Hatsune Miku is a Japanese pop star who draws thousands of fans from across the world. She is tiny, has green hair and sings whatever fans want her to. Hatsune Miku is also a hologram.
Miku is a Vocaloid, or singing synthesizer, created by Crypton Future Media, whose voice was created by sampling the sound of Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita.
Reuters reported that Miku’s farewell concerts on Thursday and Friday sold out within hours of the tickets going on sale, at $76 per ticket. Her final performances were projected onto 24 packed …

One of Asia’s youngest self-made billionaires, 35-year-old Yoshikazu Tanaka looks the part of a young internet tycoon.
The Japanese founder and CEO of mobile social gaming business Gree arrived for his CNN interview wearing a hooded sweatshirt, ripped jeans and a pair bight red shoes. His personal wealth is valued at $2.2 billion so he can afford to wear whatever he wants to the office.
Gree has grown from Tanaka’s self-financed project into a company with a market value of around $7 billion. The share price is more than sevenfold what it …

It might the stuff of science fiction dreams, but a Japanese construction company has announced that it will have built a working space elevator by 2050. Where can I join the queue?
According to the The Daily Yomiuri, construction company Obayashi Corp has announced it will have built a space elevator capable of shuttling passengers 36,000 kilometers above the Earth by 2050.
The company plans to use carbon nanontubes, which are 20 times stronger than steel, to produce the cables required for the elevator. Those cables will be stretched to a counterweight …

Korehira Watanabe is one of the last 30 remaining swordsmiths in Japan having spent 40 years honing his craft. His life ambition has been to re-create a type of sword called Koto, that dates back to the Heian and Kamakura periods that spanned from 794 AD to 1333 AD, even though there is no written guide or formula for creating the sword. The challenge to hand-craft a sword without any blueprint has been an obsession of Watanabe’s since he was a child.
While there is no set formula to re-create the …

The signals have been developed by Taro Ochiai, a professor at Kyushu Sangyo University, with the first set of traffic lights installed in the southern city of Fukuoka. A second month-long test is to be started in Tokyo before the end of February.
Prof Ochiai began researching the use of light-emitting diodes in 2003, when they first began to be used in traffic lights in preference to regular light bulbs. Drivers with colour-blindness quickly reported that the LED signals were more difficult for them to discern based only on brightness as …

Three of Japan’s biggest electronics companies are to join forces in a chip-making venture, according to reports, days after a swathe of dire results from a sector struggling to compete globally.
Panasonic, which earlier said it expected to lose more than $10 billion this year, is set to hook up with Renesas Electronics and Fujitsu as they look for economies of scale in an increasingly difficult marketplace.
The three companies will spin off their system chip design and development divisions to create a new company in an effort to ensure the survival …

LOOKING OVERSEAS: Small but growing numbers of Japanese entrepreneurs are jumping into the startup scene in northern California.
FACTORS BEHIND THAT: Some venture capitalists believe last year’s earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear disaster that followed compelled many Japanese to take an increasingly uncertain future into their own hands.
AN EXAMPLE: Naoki Shibata, 30, had an executive-level position at online retailing giant Rakuten Inc. and an assistant professorship at the prestigious University of Tokyo. Last June he launched AppGrooves, an iPhone application discovery tool. He says, “If you want to reach a global market, then …

Police wiretapped mobile phones in 10 investigations last year and the eavesdropping led to the arrest of 22 people, a Justice Ministry report to the Diet showed Friday. The 10 investigations involved narcotics trafficking, underworld-conspired murder and gun possession, three of the four areas in which courts issue wiretapping warrants. All 22 arrests involved drug-trafficking cases, according to the report.The police obtained warrants for each instance of cellphone-tapping, allowing them to listen to conversations and read text messages.
Read the rest of the story: Cellphone taps resulted in 22 arrests last …

Given the huge hurdles Facebook has in China where Internet censorship has left it with near zero penetration, the giant tech company is turning instead to markets like India, Japan and South Korea to spur its growth in Asia.
Details scattered throughout its IPO prospectus filed Wednesday show the social networking site intends to grow its user base in India, Japan and South Korea by “continuing marketing and user acquisition efforts and enhancing products including mobile apps in order to make Facebook more accessible.
”Facebook’s penetration rate in India is about 20% …

Japan says it will soon require atomic reactors to be shut down after 40 years of use to improve safety following the nuclear crisis set off by last years tsunami.
Concern about aging reactors has been growing because the three units at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan that went into meltdown following the tsunami in March were built starting in 1967. Among other reactors at least 40 years old are those at the Tsuruga and Mihama plants in central Japan, which were built starting in 1970.
Many more of the …