Japan 'Made in China' Labels Dropped To Boost Sales

BBC
Chinese manufacturers have stopped using "made in China" labels on clothes sold in Japan in an effort to improve sales, it's reported.

The move is an attempt to overcome perceptions that Chinese-made clothes are poor quality, the South China Morning Post website reports. Instead, clothes are being labelled "made in PRC" - the People's Republic of China - because many Japanese customers don't know what the acronym stands for, the website says. Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency says despite the term being lost in translation, there's nothing to stop Chinese companies from changing their labels.

Busted! Five Charged with Kidnapping and Raping Japan Student in India

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Five men have been arrested in India and charged with kidnapping and repeatedly raping a Japanese woman, the New York Times reports.

News reports differ on the specifics, but the general outline is consistent: one or two men who said they were tour guides approached the 23-year-old woman in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. The Guardian reports that she had been studying life in rural India.

"One of the men spoke very fluent Japanese," Pallav Kanti Ghosh, a Calcutta police commissioner, told the BBC. "They took her to Digha [a beach resort] on November 23. There they sexually assaulted her and robbed her of 76,000 rupees [$1201] using her ATM card."

Japan population fell by a record 268,000 in 2014

Japan’s population fell by a record 268,000 people last year, new data show, with preliminary figures showing just above 1 million births in 2014, NPR.com reports.

The figures released by the country’s health ministry showed that the estimated number of people who died in 2014 was 1,269,000, about 1,000 above the previous year. The number of births was 1,001,000, down about 29,000 from 2013. The total population declined by a record 268,000.

The Kyodo news service adds that the number of births could slide below 1 million when new numbers are released in June.

Japanese Company Creates Real-life Transformer

Busted! Japanese woman suspected of poisoning half a dozen husbands or partners

Chisako Kakehi, center, answers a reporter's question in Sakai, western Japan in March 2014. (Kyodo News)

The Associated Press
Japanese police have arrested a 67-year-old woman whom they suspect poisoned her husband late last year, one of about half a dozen former husbands or partners of the woman who have died.
She has denied involvement in the deaths.

Kyoto prefectural police arrested Chisako Kakehi on Wednesday after cyanide was found in the body of her 75-year-old husband, according to Japanese media reports. They were married one month before he died in December 2013, the reports said.

Kyodo news service said that Kakehi had married four times, and that several partners had died within a few years of marrying her or starting relationships with her. he media reports suggested that she could have killed the men for insurance or inheritance money, but that could not be confirmed.