This morning’s Japan-related news links:

• A Laotian government official has demanded that a Japanese nongovernmental organization seeking the release of three North Korean teenagers from a Laotian prison pay $ 1,000 in cash per detainee, a group representative said Sunday. [Link]
• Candidates backed by Democratic Party of Japan won 375 seats in 44 prefectural assemblies Sunday, raising the main opposition party’s presence on the local level from its pre-election strength of 205 seats. [Link]
• Most voters in gubernatorial elections in prefectures where Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) candidates clashed head-on with Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) candidates would support the party backing the candidate they voted for in the event of an Upper House election, a Mainichi exit poll has shown. [Link]
• Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who begins a four-day visit to Japan on Wednesday, is to issue a joint document with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stating China’s willingness to cooperate on resolving the abduction issue, according to a copy of the document outline obtained by The Yomiuri Shimbun. [Link]
• Five people were injured, one critically, after a helicopter with 10 crew members and passengers aboard crashed Monday in mountains in the city of Toyama near the border with Nagano Prefecture in central Japan. [Link]
• Environmental factors may be the cause of declining proportion of males born in Japan and the United States, a U.S. statistical study suggests. [Link]
• Japan on Monday lent some $850 million to the government of visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as the oil-hungry Asian power looks to boost output from the war-torn country. [Link]
• A wheelchair user who fell over at a polling station in Nishitokyo and was unable to vote is angry that the city failed to provide a voting place that could be used easily by the disabled. [Link]
• JR Tokai announced on Monday that the company used asbestos in train parts but said that passengers were not in danger and that the parts would be replaced this month. [Link]
• The partially decomposed body of a male was found wrapped in a blanket in a mountainous area of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon. [Link]
• The layout of an arms dump and other internal information from the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Matsudo garrison in Chiba Prefecture was leaked onto the Internet in late March from a personal computer of a sergeant who used to work there via the Winny file-sharing software, Defense Ministry sources said Monday. [Link]
• South Korean actor Bae Yong-jun, a heartthrob among older Japanese women, returned to Seoul on Monday after he made a secret trip to Japan, his Japanese promotion company said. [Link]
• A small white mouse running around a Boeing 777 delayed a Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo for more than four hours on Monday. [Link]

Afternoon Update:

• The Japanese government has decided to extend the economic sanctions Japan imposed on North Korea for 6 more months. [Link]
• An associate professor at a university in Gunma Prefecture has been fired on disciplinary grounds for assigning excessively difficult homework to students, forcing one of them to kill herself, university officials said. [Link]
• Japan, the world’s third-biggest nuclear power generator, is in talks with Russia and Kazakhstan this week to secure uranium supplies as China and India increase purchases of the radioactive metal. [Link]
• A new article at Blogcritics Magazine examines homosexuality in Japan. [Link]
• The 96-year-old daughter of Yukio Ozaki, who as mayor of Tokyo in 1912 sent a shipment of 3,020 cherry trees to Washington, has traveked ti Washington, DC to commerate 95 years of cherry blossoms in America’s capital. [Link]
• Major cell phone companies in Japan have been stepping up efforts to spread filtering services to prevent children from accessing matchmaking sites and other harmful online content. [Link]
• Henry Kissinger predicted in 1974 that Japan could produce a number of nuclear bombs within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, according to a recently declassified U.S. government document. [Link]
• A man who arranged fake marriages in the Philippines between Filipinas and homeless Japanese men so he could bring the women to Japan and employ them as hostesses has been arrested. [Link]
• Britain’s the Daily Mail has printed a rant from a western woman who was stalked by a Japanese man while teaching on the JET Program. [Link]