Japan launched for the first time early Friday a rocket with a non-Japanese payload, fulfilling a spare-no-expense, two-decade quest to compete in the world’s $4.3 billion commercial satellite-launch business.

Japan enters an increasingly crowded orbit of newer players and established companies delivering space cargo at relatively low cost, raising questions about whether Tokyo’s long campaign risks fizzling shortly after it takes off.

The launch of the Japanese H-2A rocket with a South Korean satellite from this speck of land off the coast of Japan’s southernmost main island marks a coming of age for Japan’s space agency, as well as for Japanese industrial titan Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., 7011.TO +0.61%which is the primary manufacturer of the rocket and markets it globally.

“Japan’s high labor and material costs have kept it above world market rates in the past, but it is now nearing competitiveness with Russia’s Proton and others,” said James Clay Moltz, a national-security professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and author of the 2011 book “Asia’s Space Race.”  [Wall Street Journal]

You can read a whole lot more at the link but the article speculates quite a bit on whether the Japanese are serious about developing a commercial space launch capability or if this was just something done for national prestige?  If this was for national prestige it is a bit ironic that a South Korean satellite was put into space by a Japanese rocket.

Barbara Keiko Eccleston

A Brazilian woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison with forced labor after a Japanese court convicted her Friday of murder in the death of her Air Force husband.

Barbara Keiko Eccleston, 33, helped plot the fatal stabbing of Tech. Sgt. Curtis Eccleston, according to the jury decision. Curtis Eccleston, of the 733rd Air Mobility Squadron at Kadena Air Base, was found on the floor of the couple’s off-base Okinawa apartment last year.

Staff Sgt. Nicholas Cron, 26, pleaded guilty to slashing Eccleston’s neck with a hunting knife and a box cutter in the couple’s apartment in February 2011.

Cron was convicted and sentenced earlier this year to life in prison without the possibility of parole by a military judge and agreed to testify against Barbara Eccleston as part of a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty.

“You erased two men who were close to you from this world and society. Your criminal responsibility is extremely grave,” Chief Judge Hideyuki Suzuki told Eccleston during the hearing in Naha District Court on Friday. “What you need to do now is to repent and serve your prison term.”  [Stars & Stripes]

 The body of water to the east of the Korean peninsula will continue to be a source of frustration for South Koreans and a sensitive subject for U.S. military officials.

The international organization in charge of naming water bodies around the world this week rejected South Korea’s request that the Sea of Japan be alternately known as the East Sea.

“Our country asserted that both names be used … but Japan insisted that only the term ‘Sea of Japan’ be used,” according to an official with the South’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. “Other countries advised us that the two countries should come to some sort of agreement to resolve the issue.”

But the International Hydrographic Organizationdoes not meet again until 2017, meaning Sea of Japan will continue to be recognized as the sole designation for the body of water that separates Japan and the Korean peninsula, much to the dismay of South Koreans.

“It’s just a matter of time,” said the ministry official, who requested his name not be used. “We know we will eventually get the IHO member countries’ support on the issue.

“When they see the historical reasons, the international practices and the fact that the term ‘East Sea’ is being used a lot in reality, we think using both terms … will eventually be approved,” he continued. “We’ll keep trying until we succeed.”  [Stars & Stripes]

Fortunately the IHO doesn’t meet again for another 5 years which means this issue should hopefully go away for a while once again.  You can read more about what this issue is really all about at this prior posting.

At first glance, this tiny fishing village can appear a hotbed of the sort of Okinawan anger that has damaged America’s ties with Japan. Near Henoko’s docks, demonstrators in tents recently marked the 2,850th day of their vigil against construction of a United States Marine airfield.

But wander up Henoko’s narrow streets, and the villagers will tell you a different story. They say the activists are outsiders. Most residents, they say, still support the village’s “painful decision” of more than a decade ago to accept the planned air base, with its noise and risk of crashes, in exchange for jobs and compensation payments.

“Of course, it would be better not to have the air base, but we are not dogmatic like them,” Masaaki Shiroma, a community association leader, said as he nodded toward the tent encampment. (……)

Those sentiments were echoed here in Henoko, where many of the 1,800 residents said that opinions were split about three-to-one in favor of construction. But residents warned that further delays could erode that support. Mr. Shiroma, the neighborhood leader in Toyohara, which includes part of Henoko, said that villagers were weary of being left dangling by Tokyo’s inability to build the base after nearly two decades.  [New York Times]

So the village where the new Marine base would be located is 3 to 1 in favor of the construction, now that is something you don’t hear about.  I think momentum is actually building to get something done on the Futenma issue considering how recently the Japanese government has increased subsidy payments to Okinawa at the tune of $4,500 a person, plus the Pentagon has announced how 8,000 of the 18,000 Marines currently on Okinawa will be shifted to locations across the Pacific such as Guam, Australia, the Philippines, and even South Korea.

Hiromura Gakurai was a prison guard at the Hintok work camp along the Thailand-Burma “death railway,” infamous for the extremely high human toll on the Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and local Asian slave laborers during World War II.

After the war, he was tried and sentenced to death by an Australian military court for inhumane treatment of POWs but commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment and released on parole in 1956.

Hiromura’s case may not stand out among over 5,700 war criminals in the Asia-Pacific region ― except he was a sharecropper’s son named Lee Hak-rae from Korea, then under Japanese colonial rule. And he is not alone: 148 Koreans and 173 Taiwanese were convicted as war criminals, of which 23 Koreans and 26 Taiwanese were executed.

Most Korean war criminals were lowly prison guards ranking below buck privates. On paper, they were “volunteers”; in practice, certain military conscription or industrial slave labor awaited as an alternative. Some 3,000 Koreans manned the Japanese POW camps in Southeast Asia.

In flagrant contravention of the official assurances to the Allies to treat their POWs in accordance with the Geneva Convention, the Japanese authorities subjected them to brutal labor and beating while depriving food, medicine and clothes.

The mortality rate for the Commonwealth and American POWs in Nazi Germany was less than 4 percent; in Imperial Japan, it was a whopping 27 percent. The outraged Allied officials made it a priority to bring those responsible to book.

Unfortunately, in the eye of the Allied prosecutors and judges, Lee was a subject of the Japanese emperor like any other with a Japanese name (forced upon him by the despised governor-general).  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Three years ago the “Toylet” was just a pipe-dream for developers at Japanese video game maker Sega, but now the urinal video game has been rolled out at pubs across the nation.

Users target their urine at a sensor inside the toilet which measures volume and speed, with software then matching that to progress in a selection of five video games in a console mounted at the top of the urinal.

“At first, we thought it would really be only young people who would like this kind of game. But … we’re seeing this phenomenon where people are enjoying playing with it, regardless of age,” said Hirotaka Machida, the console’s lead producer.

At 150,000 yen ($2,000) for a single unit, Machida said the original plan had been to avoid the mass market, but tests in pubs and restaurants showed it had broad appeal.

An infra-red device cuts off play if gamers stray too far from the urinal, reducing the amount of mess, according to Sega, making it a hit with pub managers as well.

Toilet humor and raunchy gags are a staple of far from high-brow variety shows in Japan where Toylets were rolled out on general release.

Sega now has its sights on a global expansion plan later in the year.  [Reuters via W7VOA]

I once used a urinal that had a big target with Jane Fonda’s face in the middle.  Maybe Sega can make a urinal game for the US market where you have to hit moving targets of people like Jane Fonda or whoever else happens to be unpopular at the time?

 Japan is planning to shovel billions of dollars in unrestricted funding on Okinawa this year in hopes of buying public support for keeping a U.S. Marine Corps base on the island, experts say.

Under a budget plan hammered out this winter, Tokyo will give the small island prefecture $2.05 billion to spend as the local government sees fit and also increase its total annual funding by $826 million.

Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima negotiated the generous subsidies as part of the upcoming national budget and received nearly everything the island requested. The island will receive $3.8 billion of the $3.9 billion in total funding it requested from Tokyo, even as the country reels from disaster and a currency crisis.

The governor and the central government claim that the funding plan is not related to Futenma, but Moritake Tomikawa, president of Okinawa International University, said the intentions behind the subsidies are clear.

“It is obviously an appeasement policy by the government,” Tomikawa said. “It was as if they are slapping your face with a thick bundle of green notes and people here are weary of such policy from the central government.”

The controversial funding plan comes as Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s administration prepares to ask Okinawa for permission to build an offshore airfield — the next step in relocating U.S. Marine forces from the Futenma air station in urban Ginowan. But not even the cash infusion is likely to overcome growing public resentment toward Tokyo and convince the island to sign off on the troubled project, according to U.S. and Japanese observers.  [Stars & Stripes]

So $2.05 billion + $3.8 billion = $6.3 billion in total funding for one year.  The population of Okinawa is roughly 1.4 million people.  If you do the math on this it comes out to the Japanese government subsidizing the island of Okinawa to the tune of $4,500 a person.  It will be interesting to see if this will be enough to buy off the government on the island to get the new airfield built?

Petty Officer 1st Class Corey Baughman got more than he bargained for when he decided that a winter climb of Mount Fuji would be the perfect adventure before retiring from the Navy and shipping off to the States.

Baughman, Petty Officer 3rd Class Adam Andryc and Petty Officer 1st Class Dillon Mudloff were within 100 yards of the summit of Japan’s highest mountain earlier this month when they decided to turn back because of the weather.

Suddenly, a climber went hurtling by from above.

“It was surreal,” Baughman recalled. “I thought for sure the guy was dead.”

For the next 24 hours, the sailors and some Japanese climbers risked their own safety to give aid to the man. At the end of the ordeal, Baughman was headed home with more than the pride of summiting Mount Fuji. He spent the night in a freezing hut with the injured man, had to climb back up the mountain to retrieve his car keys and ended up with frostbitten toes.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest of this heroic rescue at the link to include video of the man falling off the mountain.

Japan’s whaling fleet left port Tuesday for the country’s annual hunt in Antarctica, press pictures showed, with security measures beefed up amid simmering international protests.

Three ships, led by the 720-tonne Yushin Maru, set sail from Shimonoseki in western Japan on a mission officially said to be for “scientific research”, according to local media reports.

In past years, a mother ship has joined them later.

The government’s fishery agency declined to confirm the reports, citing security reasons.

“In consideration of safety, we cannot make public the timing of the fleet’s departure and its operational plans,” Shinji Hiruma, an official of the agency’s international division, told AFP.

He only confirmed that in “usual years” the fleet left port in November or December and returned around March.

In February, Japan cut short its hunt for the 2010-2011 season by one month after bagging only one fifth of its planned catch, blaming interference from the US-based environmental group Sea Shepherd.

The fleet aims to catch around 900 minke and fin whales this season, according to a plan submitted by the government to the International Whaling Commission.  [AFP]

You can read more at the link.

 If you’ve ever wanted to visit Japan, this may be your chance.

In a desperate attempt to lure tourists back to a country plagued by radiation fears and constant earthquakes, the Japan Tourism Agency’s proposed an unprecedented campaign – 10,000 free roundtrip tickets.

The catch is, you need to publicize your trip on blogs and social media sites.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan has dropped drastically, since a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Power plant in March. Nearly 20,000 people have been confirmed dead, while more than 80,000 remain displaced because of radiation concerns. In the first three months following the triple disasters, the number of foreign visitors to Japan was cut in half, compared with the same time in 2010. The strong Japanese currency has made matters worse.

The tourism agency says it plans to open a website to solicit applicants interested in the free tickets. Would- be visitors will have to detail in writing their travel plans in Japan, and explain what they hope to get out of the trip. Successful applicants would pay for their own accommodation and meals. They would also be required to write a review their travel experiences, and post it online.

“We are hoping to get highly influential blogger-types, and others who can spread the word that Japan is a safe place to visit,” said Kazuyoshi Sato, with the agency.

The agency has requested more than a billion yen to pay for the tourism blitz. If lawmakers approve the funding, Sato says visitors could begin signing up as early as next April.  [ABC News]