TRAVEL

The number of foreign nationals detained by immigration officials for one year or more has dropped significantly since a more flexible approach was adopted in response to harsh criticism of long-term detentions, according to the Justice Ministry. As of August, 167 foreigners at immigration facilities in Ibaraki, Osaka and Nagasaki prefectures had been held for at least six months, the ministry said Friday. Many of them are believed to have overstayed their visas and were waiting to be deported or were seeking asylum in Japan. (Japan Times)

The cherry blossom viewing season is likely to start at around the same time as usual in many parts of the nation this year because temperatures are expected to rise around late February, Weather Map Co. said Friday. According to a forecast by the private Tokyo-based firm, the year's first cherry blossoms will appear on March 23 in Shizuoka Prefecture, followed by Fukuoka, Nagasaki and Kochi prefectures a day later. Elsewhere, the "someiyoshino" species of cherry tree is expected to bloom on March 25 in Tokyo, March 27 in Nagoya and March 28 in Osaka. (Japan Times)

The Agency for Cultural Affairs plans to have the seabed off Nagasaki Prefecture where the wreck of a ship believed to have been used by 13th century Mongol invaders has been found declared a national historical site, agency sources said. The declaration would make the area off Takashima Island in Matsuura, Nagasaki Prefecture, the first underwater ruins to be registered as such a site in Japan. The designation will in principle prohibit the area from being altered. The agency sees the need to take immediate measures in the area, given that the relics there are expected to provide archeologists with crucial information on the 1274 and 1281 Mongol attacks that, until the discovery of the relatively intact shipwreck, has mostly been available only from documents and drawings. (Japan Times)

Prosecutors have indicted the skipper of a Chinese fishing boat for illegally operating in Japanese waters, a local official said Friday. The Nagasaki District Public Prosecutors Office has finalised its case against Zhong Jinyin, 39, the official said, following his December 20 arrest near islands off southwest Japan. It was not clear when he would appear in court. The arrest, the second in the area in less than two months, took place after a six-hour pursuit. Japanese officers found coral and tools on the boat. (Channel NewsAsia)

The government has decided to go ahead with long-pending plans to construct stretches of three bullet-train lines, according to transport minister Takeshi Maeda. Financial resources have been secured for the stretches between Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, and Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture; Hakodate and Sapporo in Hokkaido Prefecture; and Isahaya and Nagasaki in Nagasaki Prefecture, Maeda announced Monday during a news conference. "I would like to approve the plans within the current fiscal year" ending in March, he said. (Japan Times)

Police launched an investigation Saturday into the deaths of two women apparently stabbed to death at their home in Saikai, Nagasaki Prefecture. Mitsuko Yamashita, 56, and her mother-in-law, Hisae Yamashita, 77, were found late Friday collapsed in the rear compartment of their minivan outside the house. Police officers rushed to the scene after receiving an emergency call from Mitsuko Yamashita's 18-year-old son, who said windows in their home were broken and that someone had apparently rummaged through the rooms. (Japan Times)

The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent letters to the U.S. government Friday asking that information on damage caused by atomic bombings be included in its plans to establish national historical parks commemorating the U.S. wartime project that developed the weapons. In a letter sent to U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui wrote that "the people of Hiroshima were profoundly alarmed" by the U.S. plan to designate three sites involved in the Manhattan Project as national historical parks. (Japan Times)

At first glance, Yoshio Hachiro and Masahiko Yamada look like they have been cut from the same piece of wood. Both men worked in agriculture for decades before turning to politics. Sixty-three-year-old Hachiro was a general manager of a rural farming cooperative in Hokkaido, Japan's most northern prefecture. He promoted Imakane Danshaku, locally grown potatoes considered such a delicacy that they are sold individually wrapped in Tokyo's ritzy and posh department stores. Yamada, 69, is a farmer, a lawyer as well as a veteran member of the Lower House of parliament and a native from an island 100 kilometers west of the southern prefecture Nagasaki. He is the author of several books on the perceived threat to agriculture in Japan, including Japan will be crushed by imported food and Japan to be smashed by China on food. He also published a novel on food security called The Japan-US food war. (Asia Times)

China called on Tokyo on Tuesday to quickly and appropriately resolve the arrest of a Chinese fishing boat captain who refused to heed a coast guard inspection order in Japan's territorial waters. The boat was spotted by the coast guard near the Goto islands off Nagasaki in southwestern Japan and asked to stop with commands and signs in Chinese, but the vessel ignored the call, the Nagasaki Coast Guard Office said. "China has noted relevant reports and is currently investigating and verifying the situation," foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing. (Reuters)

Japan's coastguard on Sunday arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that allegedly intruded into Japanese territorial waters, a report said. The 47-year-old captain was arrested on charges of violating fishing laws in Japan's exclusive economic zone, Jiji Press said, citing the coastguard. The coastguard's regional headquarters in the city of Nagasaki said its patrol ship spotted two Chinese fishing boats in waters close to the Goto Islands, off Japan's southwestern coast, the report said. After the two vessels rejected its order to stop for on-board inspections, the patrol ship chased one of the two for nearly four-and-a-half-hours. (AFP)

Takeo Nishioka, president of Japan's House of Councilors, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Tokyo early Saturday morning, Kyodo News reported. He was 75. Born in Nagasaki on February 12, 1936, Nishioka is a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). He was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in 1963. In 2010, he was elected as the President of the House of Councilors, as a member of the DPJ. (Xinhua)

Marine archaeologists say they have uncovered a wreck from one of Kublai Khan's 13th century Mongol invasion fleets just yards off the coast of Japan. Scientists are hoping to be able to recreate a complete Yuan Dynasty vessel after the discovery of a 36ft-long section of keel just below the seabed off Nagasaki. Japanese legend claims that two 'divine winds', known as The Kamikaze, destroyed both of Kublai Khan's vast invasion fleets with the loss of thousands of troops. (Daily Mail)

The wreck of a ship believed to have been part of the ill-fated attempts by Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of China in the 13th century, to invade Japan has been found lying relatively intact under the seabed off Nagasaki Prefecture, a team of Japanese researchers said Monday. It is the first wreck linked to the invasion attempts to have been discovered in Japan with much of the hull still intact, including a 12-meter section of the keel and rows of planks 10 cm thick and 15 to 25 cm wide attached to the keel, according to University of the Ryukyus professor Yoshifumi Ikeda and his team. Discovered about 1 meter under the seabed in waters 20 to 25 meters deep off Takashima Island in Matsuura, Nagasaki, the wreck of the vessel, believed to have been over 20 meters long, is expected to provide archeologists with crucial information on the Mongol attacks in 1274 and 1281, which until now have been known mostly from documents and drawings. (Japan Times)

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.

What's emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima's $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture's mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets scrambled as Russian and Chinese military aircraft came close to Japanese airspace Sept. 8, the Defense Ministry said. Two Russian bombers flew around Japan, skirting Japanese airspace from the Tsushima Straits in Nagasaki prefecture, and flying along the Pacific Ocean coastline north up to an area near the Northern Territories, the Defense Ministry said Sept. 8. It was the first confirmed circumnavigation of Japan by Russian military aircraft. (majirox news)

A group of 12 high school students Thursday presented 80,000 signatures calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons to the secretariat of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The group includes four students from the atomic-bombed prefectures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as two from Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the March earthquake and tsunami. It is the 14th time that Japanese high school messengers of peace have visited the U.N. office since 1998. The signatures were collected both in and outside Japan. (Japan Times)

The U.S. has sent its first representative to the annual memorial for the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, as the Japanese city remembered the historic horrors of radiation amid the nation's unfolding nuclear crisis. As in past years, a moment of silence was observed at 11:02 a.m. Tuesday, 66 years after the moment the bomb dropped on the southern city on Aug. 9, 1945, in the closing days of World War II. Mayor Tomihisa Taue called for change in Japan's policy, which has for decades vehemently pursued nuclear power and asked the nation work to develop safer kinds of energy. (AP)

The Japanese city of Hiroshima marked the 66th anniversary of the bombing on Saturday, as the nation fights a different kind of disaster from atomic technology - a nuclear plant in a meltdown crisis after being hit by a tsunami. The site of the world's first A-bomb attack observed a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m. Saturday (2315 GMT Friday) - the time the bomb was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945, by the United States in the last stages of World War II. The bomb destroyed most of the city and killed as many as 140,000 people. A second atomic bombing Aug. 9 that year in Nagasaki killed tens of thousands more and prompted the Japanese to surrender. Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Saturday laid a wreath of yellow flowers at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and reiterated Japan's promise to never repeat the horrors of Hiroshima, whose suffering continues today because of illnesses passed over generations. (Reuters)

People may be familiar with the name Kyushu, the southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, but few are acquainted with Saga, the northern prefecture located between Fukuoka and Nagasaki. Visitors from Seoul or other regions would enter the area through the Fukuoka International Airport but those who depart from Busan may enjoy a lower price by traveling by sea from the Busan to the Hakata Harbor International Terminal. (asia one)

A documentary film on double atomic-bomb survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was joked about on a BBC quiz show, will make its British debut this summer, with his eldest daughter hoping the screening will make people in the country and around the world more aware of the risks of nuclear power. "I was furious at first and it was difficult to forgive the BBC" for airing the "Q1" quiz show in December in which her father was called "the unluckiest man in the world" for experiencing both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in August 1945, Toshiko Yamasaki, Yamaguchi's daughter, said Tuesday. (Japan Times)

Most of Japan is back to normal following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on 11 March. Many parts of Japan, including popular holiday destinations such as Hokkaido, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima, Mt. Fuji, Nagasaki and Okinawa, incurred no disruption to infrastructure and everything in these areas has continuously operated as normal. Tokyo is back to normal with trains once again running like clockwork, water safe to drink and the beer and yogurt shortages now over (yes, there were temporary shortages due to packaging factories having been in the earthquake-hit region!). (eturbonews.com)

The 43 victims of a huge pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen's Fugen Peak were commemorated Friday in the city of Shimabara, Nagasaki Prefecture, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster. Fugen Peak erupted for the first time in around 200 years on Nov. 17, 1990, and spewed a massive fast-moving current of superheated gas and rock at 4:08 p.m. June 3, 1991. The victims included police officers, firefighters and reporters. Local governments set up a caution zone, forcing up to 11,000 people to evacuate the residential area. (Japan Times)