is using dummies to increase work efficiency.
The five upper-body-only mannequins sit on the staff desks facing the employees to ensure they don’t relax. Each is given a name, age, gender and occupation. Yoshiko Naniwano, for example, is a 66-year-old lady from Osaka who came to visit Kyoto for sightseeing. She has some complaints to make. Another is a 32-year-old woman raising her kids. And there’s a 24-year-old graduate student who is …

Japan opened up the secretive world of its capital punishment system to the public Friday, offering journalists a rare tour of Tokyo’s main gallows in an effort to stoke debate about a practice widely supported here.

The victim, a 22-year-old woman, realized her underpants were missing from a drying tumbler in a coin laundromat in Fukuoka, western Japan.
When she saw Hirano get into a car parked outside, she reported the licence plate number to police, Kyodo News reported.
"At first glance, I knew ‘she’ was a ‘he,’" she reportedly told police.
via Japan blind-school teacher in drag arrested for panty theft.

Japan’s finance minister further sharpened his rhetoric on the yen’s steep gains after the Nikkei newspaper reported Japan may consider selling the yen in unilateral intervention if speculators drive up the currency.
Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda told reporters he would respond appropriately as needed, an expression he has not used so far in his campaign to talk the currency down.
The yen rose to a 15-year high against the dollar and a nine-year peak against the euro on Tuesday amid fears the global economy is slowing, testing Japanese authorities’ resolve to stem …

Japanese Justice Minister Keiko Chiba’s decision to allow the media a rare look at an execution chamber this month could spark public debate in a country where a hefty majority supports retaining the death penalty.
Chiba, who used to be a member of a lawmakers’ group opposing capital punishment, had not signed off any executions since she took power last September, but suddenly did so in July. She did not give specific reasons for her move.
But she took the unusual step of attending the hangings, and then said she would open …

Remains believed to be those of a missing woman, who would have been aged 104 if she were alive, have been found in a backpack at her son’s apartment in Tokyo’s Ota Ward after he admitted to the local authorities that his mother died about nine years ago, police said Friday.
The 64-year-old son of Kikue Mitsuishi initially told ward officials, who are trying to confirm the whereabouts of missing elderly people in the ward, that his mother was in Niigata Prefecture.
He has also admitted to having received his mother’s pension …

Japan has long boasted of having many of the world’s oldest people — testament, many here say, to a society with a superior diet and a commitment to its elderly that is unrivaled in the West.
That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said.
Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to check …