Sports
Ida Torres on Apr 30 2013
A movie screenplay writer couldn't have written it better. A day after announcing his retirement from competitive
judo, former world champion Takamasa Anai captured the All Japan Judo Championship title, defeating Hisayoshi Harasawa. Anai said he was "shocked" with his
win, but will still retire after this tournament.
Former world
judo champion Takamasa Anai announced over the weekend that Monday's competition at the All Japan Judo Championship in Tokyo would be his last, as afterwards he was officially retiring. The 28 year old, 100 kilogram (220 pounds)-category judoka said when explaining his decision that even before getting to the 2012 London Olympics, the heavy training had left him both mentally and physically exhausted.
When reporters recently asked Japanese figure skating champion
Mao Asada about possible retirement in the near future, she responded that her current intentions are to step down from competition after the 2014 Winter Olympics, hosted in Sochi, Russia. The women's world champion in 2008 and 2010, 22 year old Asada took home the silver medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, finishing in second place after South Korea's Kim Yu-Na.
Howard Stringer, the Welsh-born American who became the first foreign president of Japanese electronics and entertainment giant
Sony, has announced that he will be retiring as chairman of the company in June. On Friday in a speech before the Japan Society in New York, he made known that he was calling it quits with the company he fought so hard to bring together and stabilize.
Sports
Cherrie Lou Billones on Feb 5 2013
Two-time double Olympic gold medalist
Kosuke Kitajima said on Monday, February 4, that he is not set to retire any time soon. He’s definitely got one more season on him… at least. The 30-year-old said that he wants to enjoy swimming this year. “I want to keep swimming until I've had absolutely enough,” he said. Despite not getting the
three-peat double gold medals in London 2012, he was still very much instrumental in taking home the silver in the 4×100-meter medley relay for his country.
In a move that has left many, especially residents of the
Fukushima Prefecture town of Futaba, at a loss for words, Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa handed in a letter of resignation to the secretariat of the
Futaba Municipal Assembly yesterday, January 23. Idogawa then went before the assembled senior town officials at 4:30 in the afternoon of that same day to announce his decision. Based on the Local Autonomy Law, his resignation becomes fully effective after 20 days from submission of the
resignation letter. He is the first mayor of a municipality inside a nuclear evacuation zone to give up his post.
Teachers in different prefectures across Japan are retiring in droves just months before their original retirement dates in order to avoid the cuts on retirement allowances being
imposed by prefectural governments.
Business
Adam Westlake on Jan 17 2013
The financially troubled
Renesas Electronics, a Japanese computer chip maker, revealed on Thursday that it would be eliminating another 3,000 jobs as part of its ongoing cost-cutting measures. Adding to the more than
10,000 job cuts already planned, the addition 3,000 are said to be through early retirement programs in accordance with labor unions.
As the
Japan Coast Guard continues to lose its ability to effectively patrol and work in other parts of Japan due to
repeated entries into territorial waters by Chinese ships near the Senkaku Islands, a new plan has come about that involves using older, end-of-life patrol vessels with retired guardsmen. As China maintains its claims to the uninhabited islands, calling them Diaoyu, a senior coast guard official says they cannot continue the same pattern of incursions over the long-term.
Baseball's Hideki Matsui, the Japanese outfielder that was dubbed "Godzilla" in the U.S., has announced his retirement from the sport, bringing an end to a 20-year career. At 38 years old, Matsui was last playing with the Tampa Bay Rays, but the former New York Yankee has spent the last two decades playing ball in both the West, and in Japan for the Yomiuri Giants.
