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 put a damper on that.

As reported by the AP, "The Japanese government allows a hunt of about 20,000 dolphins a year, and argues that killing them — and also whales — is no different from raising cows or pigs for slaughter. Most Japanese have never eaten dolphin meat and, even in Taiji, it is not consumed regularly.

Read the rest of the story: Taiji Opens Season on Dolphins Today.

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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 Italian man in his 30s who lives in Tokyo said he filed a lawsuit against two credit card firms and a restaurant in Roppongi he had never visited after receiving account statements from the firms last fall notifying him that he spent about ¥370,000 at the restaurant.

Read the rest of the story: Credit card scam targeting foreigners on rise in Roppongi.

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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.

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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 job hunting.

“I feel like being watched. The tense feeling in a good sense makes me work more efficiently," says one employee. The initiative has been so successful so far the office plans to employ more dummies soon.

Read the rest of the story: Kyoto office employs a bunch of dummies.

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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.

All executions in Japan are carried out by hanging, and no media coverage of executions is permitted. Inmates on death row do not know when they will be executed until the last minute, while family members and lawyers are only told afterward. Along with the United States, Japan is one of the few industrialized countries that maintains capital punishment.

Despite persistent criticism by rights groups such as Amnesty International and the main Japanese bar association, there is little public outcry against capital punishment in Japan, where recent government surveys showed more than 80 percent support ratings.

Read the rest of the story: Japan gives rare tour of gallows to spur debate.

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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.

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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 the currency’s climb.

The sharp yen rise and declines in the Nikkei stock average have increased the likelihood that the Bank of Japan will further ease its monetary policy before its scheduled rate review next month, sources told Reuters.

"The dollar went to 83 yen, so the chance of intervention has increased, but it would take more than intervention," said Kiichi Murashima, economist at Citigroup Global Markets in Tokyo.

Read the rest of the story: Japan warns on intervention after yen rise.

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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 up the gallows in Tokyo to media and set up a group within the ministry to study the death penalty.

Information on the execution process is scarce in Japan, which along with the United States is one of only two Group of Eight rich countries that retain capital punishment.

Japan currently has 107 people on death row.

Read the rest of the story: Japan execution chamber opening could spark debate.

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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 up until six years ago, investigators said.

Read the rest of the story: Remains believed to be of missing elderly woman kept in son’s backpack.

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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 on other elderly residents. What they found so far has been anything but encouraging.

A woman thought to be Tokyo’s oldest, who would be 113, was last seen in the 1980s. Another woman, who would be the oldest in the world at 125, is also missing, and probably has been for a long time. When city officials tried to visit her at her registered address, they discovered that the site had been turned into a city park, in 1981.

To date, the authorities have been unable to find more than 281 Japanese who had been listed in records as 100 years old or older. Facing a growing public outcry, the country’s health minister, Akira Nagatsuma, said officials would meet with every person listed as 110 or older to verify that they are alive; Tokyo officials made the same promise for the 3,000 or so residents listed as 100 and up.

Read the rest of the story: Japan, Checking on Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone.

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