Daily Japan Headlines: Tuesday, Jan 3, 2012
Photo Source: Bloomberg.
Bloomberg: Wendy’s Adds $16 Foie Gras Burger in Second Bet on Japan
Wendy’s Co., the third-biggest U.S. fast-food chain, added goose-liver pate and truffles to burgers as it invests as much as $200 million on a return to Japan two years after leaving the country.
The Japan Premium sandwich sells for 1,280 yen ($16) at Wendy’s in Tokyo’s Omotesando luxury shopping district, the first of a targeted 100 shops. “We think the fast-food market here is ready for something different,” Ernest Higa, chief executive officer of Wendy’s Japan LLC, said in an interview at the restaurant’s opening yesterday.
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Reuters: Japan PM eyes election if tax bills don’t pass: report
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda wants to call a snap general election if parliament does not approve bills needed for a sales tax increase, the Sankei newspaper reported Tuesday.
Japan is saddled with public debt twice the size of its $5 trillion economy and Noda wants to double the sales tax to 10 percent by October 2015 to help fund its ballooning social welfare programs.
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Market Watch: Japan IMF stress-test results coming soon: report
Japanese banks could face pressure to expand their capital buffers, depending on stress test results to be disclosed as early as this summer by the International Monetary Fund, the Nikkei reported in its Tuesday morning edition.
The tests will simulate how banks’ finances would stand up under a variety of scenarios, such as fallout from the euro-zone debt crisis, weak economic growth or a double-dip recession, the Nikkei reported.
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Japan Times: Japanese must tap their ‘inner Israeli’
Cultural traits aside, however, at a macro level Japan and Israel share a common core: Both nations possess few natural resources but their people. By effective deployment of their human resources, both rose from deprivation to prosperity in, historically speaking, the blink of an eye, leaving many other, seemingly more amply endowed, countries trailing far behind. Japan and Israel both live or die on their wits alone.
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San Francisco Chronicle: Japan ‘mancession’ as jobs increasingly go to women
Forty-two percent of people employed in 2010 were women, the highest share since the Labor Ministry made comparable data available in 1973, when the figure was 38.5 percent.
Manufacturing, where men outnumber women by more than 2-to-1, is still Japan’s largest employer, accounting for about 16 percent of its 62.5 million workers. In construction, the ratio of men to women is 6-to-1. Since October 2008, the former shrank payrolls by 9 percent and the latter by 11 percent. Meanwhile, the health care workforce will grow 32 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to Works Institute.
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AFP: Japanese politicians land on disputed isles
The group from the Ishigaki municipal assembly in Okinawa in the south of Japan landed on the uninhabited islets, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, in the morning, Kyodo news agency said.
Conservative Japanese politicians, both at local and national levels, have used the territorial dispute to take more hardline approaches with China, as Beijing expands its naval assertiveness.
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Asia News Net: Japan working on defensive cyberweapon
Japan’s defence ministry is in the process of developing a computer virus capable of tracking, identifying and disabling sources of cyber-attacks. The development of the virtual cyberweapon was launched in 2008. Since then, the weapon has been tested in a closed network environment.
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Daily Mail: New ‘silent camera’ apps cause plague of voyeurism in Japan – and some are on sale in West
Most smartphone cameras have a built-in shutter noise to prevent the camera being used to take pictures without people’s consent.
But a new wave of ‘silent’ apps – some specifically designed for voyeurism – have been blamed for a huge rise in illicit photography in Japan.
There were 1,741 incidents last year, according to a report in Mercury News, an increase of 60 per cent on the figure five years ago.
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BBC Video: South Korea’s K-pop culture growing in Japan
South Korea’s K-pop music has overtaken Japanese music as the industry’s most popular genre in the country.
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Yahoo! News: Japan’s Shinji Kagawa willing to put hand up for 2012 London Olympics
Samurai Blue superstar Shinji Kagawa says he will prepare himself to be available for selection for his country at the 2012 London Olympics.
The 22-year-old Borussia Dortmund midfielder hasn’t featured in Olympic qualifying for Takashi Sekizuka’s Under-23 side but could be considered for the London games.
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Tech Crunch: Sleep Buster: Japanese Company Develops Anti-Sleep Driver Seat Sheet
The Sleep Buster measures the driver’s bio signals every 18 seconds and can warn drivers about 10 minutes before they fall asleep – enough time to find a place to rest (and to prevent possible accidents).
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