As part of an escalating diplomatic dispute, South Korea announced on Thursday that it would end the sharing of military intelligence with Japan. The rift between the two nations, usually mediated by US influence, has widened in recent months and has led to a trade war in the Pacific. Tensions were first sparked in this exchange by South Korean court rulings that demanded reparations from Japanese companies that made use of Korean forced labor during the Japanese occupation of Korea in World War Two. Japan largely avoids acknowledging the crimes…
The Japanese government has given the go-ahead to the University of Tokyo to conduct experiments on human-animal hybirds, which may now be carried to term. Currently, on the international stage, hybrid embryos are not allowed to develop for more than 14 days. In March, Japan was the first country to remove such restrictions. The first experiment of its kind to be approved will involve human cells grown in mouse and rat embryos. According to the experiment lead, geneticist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, there will be no attempts to bring embryos to term…
As votes have been tallied in Japanese parliamentary elections, it appears Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has fallen below the supermajority threshold needed to pursue their plans of changing the country’s constitution. Abe’s coalition, consisting of Abe’s own Liberal Democratic Party and the Komeito party, previously held a supermajority in the lower house of the Japanese government. They sought the same control in the upper house, the House of Councillors, to allow consitutional reforms to be pushed through. The current election had 124 seats in contention, of which the LDP…
A series of scandals in the Japanese entertainment community have centered on comedians performing off-the-books shows for groups tied to organized crime. Japanese entertainment company Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. suspended several of its comedians in June due to their receiving pay from such groups without involving the agency. Many comedians, however, rely on these sometimes-shady performances to make a living, as the fees taken by the entertainment agency for arranging ‘legitimate’ performances is exorbitant. Once a comedian has become widely-known, it is impossible to take side jobs in the public eye…