Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on April 2014

IN MEDIAS RES

• An industry poll has found that just 49.2 percent of Japanese people are “aware of the existence of online newspapers.”
• A journalists association says that as many as 20 percent of reporters who covered the 3/11 disaster are suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.
• Japanese literary magazine Waseda Bungaku has teamed up with British counterpart Granta on a pair of special editions featuring J-E and E-J translations of articles from the two periodicals.
• Bottom Story of the Week: “97-year-old Portrays Picture-Book World Through Woodwork” (via The Japan News)

COURTING DISASTER

• Two Japanese, two Peruvians and a Mexican were arrested for smuggling more than 100kg of stimulants into Japan by “hiding the drugs in stone blocks.”
• A privacy watchdog group has slammed a proposal by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology to “track individual passersby at Osaka station with a network of dedicated cameras.”
• The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of a man who killed 16 people in Osaka in 2008 by setting fire to a video parlor that specialized in pornographic films.
• Meanwhile, justices on the Tokyo High Court have determined there was “nothing unreasonable” about the death sentence handed down to Kanae Kijima, who was convicted of killing three men she met through online dating services in 2009.

NEWS FROM THE LAB

• A research team led by a scientist at the Chiba Institute of Technology claims that the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by acid rain that resulted from an enormous meteor strike.
• That goes against traditional findings, which suggest the dinosaurs were killed off by the climate change that resulted from massive amounts of dust thrown up by the strike.
• In what’s being described as a potential breakthrough for people with cervical cancer, researchers at Keio University say they’ve been able to regrow blood tissue removed from the uterus of a mouse.
• Heavy snowfall is being blamed for a 5 percent drop in the number of Japanese people who dined out in February, compared to the same month last year.

TO PROTECT AND SERVE

• It was reported that a hotel in Yokosuka held a matchmaking event for SDF servicemen and “civilian women selected from a pool of applicants.”
• A spike in the number of elderly people dying alone has given rise to a boom in businesses that sort out the belongings of the deceased.
• Expect to pay more for sashimi next year when Japanese fishermen halve their catch of bluefin tuna in the Northern Pacific. The move is “aimed at encouraging other nations to adopt massive cuts.”
• Kazuo Yairi, a Gifu-based guitar maker whose instruments were sought out by such illustrious musicians as Paul McCartney and Carlos Santana, has died at the age of 81.

DEATH BE NOT PROUD

• According to figures from the National Police Agency and the Cabinet Office, the number of people who killed themselves in Japan declined for the fourth straight year in 2013.
• The only demographic group that saw a rise in suicide rates was men and women in their seventies.
• Officials say that of the 27,283 people who killed themselves last year, 20,256 left suicide notes.
• The most common reasons cited for the suicides were health problems (13,680), money difficulties (4,636) and family issues (3,930).

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, Jiji, The Tokyo Reporter, The Mainichi, The Japan News, AFP, Reuters and Kyodo