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The dollar has risen above 100 yen for the first time in more than four years as currency traders persist in selling the Japanese currency in reaction to Tokyo's aggressive credit-easing moves.

China said on Monday that Japan must face up to history and respect the feelings of those who were victims of wartime aggression, after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made an offering to a shrine seen as a symbol of Japan's former militarism.

Japanese man Jiroemon Kimura, who holds the distinction of being the world's oldest living person, is celebrating his 116th birthday on Friday.

... Though it remains a highly unlikely scenario, Japanese officials have long feared that if North Korea ever decides to play its nuclear card it has not only the means but several potential motives for launching an attack on Tokyo or major U.S. military installations on Japan's main island. And while a conventional missile attack is far more likely, Tokyo is taking North Korea's nuclear rhetoric seriously.

Japan is making a sweeping shift in its monetary policy, aiming to spur inflation and get the world's third-largest economy out of a long, debilitating slump. Bowing to demands from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for more aggressive monetary easing, the Bank of Japan announced Thursday a policy overhaul intended to double the money supply and achieve a 2 percent inflation target at the "earliest possible time, with a time horizon of about two years."

This week's power outage at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant may have been caused by a rat Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, says a 15-centimeter (6-inch) rat was found dead Wednesday near a switchboard. He says the rat may be linked to the power failure, but that more investigation is needed to be sure.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - In a break from months of saber rattling, China under new President Xi Jinping appears to be moderating its approach to a potentially explosive territorial dispute with Japan and taking measures to prevent accidental conflict.

If the extraction process is successful, it could provide enough energy to meet the country’s gas consumption needs for 14 years, experts say.

North Korea has plenty of military firepower even if its threat this week of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States is a hollow one, with South Korea most at risk from the isolated regime's artillery and rockets.

What do you buy the nation that already seems to have everything? That is the question facing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he aims to spend more than $100 billion on infrastructure in the next 15 months to help revive his country's economy. But with its gleaming bullet trains, jungles of elevated highways and strings of man-made islands, ultra-modern Japan doesn't appear to want for much.