Features National
John Hofilena on May 23 2013
He planned it, and it has finally happened – 80-year-old Japanese mountaineer
Yuichiro Miura has on Thursday officially became the oldest man conquer Mount Everest, this confirmed by Nepali official and Miura's Tokyo-based support office. The amazing Miura conquered all of
Everest’s 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) in his 80th year also did this feat when he was 70, and again at 75 years old. This year, he wrests the record from Nepali climber Min Bahadur Sherchan, who did it at age 76.
The
Sapporo District Court found 42 year old Kumiko Osawa guilty of murder after she confessed to assisting her 70 year old mother to commit
suicide. Adding to her offense was the fact that she refused welfare assistance from the government after the two of them ran out of money, which led to their dire circumstances.
The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has sent a document to Japan recommending the government to do everything in its power to stop the hate speech and defamation against
"comfort women" or those who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military in World War II.
Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (
NRA) accepted and approved of an expert assessment on Wednesday which points out that the No. 2 reactor at the
Tsuruga nuclear power plant in Western Japan is built right above a tectonic fault line that is active, strengthening doubts that the facility will be able to resume operation. The acknowledgement from Japan’s nuclear regulators is a significant one, as this is the first time that the NRA has stated that a reactor is located above a fault line with a high possibility of earthquakes in the future. This assessment is likely to leave plant operators Japan Atomic Power Co. with no choice but to scrap the reactor.
Former Tokyo mayor
Shintaro Ishihara spoke out on Tuesday in defense of his co-leader of the
Nippon Ishin no kai (Japan Restoration Party) and Osaka Mayor
Toru Hashimoto’s notion of legalizing sex-related services for United States troops in Japan, saying that this view is understandable under the current circumstances. Hashimoto has been in the hot seat lately for his comments regarding “comfort women” in the Second World War and legalizing prostitution in Okinawa.
Government sources have revealed that the submarine
detected plying the waters of the contiguous zone around Minami-Daitojima island in Okinawa Prefecture on Sunday were picked up by a Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) patrol plane using a sonobuoy – a small floating sonar system that emits sound waves, and transmits its data back to the sonar operators. Using the sonobuoy, the plane was able to let the submarine know that it was being monitored.
The Stone for Peace Association of
Hiroshima, a citizen’s group based in one of the only two cities in the world that were victimized by nuclear warfare, presented the former Yugoslav autonomous region of Kosovo with a stone engraved with an image of the Buddhist goddess of mercy. The stone is an actual remnant from the 1945 atomic bombing that devastated Hiroshima, one of the paving stones for the streetcar tracks just 200m from ground zero.
Four Japanese history academics held a press conference in Busan and said that Japan’s claim over the
Takeshima Islands (known as Dokdo in
South Korea) is wrong, and flimsy at best. They represent a group that opposes Japan’s sovereignty claims over the islands that has caused much of the current tension between the two countries.
Japan's upper and lower houses of parliament finally approved on Wednesday an international treaty on child abductions, as decades of pressure from the United States and the international community finally created the result. Before today, Japan was the only member of the Group of Eight (G8) – the global group of highly-industrialized nations – that has not put into its country’s law articles of the 1980
Hague Convention – an agreement requiring nations to return abducted children to the countries where they naturally reside.
Just outside of Japan’s disaster-stricken
Fukushima Prefecture, there are people who are saying they have been denied compensation despite experiencing increased radiation levels even from living around the fringes of the nuclear disaster that was caused by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. 700 residents of the Hippo district in
Miyagi Prefecture, an area northeast of Fukushima, filed their claims on Tuesday via a government arbitration office, saying that they should at least be getting the same rates of compensation as the residents of Fukushima.
