Nipponica

Couche-Tard has yet to lay out anything about this deal, from a per-share offer to a demonstration of how it intends to manage 7-Eleven better than its current custodians. And though the suggestion that the chain is a critical piece of national infrastructure like nuclear plants might be opportunistic, 7-Eleven has more value than simply its worth to shareholders.

The konbini style stores like 7 are a unique gem that is truly Japan. I do worry that a foreign takeover would tarnish their utility.

Foreign nationals in Japan earn less than their Japanese counterparts even after controlling for such factors as education and experience, according to a recent government report covering an area at the center of intense policy debate.

The Cabinet Office's economic white paper for fiscal 2024 includes for the first time a section focusing specifically on Japan's more than 2 million foreign workers, finding that they earn 28% less than Japanese nationals.

This owes in large part to demographic differences, with many Japanese workers being in their 40s to 50s while their foreign counterparts skew younger, often in their 20s, and have less experience. But even after adjusting for age, education, and other characteristics of individual workers or workplaces, the paper still found a 7% gap that cannot otherwise be explained.

Japan’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday began its first full-scale U.S. base relocation work on the Oura Bay side of the Henoko coastal area in the city of Nago, Okinawa Prefecture.

The work, which involves the construction of seawalls on the Oura Bay side with soft ground, is part of the project to build a replacement facility for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Futenma air station in the Okinawa city of Ginowan. The ministry plans to fill in the area surrounded by the seawalls with soil.

The museum in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, is located inside a renovated old factory built in 1969, where the gaming giant began life making Western-style and Japanese playing cards and later repaired consoles.

The company on Tuesday also released a video of Shigeru Miyamoto, the renowned creator of Super Mario Bros and other famous games, giving a sneak preview of what's inside.

"The Nintendo Museum is a place where visitors can learn about Nintendo's commitment to manufacturing that places importance on play and originality," Miyamoto said in the clip.

Booking flight now.

Japanese convenience store operator Lawson Inc. has started requesting staff to wear a badge if they can speak a foreign language, aiming to cater to an increase in overseas visitors, the company said Tuesday.

The badge covers seven languages -- English, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Nepali. Lawson said it chose them as the most commonly spoken by foreign tourists and based on the nationalities of Lawson staffers. Wearing a badge will be voluntary.

This is a great idea to help assist those not comfortable in Japanese and to reward employees of Lawson to invest in language studies. I've seen these kind of language badges elsewhere and they do help foster inclusiveness in multicultural settings.

In Japan, which is made up of just 2.66% foreign nationals, there is no such named conceit for the Japanese people or for the foreign population.

Still, just because there’s no recognizable “Japanese dream” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And as is increasingly apparent, the country needs a considerable increase in skills and talent from abroad to address its depopulation problem.

This is a great essay about the stories of some recent immigrants to Japan and how they chose coming here best choice for their future. The Japanese Dream is real but can be difficult to achieve unless you really work hard to integrate, compromise, and understand that it is a give-and-take process. Japan needs a part of you before it will take you in.

A Mexican man was found to have landed on one of the Senkaku Islands in Ishigaki, Okinawa Prefecture, on Friday, after apparently drifting in a canoe, the Japan Coast Guard said.

The man was picked up by a helicopter and taken to a hospital in the prefecture. He was quoted as saying that he had been drifted after leaving Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island, by canoe.

A new challenger enters the ring...

The photos, found among previously unarranged materials, capture scenes such as the bustling black market in front of Hiroshima Station, streetcars in the process of being restored and houses that began to appear among the ruins of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing. These images document the period when people were beginning to take steps toward the city's reconstruction and recovery after its complete destruction.

The pictures include three shots taken in September 1945 and seven taken in February 1946. With cooperation from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and experts, the locations of all but two of the September 1945 shots were identified. There were no records of the names of the reporters who took the pictures.

The National Diet Library Law requires publishers and others to deposit publications to the library when they are released. When the law was revised in 2000, commercially available video games were included in the deposit system.

The library in June 2022 started a program to allow visitors to play some of the games, about 3,300 title, in its collection on a trial basis. However, due partly to a lack of advertisement, there have been only 16 instances of a video game being played in the about two years until Jul7 27. The program limits the use of video games to research and study, and the library checks how the user plans to publicize the results of the play session.

After reading the headline, I reflexively started to buy a ticket to Tokyo to take up the Diet Library's offer of an afternoon of GTA: Vice City. However, my hopes were dashed when the use for the archive was research. Shame.

Japanese government workers will survey an uninhabited southwest Alaskan island from Monday to pave the way for the first recovery in over 70 years of remains of World War II soldiers who died fighting U.S. forces there.

Some 2,600 Japanese soldiers died on Attu Island in May 1943, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in a doomed attempt to hold the northern Pacific island, captured in June 1942, from over 10,000 U.S. personnel.

Remains of around 320 soldiers were recovered in 1953, but later inspections in 2007 and 2008 did not culminate in the collection of any remains.