Getting on the Yamanote train line the other day, we happened to board a "train-jack" car -- a term referring to a carriage whose entire advertising space has been bought by a single advertiser. In this case, the car's walls,
doors, and ceiling ads all featured the Pink Panther cartoon character and his nemesis the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. Being fans of Peter Sellers, the original Inspector, we naturally wondered what the pink panther was being used to...

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been hitting the news a lot recently, with dire predictions for Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and South and South East Asia, as well as more extreme weather for
the rest of us. Although the current summaries from the report don't yet enlarge on the threat, Japan was identified as one of the 8 most affected...

In a move reminiscent of Livedoor's Horiemon, at 04:00 am on March 1st this year, mobile content company For-side.com announced that it would downgrade its earnings for FY2006 (ending Dec. 31, 2006) to a massive JPY60.6bn (US$51.4m) loss. The company blamed the result mostly on an extraordinary JPY71.3bn (US$60.4m) loss on its sale of UK subsidiary iTouch. For-side's stock price as of last Friday (April 20th) was just JPY3,780, about 85% lower than a year ago, and less than 2% of the company's peak back in October 2002. So what went wrong with this once high-flying firm? Most analysts agree that...

Shintaro Ishihara, who recently won a third term as Tokyo Governor, is not one to hold his tongue. In his years as governor he has spooked foreigners with a warning to beware rioting 'third country nationals' (code for Koreans) in the aftermath of a natural disaster in Tokyo; raised Francophone hackles with the comment French is not...