Japan | featured news

After decades of a virtual one-party state, the Japanese now are confronting what a change of power would actually mean.

All players and staff of the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team will be tested for the H1N1 virus after two players and a coach contracted the flu, the Japanese Pacific League team said Wednesday.

Two strong earthquakes hit between Japan's southernmost islands and the coast of Taiwan on Monday, both briefly prompting tsunami warnings, the Japanese Meteorological Agency said.

The country's return to growth is a strong signal that a corner has been turned in the global crisis.

At least nine people have been killed while 10 others are missing after Typhoon Etau slammed into western Japan, bringing heavy rain and triggering floods and landslides. Japan's metereological agency said Etau packing winds of up to 108kph was moving ...

Japan sees its unemployment reach a six-year high, at 5.4%, with job availability at a new low, in a further sign of the slowdown.

The number of centenarians already has jumped from an estimated few thousand in 1950 to more than 340,000 worldwide today, with the highest concentrations in the U.S. and Japan, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.

Police say 10 climbers have died on two mountains in northern Japan.

Japan's embattled prime minister has decided to dissolve parliament and call general elections for next month, a news reports said Monday, after his party was defeated in a Tokyo municipal poll considered a barometer of voter sentiment.

Depicted by experts as the candidate favored by the United States and other wealthy nations, Yukiya Amano favors a strict approach toward Iran.