Daily Japan Headlines: Thursday, Jan 12, 2012
Wall Street Journal: Honda CEO: We Were Jinxed
“We were jinxed,” Honda President Takanobu Ito told reporters at the Detroit auto show Monday. Mr. Ito said that when people hit a certain age in Japan, they have bad fortune “no matter what you do. You have to go to a shrine to get rid of it.”
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Wall Street Journal: Geithner Prods China, Japan on Iran Oil Imports
“We are in the early stages of a broad global diplomatic effort to take advantage of this new legislation to significantly intensify the pressure on Iran,” a senior U.S. official said. “We are telling them [the Chinese] what’s important to us and they are listening.”"We have a reasonable shot at getting a number of countries to wean themselves off Iranian oil.”
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BBC: Japan ‘to reduce Iran oil imports’
Japan will take “concrete steps” to reduce its oil dependency on Iran, its finance minister has announced.
The comments from Jun Azumi came after he met US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in Tokyo.
“We wish to take planned and concrete steps to further reduce this share, which now stands at 10%.”
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Chicago Tribune: Analysis: Ageing, indebted Japan holds lessons for others
Economists have generally played down the implications of Japan’s prolonged stagnation for Western economies that are now wrestling with apparently similar balance sheet recessions. These occur when firms and households are forced to reduce their excess debt by cutting consumption and investment.
But Kapur said it would be a crucial error to dismiss Japan’s malaise since 1990 as somehow reflecting specific national ‘cultural’ traits. Many other countries were displaying similar features.
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BBC: Tsunami tales win Imperial Palace poetry contest
Poems about the Japanese tsunami were among the winners at the country’s annual Imperial Palace poetry contest.
Emperor Akihito and his family attended a ceremony in Tokyo, where the 10 winning poems were read aloud.
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Telegraph: Louvre ‘courting disaster’ over plans to send works to Fukushima
The world’s most visited museum is due to send around 20 works in April to three towns in northern Japan, including Fukushima City, less than 40 miles from the site of a major nuclear power plant disaster last March triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.
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Bloomberg: Japan Builders Tout Quake-Resistant Features
“Some may think that people will refrain from buying homes after the quake, but it’s the opposite. People want to move in to apartments they deem safe.”
Tokyo’s stringent building code, which includes rubber bearings used as foundation so that seismic energy can shift from structures, helped the city’s buildings avoid major damage from the nation’s record magnitude-9 quake, though the temblor turned landfill in the Tokyo Bay area into mud, shattering pipes and disrupting gas, electricity and water supplies.
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BBC: Manhunt in Japan for first jail-breaker in two decades
Li Guolin, a Chinese national, is serving a 23-year sentence for offences including attempted murder.
He broke out wearing only his prison-issue underwear, Japanese reports say.
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UPI: Japan suicides top 30,000 for 14th year
Statistics released by the Japanese government estimate 30,513 people committed suicide in 2011, the 14th year in a row the total has exceeded 30,000.
The number of suicides for 2011 is the lowest it has been since the annual suicide count topped 30,000 in 1998.
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Daily Mail: Brain training games DO speed up your brain – or at least they’re better for you than playing Tetris
Nintendo’s Brain Training and Brain Age games sold 19 million units and became one of the biggest hits on DS – but their supposed health benefits have always been disputed.
Now a study of elderly volunteers has found that Brain Age seems to speed up brain function – when compared to a control group who played Tetris five days a week for a month.
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UPI: Japan’s oldest elephant turning 65
The oldest Asian elephant in Japan will turn 65 next month and officials at the Inokashira Park Zoo in western Tokyo say they’re planning a party for her.
The elephant, named Hanako, has been living at the zoo for more than 50 years and has never had a major disease or injury, her keepers say.
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