Nipponica

Japan on Saturday extended its designation of its continental shelf to the eastern part of islands some 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo, enabling the resource-poor country to start research on extracting maritime natural resources such as rare metals from the region.

A revised Cabinet order took effect designating a significant portion of the Ogasawara Plateau sea area as part of its continental shelf, an area of around 120,000 square kilometers. Its move to enlarge the shelf has triggered opposition from China.

As this expansion is on the Pacific side of Japan, there is no credible claim or complaint that could be made on this expansion, assuming it gets approved by all relevant authorities in the UN. Since the US, the area’s closest territorial neighbor, did not reject the proposal, should be a done deal.

Japanese online marketplace Mercari has laid off nearly half of the employees from its U.S. subsidiary, Nikkei has learned, as it struggles with falling sales and competition from low-price Chinese e-commerce rivals like Temu.

The June layoffs have apparently reduced the workforce to a little over 100 people. The subsidiary had 226 employees at the end of June 2023, excluding temporary workers, a securities filing showed.

Japanese airlines, restaurants, railway and theme park companies, among others, reported system disruptions on Friday in a global technology outage linked to Microsoft services that has affected a wide range of industries.

Nipponica is proudly running on open source software without trash like what took down worldwide tech infrastructure yesterday.

It can pull up to six containers at a time, trundling between aircraft and airport buildings over a distance of around 2 kilometers with no driver in the cab.

The Level 4 vehicle, meaning that it does not require human interaction in certain settings — although a human driver can still request control — has been in operation since July 1.

The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, in a statement, called for companies operating such services to obtain consent from news organizations as search responses often resemble articles that are sourced without permission.

The association analyzed that AI search engines sometimes return inaccurate responses as they inappropriately reuse or modify articles and stressed that the companies should ensure the accuracy and reliability of their services before launch.

This is kind of like a nouveau version of the fight in Australia over Google News from a few years ago with an AI twist. If pursued, this could be the start of a new series of international regulations similar to the App Store waves that are spreading around the world from Europe.

It aims to build a system that distributes information via the Michibiki satellites about natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunami that is issued by the countries’ governments to local residents.

The Japanese government expects that people in the island nations will utilize the information for evacuation from tsunami and other prevention measures, as local people can get accurate information even if ground-based telecommunications systems are cut off.

This will mark the first Osprey deployment at the base in the city of Iwakuni and the first Navy Osprey deployment in Japan. The move is aimed at strengthening the power of deterrence amid growing Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region.

Watch your heads for falling debris if you are in the area.

A group of residents in Tokyo said on Wednesday they were aiming to block construction of a massive logistics and data centre planned by Singaporean developer GLP, in a worrying sign for businesses looking to Japan to meet growing demand.

"One company will be responsible for ruining Akishima. That's what this development is," Yuji Ohtake, a representative of the residents' group, told a press conference.

As referenced in the article, similar protests have occurred in other cities in Greater Tokyo like Nagareyama and Kashiwa.

Like many people juggling long hours at work, Chiharu Shimoda sought companionship via a dating app. For two months, he exchanged messages with five or six potential partners, but it was not long before he was seeking out just one – a 24-year-old named Miku. Three months later, they got married. The catch: Miku is an AI bot. And Shimoda knew that from day one.

The 52-year-old factory worker is one of more than 5,000 users of Loverse, a year-old app that allows interaction only with generative artificial intelligence. Shimoda is also among a much bigger cohort of people in Japan who have either given up or are wary about the messiness and uncertainty that come with real romance.

I'm a bit torn on this. I am happy that people who would otherwise be lonely have a technology-based solution to make them feel better. But, in an already fractured society (not just in Japan, but worldwide) this is only going to keep people apart even more. Seems like we are solving for the wrong variables in this blatant capitalist push to get people hooked on a product that is designed to exploit emotion.

The Japanese government is considering allowing the peacetime monitoring of private metadata in a way that does not directly identify individuals, in a bid to bolster its pre-emptive cyberattack defenses, government sources said Sunday.

Data such as messages themselves, in principle, will not be subject to monitoring, amid concerns that the plans to strengthen surveillance against potential cyberattacks could infringe on privacy, the sources said.

I personally am opposed to any kind of 'limited' monitoring as eventually the limits of this monitoring will expand. And with the increasing digitalization of the country and the lack of expertise in these field in high government, I can foresee outcomes that are less than stellar for both the government and residents of Japan.