Japan News for February 11, 2007

Today’s Japan-related news links:

• Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven nations urged investors to recognize Japan’s economic recovery is “on track,” while stopping short of saying the yen’s decline threatens global growth. [Link]
• A total of 28 million yen cash found among old newspapers that a recycling company here had collected has turned out to belong to an 80-year-old local woman. She told police that she forgot that she had kept the bundles of banknotes between old newspapers, and handed them over with the old newspapers to the company. [Link]
• Rinnai Corp. did not recall gas water heaters involved in fatal accidents even though it knew they had a structural defect, company sources said Saturday. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced Friday that Rinnai’s RUS-5RX and RUS-51BT models have caused five cases of carbon monoxide poisoning since 2000, killing three people and sickening 12 others. [Link]
• A 70-year-old woman on trial for violating an anti-stalking law by bombarding a 79-year-old man with love letters and repeatedly visiting his home should be jailed for 10 months. [Link]
• A Japanese archaeological team has discovered three painted wooden coffins in Egypt, including two from the little-known Middle Kingdom period dating back more than 4,000 years. [Link]
• The Tokyo Metropolitan Government was slapped with a lawsuit Friday by 173 high school teachers who were punished for refusing to sing the national anthem at school ceremonies and claim they were treated unjustly under a directive that violates their freedom of thought. [Link]
• Ice floe sightseeing tours off Hokkaido in the Sea of Okhotsk are proving a popular attraction, reports Mainichi Shinbun. [Link]
• -Police on Saturday served a fresh arrest warrant on a 67-year-old man held for destruction of property on suspicion of toppling gravestones in temples in Yamanashi Prefecture. About 350 gravestones in about 20 places have been damaged since August, and the police were also questioning Imamura about those incidents. [Link]
• Yoshihiro Morimoto, who stole 541 million yen from the defunct Fukutoku Bank in Kobe in 1994, was arrested on Friday while attempting to rob employees of a shinkin cooperative bank in Nagoya, police said. As Morimoto repeatedly changed his appearance with plastic surgery and disguises, and used 10 false names, he was dubbed “the man with 10 faces.” [Link]
• The Asahi Shinbun honors a police officer who is currently in a coma after he was gravely injured attempting to save a woman from being run over by a train. [Link]
• Dr. Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association, investigate whether or not eating snakes improves one’s sex drive. [Link]
• Vice has a feature story on European women who worked as hostesses in Japan speaking about their job. [Link via FG]