Japan’s public TV broadcaster is to resume live sumo broadcasts, after canceling coverage of July’s Nagoya tournament over a betting scandal that hit the country’s ancient sport.
NHK officials said Thursday the station will televise the Sept. 12-26 Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament as usual.
NHK did not air live broadcasts of the Nagoya tournament, saying that the betting scandal generated viewer disgust. It was the first time since 1953 that live broadcasts weren’t shown on NHK.
Read the rest of the story: NHK to resume live broadcasts of sumo.

Japan’s public pension fund, the world’s largest, will sell about 4 trillion yen ($48 billion) in assets this fiscal year to fund rising payouts as the nation’s population ages.
That follows asset sales of 720 billion yen, all in Japanese bonds, in the fiscal year ended in March, Takahiro Mitani, president of the Government Pension Investment Fund, said in an interview in Tokyo yesterday.
“Insurance premiums rise little by little every year, but it isn’t catching up with the increase in payouts,” said Mitani, a former executive director at the Bank of …

Turn on the TV in Japan and you’re bound to see someone slicing up a tuna on a cooking show while commentators ooh and aah. It’s no wonder, then, that during the current heat wave frying Tokyo, people are heading north for chills and eye candy in the form of giant fish popsicles.
The Kori no Suizokukan (Ice Aquarium) in Kesennuma, northeastern Japan, packs about 450 specimens of marine life frozen in large columns of ice bathed in blue light. Some 80 species, including saury, octopuses, crabs, and skipjack, are preserved …

One recent sweltering summer’s day, a tour bus from Tokyo pulled up at a sun-kissed beach at Atami, a Pacific coast resort southwest of the metropolis, and disgorged more than a dozen excited, iPhone-clutching young men.
The determined youngsters, paying scant attention to the bikini-clad girls frolicking on the sand, instead headed straight for a bronze statue that depicts Kanichi and Omiya, a couple from an old love story set in Atami.
The focus of the men’s attention—and of their smartphone cameras—was a tiny black and white square, a two-dimensional barcode that, …

A company employee in Nagano Prefecture calculated the value of pi to five trillion digits this month using a self-made personal computer, beating the record set by a French engineer who calculated it to about 2.7 trillion digits late last year.
To calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to an undetermined number of digits, Shigeru Kondo, a 55- year-old resident of Iida, assembled a computer with 32 terabytes of hard-drive capacity and used an application made by Alexander Yee, a 22-year-old student at a U.S. …

Former Juventus and AC Milan coach Alberto Zaccheroni was appointed to lead Japan’s national football team on Monday.
The Japan Football Association has made Zaccheroni the first Italian and the sixth foreigner to coach Japan.
The 57-year-old Zaccheroni takes over from Takeshi Okada, who stepped down after taking Japan to the round of 16 at the World Cup in South Africa.
Japan plays Paraguay and Guatemala at home on Sept. 4 and 7, with more friendlies against Argentina and South Korea scheduled in October.
Rad the rest of the story: Alberto Zaccheroni hired as …

Japan is known as the biggest consumer of tuna. Be it raw for sushi or sashimi or fried, broiled or canned, tuna is an important element of the food culture.
But concerns are growing because tuna is disappearing, and this is putting Japan in a difficult diplomatic position.
How much tuna does Japan consume annually, and how does the rest of the world feel? Following are basic questions and answers:
How many types of tuna are there?
Read the rest of the story: Does Japan’s affair with tuna mean loving it to extinction?.

A show of outlandish sculptures by a cult Japanese artist in the historic Chateau of Versailles near Paris has enraged traditionalists who say it dishonours France’s past.
From September 14 to December 12, visitors to Versailles will see eye-grabbing multicoloured statues in silver, fibreglass and metal by Takashi Murakami alongside the chateau’s ornate murals and chandeliers.
"The Chateau de Versailles is one of the greatest symbols of Western history," Murakami said in a statement on the museum’s website.
"The Versailles of my imagination… has become a kind of completely separate and unreal world," …

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 …

The hit video game series "Ryu ga Gotoku" (released in English as "Yakuza") is getting a live-action drama adaptation of its newest installment, "Kurohyou: Ryu ga Gotoku Shinshou," which is being released for the PlayStation Portable on September 22. The show will star actor Takumi Saito (29).
The video game series, which started out on the PlayStation 2 in 2005, is a mix of action and adventure set in the yakuza world. "Kurohyou" will be the franchise’s first game for a handheld console, and it was decided that it would be …