Nipponica

Japan Airlines (JAL) and flag carrier Garuda Indonesia will soon bolster their business tie-up by launching a revenue-sharing arrangement to maximize earnings on routes, Nikkei has learned.

JAL and Garuda, which have been in a code-sharing agreement since 2018, will enter into a joint venture. The two sides will coordinate schedules and fares, providing passengers with more convenient connections.

When you pick up a Japanese text written before 1945, the language used in it will likely look different to what you’re used to, and that’s the Japanese you’ll need to tackle in order to read Akutagawa, who is considered by many to be the greatest writer in Japanese history. He even has a literary prize named after him — the 171st 芥川龍之介賞 (Akutagawa Ryūnosuke-shō) was jointly awarded Wednesday to Sanzo K. Matsunaga and Aki Asahina for their works "Bari Sanko" and "Sanshouo no Shijuku-nichi," respectively.

To be able to read this work, it will first be necessary to understand the differences between prewar and postwar literature. One major difference is the aforementioned use of 旧漢字 — however, modern editions of books will always replace these old characters with their modern equivalents. For example, in an old edition of “Kappa,” the “並” in 人並 (hitonami, ordinary) may have been its 旧漢字 equivalent, “竝.” Fortunately, there is no need to have to read these old characters.

Interesting story about the evolution of written Japanese and one of the nation's most treasured authors.

A total of 900 copies of the "Guidebook for Foreign Residents" have been published in English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese and simple Japanese. The simple Japanese version has furigana readings for all of the kanji characters, which the city's Multicultural Affairs Division says it expects foreign residents not covered by the other five language versions will be able to use.

It is good that local governments are putting things like this together. Perhaps bits of it more general can be 'open sourced' for other municipalities to create similar guides for their residents.

Over a year has passed since the PDAS-X06 unmanned experimental aircraft, part of a space travel project, crashed into the sea off Shimojishima Airport in the city of Miyakojima, Okinawa Prefecture.

PD Aerospace, the Nagoya-based developer of the aircraft, aims to realize space travel by manned spacecraft from the airport under the Shimojishima Spaceport Project, which was signed between the company and Okinawa Prefecture in September 2020.

Under the project, the company’s spacecraft, which is designed to fly to an altitude of 100 kilometers, will allow passengers to experience a state of weightlessness for about five minutes. Originally, the company had planned to launch space travel in 2025, sending 100 passengers to space that year and gradually increasing capacity to 1,000 by 2030.

With this story and the previous one about Hokkaido Spaceport, Japanese industry is making up for lost time in the new space race. While JAXA is far from a small player in the industry, it is small in comparison to the legacy space states. But, experimentation like this could be vital to the next generation of spacecraft and there could be a breakthrough in the testing on Miyako.

Located on the Pacific coast, Taiki, with 5,300 people, is home to the Hokkaido Spaceport (HOSPO), billed as Asia’s first privately operated spaceport, which the town first proposed nearly 40 years ago.

Since 2008, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been carrying out experiments involving scientific balloon, aeronautical technology and the Hayabusa2 laser altimeter at HOSPO following the signing of an agreement with the town.

But now, HOSPO is aiming to become one of Japan’s major domestic spaceports for launching satellite-equipped rockets and spacecraft as well as for the aerospace industry to conduct research and development.

In the future, convenience stores may become the new base for crane games. Lawson hopes that "people will be able to casually enjoy playing the games at their local convenience stores nationwide." It plans to expand its crane game services by offering original prizes that can only be obtained at the stores where the games are installed and by linking the games to campaigns.

This weblog is slowing turning into a crane game news site. At least this will give me a reason to go to Lawson.

In the meantime, determining a tsunami’s arrival time on shore could still prove to be an essential part of tsunami warning systems, given the density of the cable network in the Pacific Ocean.

“Optical fiber cable is everywhere offshore,” Aoki says, while noting that the network is far less developed on the Sea of Japan side given political sensitivities with Japan’s neighbors. “Using optical cable is a promising tool to quickly understand the arrival time of tsunami.”

This is a very innovative idea to leverage existing data infrastructure to dramatically increase seismic tracking. Also an interesting history of the current system of seismographs that power Japan's earthquake & tsunami early warning system.

The Mainichi Newspapers Co. will start delivering a newsletter in Japanese titled "Mainichi Shimbun nyusu de manabu eigo" (Learning English through Mainichi Shimbun news) on July 24. It will feature a selection of Mainichi Shimbun articles that have English translations -- in other words, the Japanese originals of The Mainichi's English-language pieces.

He was arrested Sunday when his ship docked in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, a police statement said. He later appeared before a district court to look into a request to detain him pending a decision on his possible extradition to Japan, the statement said.

He was detained in Germany in 2012 on a Costa Rican extradition warrant but skipped bail after learning that he was also sought for extradition by Japan, which has accused him of endangering whalers’ lives during operations in the Antarctic Ocean. He has since lived in countries including France and the United States.