TRAVEL

Police turned over to prosecutors Wednesday their case against a 21-year-old man who walked naked on a street in Yokohama last month and a 22-year-old woman who ordered him to do so, alleging they committed acts of public indecency. The woman and the man had been living together since January. She was angry with him for not paying rent and was quoted as telling him to, "Take off your clothes" and "follow my bicycle." (Japan Times)

Impressed by the success of the Better Place experiment with electric taxis in the city of Tokyo, an increasing number of Japan's taxi operators are adopting electric vehicles (EVs). Nissan Motor Co. has received advance orders for around 6,000 orders for its Leaf electric car, which will go on sale in Japan in December, with several hundred of those orders from taxi companies. Mitsubishi Motors Corp.'s i-MiEV is also proving popular with drivers. Many of those firms are based in Yokohama, which is one of two local authorities in Japan to introduce subsidy programs for anyone who purchases an environmentally vehicle. Similar schemes are due to be introduced in other cities around Japan in the near future, including Tokyo. (independent.co.uk)

Police conducted raids here on Aug. 30 over the illegal sub-letting of rooms in former brothels. A 47-year-old man, believed to have leased several former restaurants attached to brothels in the Koganecho district in Yokohama's Naka Ward without a real-estate license, is under suspicion of violating the Building Lots and Buildings Transaction Business Act. After a police crackdown in 2005, brothels attached to restaurants in the district, disappeared, but there are still approximately 140 vacant "restaurants," with many of them now used as "rental rooms." (Mainichi)

Yakult Swallows right-hander Yoshinori Sato set a new record by a Japanese pitcher when he recorded a fastball at 161 kilometers per hour in a game against the Yokohama BayStars on Thursday. Four pitchers, including Sato and former Lotte Marines pitcher Hideki Irabu (Lotte) had been tied at 158 kph for the fastest pitch thrown by a Japanese player. Marc Kroon (Yomiuri Giants) hold the Japanese record for the fastest pitch at 162 kph. (AP)

Yasuhiko Kobayashi's 15-year-old son had skipped judo practice. According to Kobayashi, the boy's teacher was furious and stood waiting for him at the gates of his junior high school in Yokohama. The teacher forced the boy into the gym and made him grapple one on one. The former All Japan judo champion choked the boy until he lost consciousness. When the boy came to, the teacher choked him again until he went limp, and threw him to the floor with such force that he suffered severe internal bleeding in his brain, an injury known as an acute subdural hematoma. (Japan Times)

Konan of Okinawa Prefecture roughed up highly touted right-hander Shinta Hifumi and trounced Kanagawa's Tokaidai Sagami 13-1 in the final of the National High School Baseball Championship on Saturday. Konan became only the sixth school in the long history of Japanese high school baseball to win both the spring and summer national tournaments and first since Daisuke Matsuzaka, now with the Boston Red Sox, helped Yokohama do so in 1998. (Japan Times)

Al fresco tables are at a premium at this time of year, especially if the view you want is one of leafy nature rather than city traffic or nearby buildings. Add quality food into that equation and the choices narrow even further. However, one place that fits the bill perfectly is Park Side Cafe, down in the Yokohama suburb of Nakamachidai. We first discovered it some seven years ago, when it was still very new, but it has changed little since then. The elegant building - designed by architect Ken Yokogawa, whose offices are on the second floor - nestles among trees and bamboo. (Japan Times)

A man and woman living together in Yokohama were arrested Saturday on suspicion of suffocating the woman's 14-month-old daughter in December by confining the infant in a sealed wooden box, police said. According to the police, Nobutake Komaba, a 37-year-old sheet metal worker, and Sachiko Watanabe, 21, allegedly confined Watanabe's second daughter Yukina in the box Dec. 18-19 at their house in Kohoku Ward, Yokohama, eventually leaving her to die from suffocation. The two reportedly admitted the allegation, saying they always put Yukina in the box because she cried at night. (Yomiuri)

Japan's coastal city Yokohama on Friday held a water splashing ceremony in Chinatown. The event was aimed to raise people's awareness of saving water and react to heat island effect. The ceremony began at a Mazu temple in the famous tourist spot. Young people, dressed in both traditional Chinese clothes and Japanese attire, splashed water along the main street of the town despite the sizzling heat in the afternoon. The city saw a maximum temperature of 37 degrees Celsius on Friday amid heat waves troubling the country in large recently. (Xinhua)

In the years following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan ended nearly 2 1/2 centuries of isolation, Tokyo, Yokohama and Kobe in particular saw a large influx of Western men in uniform, merchants, teachers and clerics. One of the first things many did upon arriving in Japan was make contact with fellow expatriates at social clubs modeled after those in Europe and the United States. Members could find food and drinks like those at home, catch up on news from outside Japan and take in a host of activities ranging from dancing to billiards to tennis and squash. The most prominent social clubs founded by Western expatriates include the Tokyo American Club and the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, the Kobe Club, and the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club. (Japan Times)

The center of Little Tokyo was begun in 1977. Its real name is Japanese Village Plaza and it was designed and funded by a group of businessmen in cooperation with the city of Los Angeles. It's only about a square block of city real estate, bounded by First and Second and Alameda streets. But once you enter, you could be in the middle of the real Tokyo itself, or Yokohama. It has been honored for its urban design. It is the real deal for anyone wanting to experience modern Japan. (dailybulletin.com)

Russia and Japan are to work together to create a liquefied natural gas plant in Vladivostok. An official signing for he deal will take place in November, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visits Japan to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Yokohama. When the plant is operational, it is expected that five million tonnes of gas output will be shipped to Japan annually. (kyrgyzstannews.net)

"OK, I'm taking off," said Yukari Tajima as she left the office at 4 p.m., and headed to a day care center to pick up her 2-year-old daughter. Tajima works as a medical representative at a Yokohama branch of pharmaceutical firm Pfizer Japan Inc. She spends her days making sales calls to doctors, but only works from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. under a system the company introduced in July last year that allows shorter working hours. Normal working hours at the company are from 9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. An increasing number of companies have introduced similar systems to allow regular company employees to work less than the standard eight hours. Employees usually use the system for child-rearing or caring for elderly family members, but some use it for personal development. (Yomiuri)

Six movie theaters - in Hachinohe (Aomori Prefecture), Sendai, Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto - on July 3 started showing "The Cove," a documentary film about dolphin hunting in the whaling town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture. There have been no reports of big disturbances. Originally, the movie, the winner of this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary, had been scheduled to be shown from June 26. Three movie theaters in Tokyo and Osaka gave up on screening the film after groups who call the movie "anti-Japanese" threatened to stage noisy protests near the theaters. Besides those six movie theaters, 18 others are to show the film. The distributor and the movie houses deserve praises for not bowing to pressure from protesters. (Japan Times)

Yokohama's Ishikawacho Station straddles the border between two worlds. Take a right turn from its south exit and you find yourself among the designer boutiques and Belgian chocolate shops of tourist Motomachi. Head left from the same station, however, walk three minutes and you discover a neighborhood omitted from most guidebooks - except perhaps as a warning in the "Dangers & Annoyances" section. This 200- by 300-meter district is called Kotobukicho, "The Town of Congratulations," and it's home to Japan's third-largest community of day laborers - the closest Yokohama has to a slum. (Japan Times)

The Yokohama District Court　has dealt a major blow to right-wingers who were using loudspeakers and sound trucks to protest a theater that was going to screen "The Cove". The court decision on the injunction Thursday prohibits making loud speeches within a 100-meter radius of the movie theater and entering the movie theater without permission, the distributor Unplugged Inc. said. As the movie theater is planning to screen the film from July 3, scores of people from the Tokyo group staged street protests around the theater on June 12. The theater applied to the court for an injunction to ban such protests. (Japan Probe)

Leena, 20, may be the new face of Chinese nationals living in Japan. A model, Leena took part in the Asia Beauty Expo last month in Yokohama that attracted about 40,000 people. Backstage after her appearance, Leena spoke fluent Japanese and her gestures and conversational pauses were typical of a young Japanese woman. "As long as I don't say my real name, no one would know I'm Chinese," she said. Leena arrived in Japan when she was 10 from Shandong province, accompanying her father who is a mechanical design engineer. (Asahi)

A 15-year-old boy arrested last week for allegedly stabbing a female classmate at a senior high school in Yamaguchi Prefecture has told police he was prompted to do it by a similar incident two days earlier at a girls' school in Yokoyama, the police said Monday. "I thought I would do the same thing. I didn't care who it was," the first-grade boy was quoted as saying about the incident that occurred on Thursday, referring to the arrest last Tuesday of a 15-year-old girl for allegedly stabbing a classmate during a lesson. The boy also said he was feeling under pressure studying to be a top student, and that he put a kitchen knife in his bag on Wednesday night after quarreling with his mother and watching TV news about the Yokoyama incident, according to the police. (AP)

A Chinese woman arrested on suspicion of robbery has been found to have entered Japan unlawfully after changing her fingerprints to slip through airport biometric identification checks, investigative sources said Thursday. Lin Xiuai, 33, a resident of Yokohama, has told police investigators that she underwent a surgical operation to change her fingerprints at a clinic in China's Fujian Province for about 30,000 yen, the sources said. (AP)

A 15-year-old girl, who was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stabbing a classmate during a lesson at a private girls' high school in Yokohama, has told police she shoplifted the knife used in the assault and waited for the "right time" to attack, police officials said Wednesday, indicating that the incident was premeditated. The victim, a 15-year-old first-grader at Seishin Girls' Senior High School, remains in critical condition in hospital. She suffered deep stab wounds to her side inflicted by a knife with a 12-centimeter blade that passed through her liver and reached a kidney, the police said. (AP)

A 15-year-old girl, who was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stabbing a neighbor during class at a private girls high school in Yokohama, is believed to have acted suddenly and without provocation while she was seated, police said Wednesday. The victim, also a 15-year-old first-grader at Seishin Girls Senior High School, remains in critical condition in hospital. She suffered deep stab wounds to her side by what appeared to be a fruit knife with a 12-centimeter blade that reached to her kidney through the liver, the police said. (AP)

A student was stabbed Tuesday with a knife in her side at a private girls' senior high school in Yokohama, and another student was arrested there, police said. Seishin Girls' Senior High School made a 119 emergency call around 12:20 p.m. about the stabbing, which caused the first-year student to be treated in an intensive-care unit of a hospital, they said. (AP)

My neighbors are farmers. They regularly bring us cabbages, cucumbers, bitter melon, tomatoes, eggplants, persimmons, and other local specialties, and their arrival on our doorstep with a box of fresh-picked produce is as much an announcement of the changing seasons as the color of the sky or warmth of the wind. Our conversations often turn to rain, mulch, tools for tilling, and fruit yields from the old but still-productive trees they tend. They offer advice on reviving my stunted tomatoes, and we debate the relative merits of baseball caps for working the fields under the hot sun as opposed to the traditional straw kasa. None of this would be remarkable except that we live in the middle of Yokohama, a progressive city of 3.6 million people, and our houses are so densely packed that they almost touch. My neighbors are Japanese urban farmers, and have been for decades. Urban development in Japan often leaves small farm plots, rice fields, and other rural features intact while houses and apartments spring up all around them. (theatlantic.com)

Trade ministers from Pacific Rim economies on Sunday trumpeted the "significant progress" made toward attaining self-imposed goals to free up regional trade, while embracing the need to make concrete efforts with a view to creating a region-wide free trade zone. Noting that the Asia-Pacific region is now gaining weight in the global economy, they also called for a regional growth strategy to be devised at their leaders' summit in Yokohama in November that Japan as chair hopes would be a key component of new policy goals envisaged for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. (Japan Times)

A 42-year-old lawyer died after being stabbed at his office here on Wednesday, police said. Police received an emergency call from a clerk at Yokohama Mirai legal office in Yokohama's Naka Ward at around 2:40 p.m., saying that a man with a knife had broken into the office. Police officers with the Kanagawa Prefectural Police's Kagacho Police Station rushed to the scene to find lawyer Yoshihiro Maeno lying on the floor bleeding. He was transferred to hospital, but died at around 4 p.m. the same day. (Mainichi)