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Japan's factory activity shrank in February at the fastest pace in over two years, a private survey showed, highlighting companies' struggles amid a global economic slowdown, raw material inflation and policymakers' calls for higher wages. The final au Jibun Bank Japan Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index released on Wednesday fell to 47.7 in February from January's 48.9. Although higher than the flash reading, it marked the fastest decline since September 2020. "Both new orders and production levels, which make up 55 per cent of the headline PMI figure, fell at the fastest pace since July 2020 as weak domestic demand and...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s current account surplus remained the world’s largest last year despite trade tensions, the Ifo economic institute said on Monday, in an estimate likely to renew criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fiscal policies. The Ifo calculations, reported exclusively by Reuters ahead of publication by the economic institute, put Germany’s current account surplus — which measures the flow of goods, services and investments — at some $293 billion in 2019. It is the fourth successive year that Germany’s current account surplus has been the world’s largest, with Japan’s the next biggest at $194 billion, according to Ifo calculations....

Japan’s $1.3 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund lost 3.8 percent in the year ended March 31, or 5.3 trillion yen ($51 billion), the retirement manager said Friday in Tokyo. That’s the biggest drop since the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009. GPIF lost 10.8 percent on domestic equities and 9.6 percent on shares in other markets, while Japanese bonds handed the fund a 4.1 percent gain.

Do not believe in official statistics, Japanese retailers seem to be saying, as they cut earnings forecasts and warn of lackluster consumer spending, a key growth engine for Japan at a time when exports and factory output are stalling. If you go by the larger-than-expected 2.9 percent gain in household spending in August - the first year-on-year rise in three months - then consumption looks like it is finally alive and well again, after a sales tax hike last year stifled the economy. But profits of retailers suggest the spending data, which has a small sample size, has not captured...

In reviewing Japan’s just released balance of payments details showing the weekly transactions in Japanese stocks by foreign investors, we were shocked to see that foreign money has headed for the Japanese exits at a rate never seen before, not even in 2008-2009. Could this mark the inevitable “end game” for Japan as it finally recons with it’s unsustainable debt situation with foreign investors fleeing the country so fast they forget to say “Arigato”? It could, but we don’t think so. Rather, previous times of mass movement out of Japanese stocks have typically coincided with some sort of bottom in...

Japan's public and private sectors will supply an aid package worth US$16 billion over three years to help developing nations cut greenhouse-gas emissions, a report said on Tuesday, as climate talks get underway in Warsaw. TOKYO: Japan's public and private sectors will supply an aid package worth US$16 billion over three years to help developing nations cut greenhouse-gas emissions, a report said on Tuesday, as climate talks get underway in Warsaw. The contribution would account for over 40 per cent of the US$35 billion that developing nations were expected to ask for to battle climate change, Japan's leading Nikkei business...

The Yomiuri Shimbun The health ministry has confirmed that more than 1,500 disabled people were abused, most of them by relatives, in the six months through March this year. Local governments nationwide received reports or were consulted over a total of 4,502 cases of allged abuse against disabled people in the six months after a law to prevent abuse of the disabled came into effect in October last year. Of this number, abuse was confirmed to have occurred in 1,524 cases involving 1,699 victims, according to the first such survey ever conducted by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. The...

Anti-nuclear activists expressed outrage Monday over cyberattacks involving a torrent of harassing emails that have nearly crippled their online activities. Yasue Ashihara, a member of Sayonara Shimane Genpatsu Network (Goodbye-Nuke Network in Shimane), said the group received about 10,000 emails in mid-September, some of which contained hateful remarks such as: “without the massacre of anti-nuclear activists, the world will see no peace.” But most messages turned out to be fake confirmations of new memberships, she said. Noting the cyberattacks mainly targeted anti-nuclear civic groups, Ashihara said she believes whoever masterminded the harassment clearly supports atomic power. “Whoever may have perpetrated...

AKITA – A new company aiming to mediate between rice producers, mass merchants and consumers was established Monday, led by agricultural corporations in Akita Prefecture and the city of Sendai. The move is part of efforts to prepare for rapid changes in the competitive environment for agriculture, including Japan’s participation in Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade talks and the planned abolition of rice production adjustments in five years. The new firm is based in the village of Ogata, Akita Prefecture. It was chiefly founded by Ogatamura Akitakomachi Seisansha Kyokai, an Ogata firm selling rice online to individual customers nationwide, and Butai...

The government plans to draw up guidelines to tackle dishonest menus and food labels that have been used by many hotels, restaurants and department stores across Japan. At a meeting Monday of officials from relevant agencies, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga asked for effective measures to ensure suitable representations of dishes and food products at such locations. The government will work out guidelines under the law against unjustified premiums and misleading representations, Suga said, urging the agencies to make sure inappropriate representations are corrected as soon as they are discovered. The dishonest labeling issue “could fundamentally undermine consumer trust in...

TOKYO: Japan is putting missiles on islands marking the gateway to the Pacific, officials said on Thursday, as part of a huge military drill that has unsettled Beijing. The exercise, aimed at bolstering Japan's defence of remote islands, has already seen a launching system and a loader for Type-88 surface-to-ship missiles installed on Miyako island, complete with two missiles. Four more missiles were due to arrive on the main island of Okinawa later on Thursday. It was not clear how long they would remain in place. "This is the first time" that missile systems have been taken to Miyako, said...

ONAHAMA PORT, Japan (AP) — Japan has switched on the first turbine at a wind farm 20 kilometers (12 miles) off the coast of Fukushima, feeding electricity to the grid tethered to the tsunami-crippled nuclear plant onshore. The wind farm which started up Monday, near the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, is to eventually have a capacity of 1 gigawatt from 143 turbines. Its significance is not limited to the energy it will produce. Symbolically, the turbines will help restore the role of energy supplier to a region decimated by the multiple meltdowns that followed the March 2011 earthquake and...

Shinzo Abe raise eyebrows on Thursday by breaking away from a 20-year tradition of Japanese prime ministers expressing remorse over their country's wartime aggression and pledging not to let it happen again when they mark the end of World War II. Speaking on the 68th anniversary of the Japan's surrender in World War II, Abe instead highlighted the "sacrifices" of Japanese soldiers. Since Morihiro Hosokawa in 1993, all Japanese prime ministers have included acknowledgement of the damage and pain Japan inflicted on countries in Asia and their peoples, and promised that Japan would never engage in a war, in their...

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a ritual offering worth about 50,000 Japanese yen to the militarist Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Thursday, a move seen as avoiding a personal visit to the shrine. Visits to Yasukuni by previous Japanese prime ministers invariably chilled relations with Korea and China to freezing point since it honors convicted World War II criminals among the country’s war dead. Abe made the offering to mark the shrine's autumn festival, which runs from Thursday until Sunday. He also sent an offering to the shrine during the spring festival in April. Abe had said he felt...

The government is making final arrangements to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 3.8 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, according to a government source. The source said the new target assumes there would be no restarts of nuclear reactors and takes into account energy-saving measures and renewable sources, as well as forest absorption of carbon dioxide. Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara is expected to announce the new target at the 19th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP19, to be held in Poland next month. The new target was created...

Long silent and out of the public eye, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s recent rumblings against nuclear power are causing many to wonder if the most popular leader of recent decades is laying the groundwork for a political comeback. The 74-year-old Koizumi has met separately with two opposition party heads — Tadatomo Yoshida of the Social Democratic Party and Yoshimi Watanabe of Your Party — to discuss his mission to rid the nation of all 50 of its nuclear reactors. A visit to a spent-fuel disposal site in Finland following the 2011 Fukushima crisis converted him to an anti-nuclear activist,...

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is refusing to reimburse the Environment Ministry for more than ¥30 billion that was spent to decontaminate land hit by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the ministry said Tuesday. Under the special decontamination law adopted in August 2011, the state is responsible for leading and initially financing the decontamination effort, but it can ask Tepco, responsible for the Fukushima crisis, to pay the bill later. Tepco has paid ¥6.7 billion so far, while the Environment Ministry has sought ¥40.4 billion. The ministry said Tepco is unwilling to pay for work not directly...

(Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is planning a state secrets act that critics say could curtail public access to information on a wide range of issues, including tensions with China and the Fukushima nuclear crisis. The new law would dramatically expand the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years. Japan's harsh state secrecy regime before and during World War Two has long made such legislation taboo, but the new law looks certain to be enacted since Abe's Liberal Democratic Party-led bloc has a comfortable majority in both...

AFP - NTT Communications said Monday it would pay a combined $875 million for two US-based cloud computing firms, marking the latest major overseas acquisition by a Japanese firm. The telecoms giant said it had agreed to buy Virtela for $525 million, while it would shell out $350 million for an 80 percent stake in RagingWire as it looks to boost its ability to supply online access to software and data storage for big global clients. The deals come as NTT looks to counter a slowdown in its mainstay long-distance telecom business. "The acquisition (of RagingWire) will more than double...

<p>Japanese retail sales rose 3.1 percent from a year earlier in September, official data showed on Tuesday, a sign a personal spending is continuing to support the nation's economy.</p> <p>The increase was much higher than the 1.9 percent rise analysts polled by Reuters were expecting, and marked a second straight month of gains. Spending on luxury goods, food and automobiles led the rise.</p>