Hamaoka nuclear plant sits right atop the Nankai Trough megaquake zone. Its operator, Chubu Electric, shrank the key seismic-safety figure the plant is built against, and kept altering data even after regulators opened a probe, rewriting 69 of 225 datasets. On July 1 the NRA called it fabrication and a cover-up. The real test isn't the reactor's engineering; it's whether Japan's post-Fukushima watchdog has teeth.
Japan is rewriting its seed law to add ten years to breeders' rights and let officials block exports even before a variety is registered. We unpack the new bill now in the upper house, the suspected leak of Ehime's premium citrus to China, and why the 2020 version left a hole that fruit pirates walked right through.
A nine-story mosque near Tokyo's Okachimachi Station became a national flashpoint after one post on X. But it's a rebuild of a facility that has served the area since 2008. A calm look at the jewelry district's history of coexistence and Japan's distance from Islam.
Japan estimates the leak of its Shine Muscat grape to China and South Korea costs about $120 million a year. We unpack how a missed registration deadline, a strawberry precedent and a too-late seed law left one of Japan's best fruits unprotected abroad.
Japan's heart-transplant society is studying transplants from cardiac-death donors. Why now, in a country that donates at one-fortieth the US rate? Inside the 1968 scandal, the death-view gap, and the ethics of restarting a stopped heart.
In greater Tokyo, families now wait one to two weeks to cremate the dead. As Japan's annual deaths head for a 2040 peak, new crematoriums stall on local opposition while a private near-monopoly drives up prices in the capital's 23 wards. A look at the limits of death-care infrastructure in the world's oldest society.
Japan's antitrust regulator raided six major ice cream makers over an alleged price-fixing cartel. Among them: Akagi Nyugyo, the maker of Garigari-kun, a company beloved for theatrically apologizing over a 10-yen price increase. Here is what the probe alleges and why it stings.
Japan's Koroyawa floor stays hard when you walk and softens only when you fall. Science Tokyo proved it prevents elderly hip fractures using a world-first simulation built from a real patient's CT data.
From October 2026, Japan requires every employer to shield staff from abusive customers. Inside the 'customer is a god' myth, the front-line toll, and why most countries lack the word.
Japan's food exports hit a record 1.7 trillion yen in 2025, a 13th straight high, while its calorie-based self-sufficiency stays at 38%. Why both are true: wagyu, green tea, the 27% feed rate and the 64% production-value figure, explained for global readers.
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare says about 7.5 million internal Microsoft Teams messages were erased after a Toshiba maintenance error. Nearly three years of data vanished, and some records that count as official documents cannot be recovered.
