Here is a link to the prepared remarks of Prime Minister Hatoyama, which he delivered at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change:

Statement by Prime Minister Hatoyama

Occassionaly a world leader will stand up and make a speech which truly moves you. This was not such a speech… It is [...]

According to an article at Japan Today, the new DPJ controlled government is planning to establish a body that would monitor and issue ‘recommendations’ to the media to ‘rectify’ cases in which broadcasters make slanderous comments or commit other violations. This is a very worrying development.

According to the brand new Internal Affairs [...]

Prime Minister Hatoyama met on Monday with Chinese President Hu Jintao, where he apparently discussed the idea of an East Asian community, based on the European Union. I will admit that I don’t know all the ins and out of such a plan, and will be interested to learn more [...]

The Japanese Medical Society on Child Abuse and Neglect, a body of medical specialists, social workers and nurses met last month to try to bring new awareness to the issue of child abuse in Japan. Apparently there were 42,662 cases of child abuse reported in [...]

Toyota is going on the offense at the end of the year in the US, with a massive launch to their ‘Toyotathon’ marketing and sales campaign which has been a fixture for about three decades. After being the biggest selling maker under the Obama government’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ policy, Toyota believe themselves well placed to capitalize [...]

About a week and a half ago, I had the story here about the number of Japanese people aged over 100 passing 40,000. I mentioned at the time, in passing, that about 20% of all Japanese people were aged over 65.

Today, in commemoration of the annual ‘Respect for the Aged Day’ (敬老の日), the government estimates [...]

According to a Japan Times editorial today, Japan is set to increase the number of foreign students studying in Japan to around 300,000 by 2020. This represents a 250% increase over current levels (there are currently about 120,000).

The plan, hatched by a 6  ministry taskforce including the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and [...]

In its annual list of the 100 Best Global Brands, Business Week has placed two Japanese brands in the top 20, with Toyota the highest ranked at 8 (down 2 places from last year). The second placed Japanese company is Honda, up two spots to 18th. While Japan has two [...]

Today I have made some slight cosmetic changes to the site, removing the left bar to make posts easier to read, and to allow more space for some new sections that have been added to the site. Now you can simply click on the link at the top of the page to access all of [...]

If I had a dollar for every time an English student has misused the word ‘expect’… Just the other day I heard it again – ‘I expect the new government very much’. ‘Expect them to do what?’ was my inner gut reaction. But I knew what they meant, and corrected them. They expect a lot [...]