This morning’s Japan-related news links:

It’s Raining: The rainy season has apparently started in Japan’s Chugoku, Kinki and Tokai districts, about one week later than normal. [Link]

What Suicide? Investigations into the J-Green bid-rigging scandal are concluding, leaving unresolved the suspected involvement of a cabinet minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who committed suicide last month. [Link]

Spymaster Raided: A former head of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, whose home has been raided over his firm’s allegedly fictitious purchase of the headquarters building of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) and its land, has failed to provide a clear-cut explanation about the deal. [Link]

China Responds: Demands by Japanese lawmakers that China remove anti-Japanese photos from Chinese war museums show their lack of courage to recognize Japan’s past wrongdoings, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday. [Link]

Textbook Protest: The assembly of Okinawa’s village of Tokashiki on Thursday adopted a protest letter against the education ministry’s advice that history textbook publishers play down the military’s role in mass suicides during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which more than 300 villagers died. [Link]

Mega-Heist: Two men robbed a jewelry shop in Tokyo’s Ginza district Thursday afternoon and fled with a diamond tiara and a necklace worth around 200 million yen in all. [Link]

Temple Deaths: Police have launched an investigation Thursday into the gruesome deaths of a temple priest and his mother in Ichinoseki, Iwate Prefecture, as a possible murder case. [Link]

Seeking Help: The number of women seeking help for domestic violence in Japan rose last year for a fourth straight year, partly because there are more shelter facilities for victims to turn to. [Link]

Abe vs. Global Warming: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to attend a summit meeting on global warming and the annual session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September. [Link]

NHK Fee Collector Kills: A fee collector for public broadcaster NHK who turned himself in to police, saying he had chopped up his former wife’s body, was arrested Thursday along with a female roommate on suspicion of mutilating a corpse. [Link]

Drunk Driving Law: The Diet enacted an amendment to the road traffic law Thursday to impose tougher penalties on drunken drivers as well as those who provide them with alcohol or vehicles or ride in a car driven by them. [Link]

Note Worthy: China has confiscated close to 6,000 of Japan’s popular “Death Note” comic books as part of a crackdown on horror publications that it deems harmful for children. [Link]

What Dad Wants: Toys and healing goods are selling well for Father’s Day gifts, according to department store industry insiders. [Link]

Japanese Sauce: Bull-Dog Sauce Co, a Japanese company, has defended the legality of its anti-takeover measures against an unsolicited takeover bid by a U.S. investment fund which asked a court the previous day to issue a provisional injunction to block the defense measures. [Link]

Tickets Fight Crime: The introduction of a system in June last year under which police commission private parking inspectors to crackdown on illegally parked vehicles has proven effective in decreasing the number of illegally parked cars and car thefts in Japan’s major cities. [Link]

Barefoot Gen Drama: Fuji Television Network is set to produce a drama based on a well-known comic, “Hadashi no Gen” (“Barefoot Gen”) by Keiji Nakazawa, featuring the tragedy of war. [Link]

Afternoon Update:

Comfort Women Ad: A group of Japanese lawmakers in a full-page ad in the Washington Post on Thursday presenting arguments counter to the claim that the Japanese government and military had a hand in conscripting women from Asian countries as sex slaves for the Imperial Army during World War II. [Link]

Social Security Numbers? Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday he was eager to introduce a common social security number that would allow the government to unify its scattered data on pensions, health-care and other public social security programs, saying it would be more convenient and raise administrative efficiency. [Link]

Royal Trip: Japan’s Crown Prince Naruhito will make an eight-day official visit to Mongolia from July 10 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the two nations establishing ties, according to the itinerary endorsed Friday at a Cabinet meeting. [Link]

Secret Satellites: Tokyo has been operating spy satellites for four years that have not been registered with the United Nations, despite having signed an international treaty that requires it to report them. [Link]

Suspicious Rise: The amount of the annual office expenses of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Norihiko Akagi’s political fund-raising body jumped from 190,000 yen to 10 million yen in the space of a couple of years, it has emerged. [Link]

“Reform” Bill: The House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday criticized as “full of holes” that obliges politicians’ fund-management bodies to report expenditures over 50,000 yen, as the ruling coalition scrambled to mitigate the fallout from the May suicide of farm minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka. [Link]

Apple Victory: Yahoo Japan replaced a Sony-affiliated music download service with Apple’s iTunes Music Store on Thursday as the default music store on Yahoo Music Japan. [Link]

High Security? Four stainless steel pipes, worth about 12 million yen, have been stolen from a warehouse at the Japan Atomic Power Co.’s Tsuruga nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture [Link]

Yakuza Profits: Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime syndicate, received at least 1 billion yen in contributions from affiliate gangs last year, according to police sources. [Link]

Yakuza Leak: Information on a crime syndicate was among a massive volume of data that has leaked from a Tokyo police officer’s personal computer through the file-exchange software Winny, documents obtained by the Mainichi Shimbun have shown. [Link]

Supermarket Bully: Japan’s Fair Trade Commission carried out an on-site inspection Thursday at the Tokyo headquarters of supermarket chain Eco’s Co. on suspicion that it forced its suppliers to reduce prices and send their workers to help operate its stores, sources said. [Link]

JSDF/USAF Exercise: The U.S. Air Force and the Japan Air Self Defense Force are conducting two weeks of military exercises at Andersen Air Force Base in this U.S. territory. [Link]

FamiMa Dumps Goodwill: Convenience store chain FamilyMart Co. has approached Goodwill Group Inc. to conclude an operational tieup with the scandal-hit staffing and welfare group in such fields as home delivery of products, company officials said Thursday. [Link]

Game Show Injury: A performer has applied for governmental working people’s compensation after she was seriously injured during filming of an NHK game show last year. [Link]

Currency Wars: The Korean economy is in trouble due to strategies by the United States, China and Japan to keep their currencies weak. [Link]

Cambodian Investment: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Phnom Penh counterpart, Hun Sen, signed a pact Thursday to promote investments by Japanese firms in Cambodia. [Link]

Saipan Tourism Drop: The Marianas Visitors Authority said only 15,610 Japanese tourists visited the CNMI in May, compared to 22,969 during the same month last year. [Link]

Ripped-Off: Japanese tourists were charged 300 euros for tickets for a free open-air concert in Vienna, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard wrote in its Wednesday edition. [Link via FG]

EEZ Talks: South Korea and Japan will hold talks in Seoul next week to discuss ways to bring an end to a decades-old dispute over the countries’ maritime borders. [Link]
Unlucky Thief: A burglar who unwittingly broke into a police officer’s family home in Kinokawa, Wakayama Prefecture, was arrested on the spot after the officer, a judo expert, arrived and pinned him down. [Link]

Russian Ninja: A masked “Ninja” in northern Italy was arrested Tuesday after terrorizing farmers for weeks by showing up at their doorsteps at nightfall and demanding money. [Link]