Japan | featured news

The Manmohan Singh government gives pride of place in its foreign policy to countries with the ways and means to transform India. The leader of the pack today, in a typically understated fashion, is Japan. The story goes back to the late 1990s.

After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player. The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan.

Toyota is recalling 1.53 million Lexus, Avalon and other models, mostly in the U.S. and Japan, for brake fluid and fuel pump problems, the latest in a string of quality problems for the world's No. 1 automaker.

The tension between China and Japan is at its all time high during the present times. On 16 October 2010 a large number of protesters came out on the roads in central city of China, Chengdu, shouting slogans against Japan.

Richard Heck of the U.S. and Ei-Ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki of Japan are honored for developing a key synthetic technique to make complex organic molecules used in medicine and electronics. Two Japanese and an American who developed a key synthetic technique for making complex organic molecules used in medicine, agriculture and electronics have been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Japan’s central bank has cut its key interest rate to a range of zero to 0.1 percent, effectively introducing a zero interest rate policy.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has told his Japanese counterpart Naoto Kan that a disputed stretch of islands in the East China Sea belonged to China, state media said.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan rejected China’s demand that Tokyo apologize for the arrest of a Chinese trawler captain.

China demands an apology from Japan following the return of a fishing boat captain who was detained for two weeks.

Prosecutors in Japan said Friday they would release the captain of a Chinese fishing vessel whose detention after a collision set off a dispute between the two nations.